Men, Sausage, and the Meaning of Teamwork

[Greggory Masterson]

The sausage went missing. The team lost. The sausage was found. The team won. Does sausage lead to winning? Science says … maybe?

Image courtesy of © Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Many are sick of talking about the sausage. Many rejoiced when it was lost, but that loss coincided with a loss of games. Its return coincided with getting back in the win column. So, what can we make of it?

If you’ve been living under a rock, the Twins have a lucky summer sausage they keep in the dugout during games. It all started when the Twins started touching a summer sausage during a slow night in Chicago, and their bats woke up. To many peoples’ chagrin, catching the sausage is a home run celebration. It’s a whole big thing.

It was lost (I’m running with that as the official story, but it might have been misplaced on purpose) before the Twins left for Cleveland for a weekend series in which they were swept. They then lost to the Nationals, and the sausage was overnighted. Boom. They won.

As a professed non-believer in witchcraft, I’m wary of saying that the sausage imbues the Twins with mythical powers. Unless you see the mind as magic.

Maybe you’ve heard of the placebo effect. It’s born out of medical studies where participants will believe that they received some sort of medical treatment in the form of a pill, and, due to that belief, begin to heal, even if the pill contained no medication and was mere hardened sugar. 

We can see that effect in all walks of life. It’s especially relevant to baseball, as many positive effects of superstitions like wearing the same dirty socks or pregame rituals can be attributed to a placebo effect. As long as they think it makes them better, it will. If you’ve seen Space Jam, you might recognize Michael’s Secret Stuff, the sink water Michael Jordan used to convince the Loony Tunes that they could play like Mike.

However, the placebo effect is not what this story is about. But it does illustrate a point. Even if you don’t believe that frivolous things like pregame rituals and clubhouse chemistry can raise players to performance levels they are otherwise incapable of, hopefully you can admit that those external factors can detract from their abilities.

Just like you might be worse at your job when a sick family member occupies your mind, baseball players can see the same decreased performance when things aren’t going well, even off the field. A successful organization removes as many barriers to performance as possible.

Sometimes, those barriers can be removed with a lucky Cloverdale Original Tangy Summer Sausage.

Let’s move beyond the individual and focus on the team. Although baseball is largely an individual sport masquerading as a team game, having the team work together is key. Things like properly converting a double-play, relaying a throw from the outfield, or working with your pitcher as a catcher to execute a game plan are all team-based activities.

One might call teams that consistently execute those team aspects cohesive. However, when we study teams, there’s more than one way to be cohesive. Working together and executing on the field is what’s termed task cohesion. It’s the proverbial well-oiled machine. The right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

Task cohesion, across contexts spanning sport and industry, is one of the best predictors of team performance. It makes sense. A team that works together performs better. But there are other types of cohesion.

Social cohesion refers to how people work together as humans. Do they get along well, do they communicate on and off the field, or have they formed bonds with each other? Naturally, the link between social cohesion and performance is less direct and weaker than for task cohesion. However, it can, again, be a factor that gives a team a slight edge, because it can remove barriers to performance.

For example, would it be easier to perform well if you had a teammate who owed you money after a card game or had no such teammate occupying your thoughts? Sure, you might cite your impeccable mental toughness, but, in reality, it can distract you in your preparation. It can make you more likely to react poorly to his performance. It can interrupt your flow state.

Keeping the guys together matters.

And so the sausage comes in. Ryan Jeffers himself—the leader of the sausage movement—admitted, "It’s the idea of the sausage – it’s the meaning behind the sausage.” It’s a blatantly silly idea, but if the guys buy into it, who’s going to stop them?

A couple of ideas from organizational research come to mind here. One is the idea of cultural artifacts. Just like nations have unique cultures that inform members of that culture on how to act and what is valued, organizations have the same. Each organization is different, prioritizes different things, and even has different ways of interacting amongst itself.

Not only do those cultural factors inform members on how to be members, but they also set them apart. Cultures have heroes. The Twins have the likes of Kirby Puckett, Harmon Killebrew, and Joe Mauer, who serve as examples of model Twins—at least on the field. Likewise, their uniforms and logos carry some essence of the team and literally set them apart from every other team in the league.

And they have a sausage. Right now, at least, the sausage is an artifact of the team’s culture. It’s something that the team is using as a unifying measure to rally behind and say “This is our team. This is who we are. This is what we do.” It’s a tangible aspect of their culture and the mission that they are all supposed to buy into, and it’s an idea they can point to.

Which leads me to a second topic. This one’s a big word—anthropomorphization. When we, as humans, try to make sense of the world surrounding us, we tend to assign human characteristics to anything. 

The Yankees are evil. We all know this. The same as the Guardians and White Sox. Just bad. But what does that mean? These are just organizations. They’re made of people, but you can’t reach out and touch “the Yankees.” So why do we know that someone in a Yankees jersey is the embodiment of villainy? Because we’ve anthropomorphized the Yankees. We’ve given the organization human characteristics.

In a similar way, the rally sausage is the physical embodiment of the team. You can’t see the team. Being a team is an emergent property of a group. It’s a word that categorizes people. One way that we can actually put a face to that group of people is through a logo, a nickname, or a catchphrase, but we still can’t touch any of those ideas.

We can touch sausage, though, and that’s what makes it real.

No. I am not saying the team will live and die by the sausage. Jeffers himself stated that he was open to swapping out the sausage for something else. I’m not saying that the sausage unlocks new powers for the Twins. None of that.

What I am saying is that it’s important for a team to find their sausage, whatever that is. If it’s something that draws the team together, represents who they are, and keeps things flowing in a social, relational, and interpersonal way, well, you better keep slingin’ sausage.

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[Craig Arko]

He who lives by the sausage shall die by the sausage.

[Ex-Iowegian]

 

[JD-TWINS]

Psychological rallying point. Seems to be a replacement for Land of Rakes vest…..whatever brings guys together and can act as a quick pressure relief valve is all good!

[Squirrel]

15 hours ago, Craig Arko said:

He who lives by the sausage shall die by the sausage.

That could be a very literal statement if anyone tried to take a bite

[Doctor Gast]

Thank you Greg for those insights. Through this summer sausage spree, we had a couple of players embrace the sausage & did very well, The majority of players were indifferent with various results & there were some put-off by the sausage maybe they were the ones that were hitting poorly during that time. The secret is getting everybody on board. Everybody loved our rally squirrel & rally caps, can we get everybody behind the rally sausage?

[Parfigliano]

The Yankees ARE evil.

[Jean-Guy]

Baseball writing can be ridiculous and pedantic, sometimes insightful and illuminating, and at times, poetic and beautiful. Somehow, this article is all of these at once. Nicely done. 

[Greggory Masterson]

13 hours ago, Jean-Guy said:

Baseball writing can be ridiculous and pedantic, sometimes insightful and illuminating, and at times, poetic and beautiful. Somehow, this article is all of these at once. Nicely done. 

Well this is all I can hope for. Thank you.