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First published in the US by Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 2020

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Joan Ryan 2020

Cover design by Steve Leard © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008241117

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008241131

Version 2020-04-10

DEDICATION

To Mike Krukow

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1. You Complete Me

2. The Arrowleaf

3. Super-Carriers, or the Curious Case of Jonny Gomes

4. Super-Disruptors, or the Curiouser Case of Barry Bonds

5. The Seven Archetypes

6. Just Us

7. Humm-Baby, Kruke, and the Pygmalion Effect

8. Synthesis

Conclusion: What I Know Now

Acknowledgments

Footnotes

Notes

Bibliography

Other Books by Joan Ryan

List of Searchable Terms

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

“The contribution of team chemistry to winning is easily the biggest hype in sports.”

— Richard Lally in The Enlightened Bracketologist

“Every once in a while you hear an expert that says team chemistry is overrated. You just write that person off.”

— Hall of Fame baseball manager Tony La Russa

When my mother died suddenly at the age of seventy-six, she and my father had been married fifty-five years. My father, who was seventy-nine at the time of her death, had minor back problems and occasional memory lapses but otherwise was pretty healthy. Soon, however, his appetite waned, and his mental acuity deteriorated. While doctors struggled to find anything wrong, his once-broad shoulders became a wire hanger beneath his shirt. He was flummoxed by the telephone and remote control. And then, nine months after we buried my mother, he died. The cause of death was the puzzling “failure to thrive.”

I knew the term only in connection to babies, having remembered learning about “sterile” orphanages in Europe at the turn of the century. To stop the spread of germs and disease, nurses were instructed to hang sterilized sheets between the cribs and to refrain from touching the babies except to feed, clothe, and bathe them. Soon the babies were sicker than ever. They ate less. They were more lethargic. Many contracted the very diseases the sterile practices were meant to prevent. Death rates soared to 75 percent at some orphanages. At one institution, every baby died. Similarly, hospitalized children cut off from their parents for long stretches of time often withered and died.¹ Doctors were stumped.

Not until the 1940s, when Austrian-American psychiatrist René Spitz began to study the case, did a theory begin to emerge: Babies need physical and social interaction to flourish. To test his hypothesis, he found two groups of babies to compare.²

One was being raised in an orphanage, the other in a women’s prison. The orphans were essentially isolated in their cribs, with a lone nurse tasked with caring for seven babies. The second group lived in the prison nursery where their mothers cared for them every day. These babies also interacted with other babies and the nursery staff. After a year, Spitz compared the two groups. In motor skills and cognitive performance, the orphans severely lagged behind their prison counterparts. After two years, 37 percent of the orphans had died but none of the prisoners’ babies. By the third year, the prison infants walked and talked at levels comparable to those of children raised in family settings. At the orphanage, only two of the twenty-six children could walk and articulate a few words.

American psychologist Harry Harlow built on Spitz’s research. Anyone who has taken an intro to psychology class probably remembers Harlow’s disturbing experiments on rhesus monkeys in the 1950s.³ Baby rhesus monkeys were taken from their mothers soon after birth and put in cages with two inanimate surrogate “mothers.” One was a bare-wire figure with a square plastic head; it offered 24-hour access to milk. The other figure was layered with soft terrycloth and had a round face with big eyes and a smile. But it offered no food. The monkeys spent nearly all their time cuddling and embracing the terrycloth surrogate. They left it only to feed quickly at the bare-wire mother. The researchers then took the terrycloth mother away for up to nine months. The babies eventually lost interest in eating. They behaved erratically. They curled up in a ball. Vital body rhythms — heart, respiration, sleep — were disrupted. Like the orphanage babies and my widowed father, they died from “failure to thrive.”

The results of these studies clearly show that babies need more than just caretaking to develop normally. They need to meet another’s gaze, to be held close, to hear the lilt of a voice and the beat of a heart. Like all primates, humans are pack animals. We all have our tribes, whether family, congregation, friends, workplace, or team. We need connection today as much as we did when our ancestors lived in caves. And it’s not just infants, of course. Like the case of my own parents, long marriages that end with a spouse passing can often catalyze the death of the widow or widower. My mother’s presence provided something more essential to my father than food, water, or sleep.

