
Carlos Beltran has taken Angel Pagan under his wing this spring
BY AARON YORKE
STACHE WRITER
I’ve always thought team chemistry was overrated in baseball. Unlike football, basketball or hockey, which feature a bunch of players sharing the ball and moving at the same time, baseball is a game that is won or lost mostly by individual performances. A team does not need to communicate with each other to put together a multi-run rally. It could help to communicate, such as when a lead-off batter takes an extra pitch so the next guy up can see what he is dealing with, but such tactics are not necessary to have success. It’s the same deal on the other side of the ball, where the pitcher by himself has the biggest impact on how many runs the other team scores.
It’s for these reasons that I never really paid attention when the Mets’ failures of the last three seasons were blamed on a “bad clubhouse.” I figured even if everyone in the clubhouse hated each other, it wasn’t going to make the team hit more and strike out less. The tough part is that there’s no way to prove or quantify the effect of leadership or chemistry on winning games. It’s even tougher for those without clubhouse access to analyze.
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