Calculating Clubhouse Chemistry

It was a good time for that particular project. The quirky and uniquely assembled Boston Red Sox had won the World Series the previous fall, and they weren’t the only notable team in that regard in 2013. The Dodgers were the most expensive team in baseball history, but were rife with cliques and egos. The Athletics repeated as AL West champions, thanks to a bunch of players of similar ages and skill sets, with similarly non-elite pre-Majors pedigrees. Notions that teams were inevitably either more or less than the sums of their parts were thick in the air.

While underpinned by ostensibly sound science, the formula didn’t perform especially well in predicting the effects of clubhouse dynamics, and neither the magazine nor any other entity within ESPN publicly revisited the project for 2015. It’s likely that any such systematic effort to pin down interaction effects on player performance will fail, because there’s so much danger of overfitting and generalizations that don’t actually apply.

However, the fundamentals of the concept are appealing to anyone who has experienced a long MLB season. There are so many important relationships within every clubhouse, so many ways in which the vagaries of the eight-month campaign can throw things out of balance, that the value of good chemistry is undeniable. The problem is that good chemistry is very hard to reliably reproduce.

Nonetheless, it’s worth walking back through the principles of that years-old formula, because as the Twins embark on a tight-rope walk of an offseason, one challenge they face is to retain the propitious balance they crafted off the field. The 2019 Twins, irrefutably, were one of those teams that were better than the sum of their parts. To repeat as AL Central champions in 2020, they’ll need to stay that way.

There were three pillars to the system devised by those professors and number-crunchers in 2014: clubhouse demographics, trait isolation, and stratification of performance to pay. The first metric focused on diversity of nationality, race, age, tenure with team, and position (this last, since clubhouses famously divide a bit between pitchers and position players). By and large, more of this kind of diversity was considered better, as long as the groups formed by dissecting the room that way overlapped in sufficient measure.

The second was an expression of whether, perhaps because of too much of that diversity, there were players within the room who were left isolated. Were they either shut out of subgroups or unable to identify closely enough with those subgroups to which they did belong?

The final factor was about ego. Teams scored best if they fit into the middle range: enough star power to provide clear leadership, but not so much as to have everyone big-timing one another.

The 2019 Twins, seen through this prism, were nearly perfect. We can’t replicate the scores the magazine assigned to teams, because the formulas themselves were not published, but we can sketch out a number of ways in which the team was perfectly constructed.

Ehire Adrianza, Luis Arráez, Willians Astudillo, and Marwin González are a good place to start. All four of them are Venezuelan. All four bloomed relatively late, though they aren’t close in actual age. All four play multiple positions. They quickly formed a loose but easy and valuable bond. Their lockers, in the Target Field clubhouse, were all in a row, save Arráez’s. On their own, the four formed a valuable subgroup in support of one another, but they’re all personable people, and they each fit smoothly into other groups, as well.

González, like Nelson Cruz, Jonathan Schoop, and C.J. Cron, came to the Twins in 2019, and brought with him experience in playoff races and competitive clubhouses. Those four formed their own group. Schoop, who is from Curacao, speaks multiple languages, and has always been known as a good team guy. The second baseman formed easy connections with Jorge Polanco and Miguel Sanó, the Dominican left side of the infield. Fellow Dominican Cruz was a good fit alongside them, thanks to his own love of talking hitting. González was a former teammate of Jason Castro in Houston.

Polanco, Sanó, Eddie Rosario, Byron Buxton, and Max Kepler formed a natural subgroup, because of their similar arcs through the Twins system and shared maturation with the parent club. Mitch Garver came along later than any of them, but is a similar age, and has been with the Twins ever since being drafted in 2013.

Cron is even closer in age to Garver than is most of the tenured Twins core, is a fellow right-handed hitter, and is also from the Southwest. In fact, most of the roster fell between the ages of 25 and 29, which both limited age-related performance downside and made it easier for the majority of the team to gel.

Rosario is from Puerto Rico, as is José Berríos, and the two lockered next to one another. Berríos was chosen in the same draft as Buxton, and has been slotted into the same hierarchy of the organization’s young prizes as the five hitters in the team’s core ever since.

Kyle Gibson, though older and on the verge of free agency, has a long-standing connection with Berríos and the rest of that crew. He, Jake Odorizzi, Martín Pérez, and Michael Pineda are all of similar ages, and are at similar stages in their careers—having established themselves, but not cemented their long-term places anywhere.

Trevor May fits in with that group to some extent, though he fully immersed himself in relief work in 2019, and he also fit like a glove into the quartet of the team’s most important relievers during the first half. Taylor Rogers, Tyler Duffey, and Ryne Harper are all within two years of each other in age, and all were college draftees who took a long time to find their way to the big leagues.

The overlapping groups formed by this assemblage kept anyone from being truly left out. Nor were there any superstars making huge money, or guys who felt they should have been but had been denied that kind of payday. Leaders emerged, but there wasn’t inordinate competition for those roles. The coaching staff, itself a conscientious concoction, fostered all the most advantageous relationships possible within the group, and made their own connections directly to key individuals.

Now, Odorizzi, Pineda, Pérez, Gibson, Sergio Romo, Schoop, and Castro are free agents. A few more players are likely to depart via trade or non-tender of arbitration, and the team will try to shore up certain aspects of on-field performance via both trade and free agency. Rearranging those pieces and improving the roster, from a sheer talent perspective, is tantalizingly possible, and even exciting. However, the team will have to undertake it all cautiously, because there’s a real risk that they’ll lose something along the way that made this year’s team great.