On a July afternoon in 2009, a few years before my parents died, I found myself in a large white tent outside of what was then called AT&T Park in San Francisco. There, a group of middle-aged former baseball players were gathered for a reunion. Some were businessmen now. Some still made their living in baseball. There were a few jowls. A smattering of beer bellies. Two or three looked like they could still leg out a slow grounder. Bursts of laughter punctuated the conversations. The familiar give-and-take. And something else. I could hear it in their voices and see it on their faces, exactly as I remembered: They still loved each other.

Twenty years earlier, these men had drenched each other with champagne as 1989 National League champions. I was a youngish sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner at the time, but that season and those players have stayed with me throughout my career. As with every romance in my life, I fell first for their story. They were a junk-drawer jumble of a team, rife with factions that had the potential to split the clubhouse: hard-drinking carousers and born-again Christians, African-Americans and Southern whites, Latinos from three different countries, college guys and functional illiterates, ambitious youngsters jockeying for roster spots and fading veterans trying to hold on. I never knew exactly what I’d find when I pushed open the clubhouse door back then. Maybe it would be the portly ace pitcher perched on the exercise bike with a Parliament in one hand and the Chronicle’s crossword puzzle in the other; or the kid from New Orleans with the lopsided grin tossing insults in his happy, high-pitched screech; or the six-feet-six-inch snarl of a man whom teammates called Buffy (to his great irritation) barking again at the beat writers for some obscure slight. At least one of the Christian players — God Squadders, we called them — would have his head in his Bible, perhaps reciting a prayer for whichever teammate thought it’d be funny to slip a pornographic photo into Leviticus. I’d surely see the hairy, funny veteran everyone called Caveman hobbling toward the trainer’s room for treatment on his scarred, patched, curbside-couch of a body. Their unlikely star that year was a gold-toothed former gang-banger who had been traded twice in seven months, nearly quit the game, and then found redemption among these men in the dank concrete clubhouse in the bowels of old Candlestick Park.

The ringleader, den mother, and raconteur of that team was a cop’s son named Mike Krukow, a pitcher whose arm was so shredded by ’89 that he couldn’t raise it high enough to comb his hair. But he still loved the game like a kid and seemed to know exactly what a teammate needed and when he needed it. Those ’89 players fought and judged, competed and goaded, and loved each other openly and without reservation. They bridged every fissure that season. It was a Peter Gent novel: raucous, funny, tender, heartbreaking, and ending not with a Disney triumph but with the literal fissure and fracture of a 6.9 earthquake in the middle of the World Series.

Two decades later, almost every one of them showed up for the reunion, flying in from Horseheads, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lake Havasu, Arizona. As I made my way through the party tent, catching up with everyone, two words kept popping up: team chemistry. It’s a term you hear a lot in sports. The triumph of the scraggly, big-hearted team has been a storytelling trope since at least as far back as Gideon’s overmatched army in the Old Testament. From Braveheart to The Bad News Bears, from The Magnificent Seven to Hoosiers, Hollywood has served up the formula in a million different ways. I love all of them. I’m a total sucker. Show me Gene Hackman’s underdog high schoolers from Hickory, Indiana, slow clapping in the locker room, and I’m reaching for the Kleenex.

