Your Team Chemistry Ratings

Think about everything you’ve ever heard about team chemistry. People say it’s an important thing, maybe the most important thing, but it’s impossible to put any numbers to. So let’s put some numbers to it.

Those are numbers. Those are your numbers, in fact. I guess you could say those are technically bars, which represent numbers, but, you know what I mean. And, you’re responsible for what you’re looking at. I polled you guys on Tuesday. That’s the meat of the outcome. Congratulations, Cubs. Sorry about your clubhouse, Atlanta.

I’ve done these things before, and I always use the same scoring method. I asked you whether you thought a given team’s chemistry was very bad, pretty bad, decent, pretty good, or very good. I tallied up all the results and gave each vote a score from 1 to 5, with 5 going to “very good.” The rating you see above is each team’s average vote. I shouldn’t need to tell you this doesn’t prove any single thing. None of the voters, or at least very very few of the voters, know for a fact how a team’s chemistry is. But let’s not pretend like perceptions aren’t interesting.

As I usually do — here’s the landscape of how many people voted for each team. Always fun to get a glimpse in a way of the FanGraphs demographics.

Cubs fans came out in droves, suggesting that Cubs fans are hanging out in droves. And there’s every reason for them to be, given that the Cubs have been totally dominant, and our numbers all like them. Cubs fans also led in participation in February when I polled the audience about season excitement levels. The most popular teams then: the Cubs, Blue Jays, and Red Sox. Here: the Cubs, Mariners, and Blue Jays, with the Red Sox in fourth. Mariners fans have been pleasantly surprised by the team’s performance, I’m sure, and my own Twitter account is also partially selective for that population.

The least popular teams in February, based on participation: the Marlins, Rays, and Padres. Now: the Rays, Rockies, and Reds. The Marlins and Padres are down there too. We’ve never been able to attract much of a Rockies audience. There would be a few reasons for that.

Let’s now get back on track. I made what I consider a polling error when I asked you all for chemistry ratings. I presented the five options, but I should’ve presented a sixth option — “no opinion.” As was correctly pointed out by a commenter, I unintentionally guided people toward answers, and I wish I hadn’t done that. It would be interesting to see where people do and do not have opinions! But what’s done is done, and the results at least reflect how people feel, among those people with feelings.

If you look at that first plot, you’ll notice it seems like good teams have good chemistry, and bad teams have worse chemistry. You could try to correlate these results with any number of things, but this already gets you most of the way. Here’s a plot of team rating vs. team winning percentage through Monday:

So, this probably isn’t surprising. There’s an extremely strong relationship between early team performance and the perception of that team’s chemistry. You could argue, I guess, that chemistry is therefore easily the most important variable. The Cubs have good chemistry, and they’re great! The Braves have bad chemistry, and they’re horrible! But the argument is at least as strong in the other direction, of course. Causality has always been one of the issues. I also suspect there’s a hint of a bias. Our perception of chemistry is influenced by reporting, and reporters might be more likely to pass along happy stories when a team is successful. When a team isn’t successful, the opposite could take place. This is my own speculation, but I imagine it isn’t nothing.

Maybe more interesting than the ratings are the differences between the ratings and the expected ratings, just based on the team winning percentage. It’s easy enough to come up with a formula to yield an expected rating, and here’s a plot of where the teams land compared to that:

The Royals come out looking terrifically good. That one’s not hard to make sense of: though they’ve played around .500, they just won the damn championship, and they haven’t had too much turnover. It should be a similar story for the Giants; they’ve kept a lot of the clubhouse intact, and there are enough holdovers from the championship rosters that obviously worked well together. The Pirates are right there with the Giants, and it’s hard to think of examples of lousy team behavior under Clint Hurdle. As for the Mariners, they prioritized chemistry over the offseason, and much has been written about that. There seems to be a considerable contrast between this clubhouse and last year’s version.

At the other end, we find the Nationals, who I have to assume are paying the price here for what happened last summer. And in fairness, many of the same players are around, including Bryce Harper and Jonathan Papelbon. Down the stretch a season ago, the situation might’ve been considered toxic, and while Dusty Baker is one of those proven leader-of-men sorts, it’ll take time for the perception to change. The Marlins? Probably a Loria effect that we’re seeing. Even with a positive new manager, it’s hard to forget that Loria looms over everything. Fans know that, and players know that. I could write a sentence or two about the Padres, but I’d rather not.

What does any of this mean? Very possibly nothing. Very possibly more than nothing, but I can’t pretend to know right now. It’ll be interesting to see if good-chemistry teams over-perform, and if bad-chemistry teams under-perform. And again, maybe that won’t be interesting, but it’s just fun to have some numbers that a few days ago didn’t exist. Thank you for your participation, and, I’m sure it won’t be long until the next polling-post project. All y’all are fun to study.