While, in real life, team chemistry is often dismissed as a throwaway explanation for every over-achieving, fun-loving team (Look! We all have beards!), those ’89 Giants sure seemed to have something going on that defied traditional explanations. I’d seen glimmers of the phenomenon on other teams, too, of course, during the twenty-five years I’ve worked as a journalist in sports — fifteen as a sports columnist and more than a decade as a media consultant with the San Francisco Giants. On those teams, the players seemed to make each other better. I had experienced it myself in my first job out of college, in the Orlando Sentinel’s sports department. We were a tight-knit staff of a few rookies like me and a slate of veterans who deleted our adverbs and introduced us to scotch. We’d go out for burgers and beer around midnight after we put the paper to bed. Every July, we’d gather at dawn at Bill Baker’s apartment to watch the finals of Wimbledon and knock a tennis ball around afterward. Looking back, I’m struck by how easily we organized ourselves as a tribe, with roles to play and inside jokes and a vague sense that who we were in that group was different from who we were with anyone else. We liked each other, helped each other, and took enormous pride in what we produced every day. The sports section was better because of it.

If some human beings possess the ability to have such a profound physiological impact on each other, as spouses and caretakers of babies do, it stands to reason that all human beings have the ability, at least to some extent, to influence the performance and productivity of those around them. Could the success of the ’89 Giants be a foundational example of the power of team chemistry?

With that question in mind, I began reading research papers and books on group dynamics, psychology, emotion, linguistics, love, the military, neuroscience, gender, leadership, evolutionary biology, mirror neurons, and a variety of sports. Really, just about anything I could get my hands on that might provide some insight into how we perform better or worse based on who we are around.

I came across a story in the New York Times with the headline “The ‘Love Hormone’ As Sports Enhancer” about a neuropeptide called oxytocin. This is the stuff that is produced in the brain and released in our bloodstream when, for example, we fall in love or when women go through labor or breastfeed, fostering strong feelings of trust and connection. It can also be triggered by meaningful touch.

Aha! Suddenly a lot of things I had seen in sports began to make total sense. Male athletes are so much more physically affectionate with one another than men in general (at least American men). They always seem to be touching each other — hugging, high-fiving, slinging their arms around one another, holding hands at courtside as the final seconds tick down in a close basketball game. In the Giants’ clubhouse, I’ve seen guys on the couch draped over each other like puppies as they watched TV. I watched a player in the dugout rubbing the top of a teammate’s head for good luck through an entire inning. Teammates embrace with full-bodied gusto, not with the shoulder bump that passes for a hug in the outside male world.

Now I know the scientific explanation for all that touching. Oxytocin helps them to bond and to operate as a close-knit tribe. A gesture of trust, such as a reassuring arm around a teammate’s shoulders, triggers the release of oxytocin in the recipient’s bloodstream, creating a reciprocal feeling of trust and connection. Evolutionary psychologists theorize this is why oxytocin developed in humans (and lower primates). We needed a trustworthy pack with whom to hunt, gather food, and fend off enemies. The human brain had to figure out a way to create bonds so strong that members would sacrifice themselves for the survival of the group.

What’s particularly fascinating about touch and the release of oxytocin is that, through a network of “mirror neurons,” the feelings of trust and bonding that they trigger are contagious. Mirror neurons were first observed during experiments with macaque monkeys in the early 1990s. Italian researchers had monkeys pick up objects and then observe fellow monkeys picking up objects. The same set of brain cells leapt into action whether they were carrying out the action or simply watching it. These brain cells came to be known as mirror neurons.⁴

Through brain imaging, we know that humans have mirror neurons, too. Neuroscientist and psychologist Christian Keysers, now at the University of Amsterdam, tested the phenomenon in an experiment similar to the macaque-monkey research.⁵ He split a group of fourteen participants into two groups. One group was lightly touched on the leg with a feather duster. The other group simply watched a video of someone being touched on the same spot. The same area of the somatosensory cortex was active whether the person felt the feather or simply watched someone else being touched by the feather.

In other experiments, people were monitored as they watched videos of happy faces and angry faces. The cheek muscles we use for smiling were activated in people watching happy faces, and the brow muscles we use when we’re angry were activated in people watching angry faces. Marco Iacoboni, a UCLA neurologist and neuroscience professor who wrote the book Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others, believes this phenomenon is what helps us to feel empathy. We mirror other people in order to identify the emotion they’re feeling. One study tested this theory by having subjects hold a pencil between their teeth, thus severely restricting their ability to mimic. They performed much worse in detecting emotional changes in other people’s facial expressions. (This raises interesting questions about the connection between the flat affect common to those on the autism spectrum and their poor ability to read other people’s emotions.)

Iacoboni’s research has found that the more people like each other, the more they seem to mimic. “Couples have a higher facial similarity after twenty-five years of marriage,” he wrote. “The higher the quality of the marriage, the higher the facial similarity. The spouses become a second self.”

The impact of mirror neurons is a major factor in explaining how team chemistry may work on a biological level. A locker room is an enclosed environment where everyone sees everything. So is a dugout, a bus, or a plane. Let’s say Buster Posey drapes his arm around a rookie and tells him his perfect throw from right field that nailed a base runner saved the game. The rookie’s bloodstream floods with oxytocin. He’s feeling happy and confident and connected to the superstar veteran in a way he hadn’t felt before. Now let’s imagine another rookie is watching this interaction from across the clubhouse. The mirror neurons in his brain “feel” Buster’s touch as if it’s happening to himself. His somatosensory cortex lets loose a hit of oxytocin, and this rookie feels happier and more connected to Buster Posey, too. Amazing.

Of all the sports I could choose to illustrate team chemistry, baseball might seem the least likely. Basketball, football, soccer, hockey, and almost any other would seem more relevant: In those sports, players have to cooperate on every play — passing balls or pucks to each other, blocking, screening. Yes, baseball players throw the ball to each other, but that’s about it for cooperative interaction on the field. The batter, pitcher, and fielder stand alone. With rare exceptions — such as double-play combos and pitcher-catcher conferences — no player can help a teammate complete his assigned task. In that way, team chemistry would seem to apply least to baseball.

Which is exactly why I chose to focus largely on baseball. America’s “national pastime” is more like a regular workplace than any other sport. In most offices, employees are alone in a cubicle performing an individual task. The employee’s task is integral to the common goal, whether manufacturing cell phones, designing software, or putting out a newspaper. Understanding how team chemistry works in a baseball clubhouse, consequently, helps us understand how it works in any group with a shared purpose.

Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball had come out a few years before I attended the Giants’ reunion. The book famously pitted the intuition and wisdom of old-school baseball scouts against the statistical analysis of a new generation. Baseball analyst Bill James coined the word “sabermetrics” back in 1980 to describe this growing field of baseball analytics, a nod to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Of course, even before Lewis’s bestseller, most major-league teams already were using analytics to evaluate players. But after Moneyball, every front office suddenly had bunkers of young Ivy Leaguers churning out proprietary algorithms and new statistical categories with ever-longer acronyms (PECOTA, BABIP, LIPS, VORP).*

Relying on hard data to gauge a player’s value or understand how a team succeeded or failed obviously makes sense. Our own minds are spectacularly biased and thus unreliable observers. We’re wired more for stories than mathematics. Our ancestors explained the movement of the sun with tales of gods hauling it across the sky in flying chariots. Aren’t we doing the same thing, the SABR folks ask, by explaining wins and losses with stories of an unmeasurable, undefined phenomenon called team chemistry?

To that point, in the years following the Giants’ reunion in 2009, I couldn’t help noticing that every World Series champion was said to have great chemistry. Every single one, from the 2009 New York Yankees to the 2019 Washington Nationals. “Proof” of team chemistry included one or more of the following: matching hairstyles (face or scalp), celebratory rituals (e.g., pie in the face), elaborate handshakes or dance moves, clubhouse pranks, humorous nicknames, hand gestures (e.g., the 2010 Texas Rangers’ claw and antlers), catchphrases, big team dinners paid for by a magnanimous superstar, and a manager who “lets his players be themselves.”

If team chemistry does exist, and it has such a profound impact, how could it be as simple as all that? Come up with a few gimmicks and start sizing the rings?

I wondered about the acrimonious Oakland A’s and New York Yankees during the 1970s, the “twenty-five-players, twenty-five-cabs” teams. They could barely get through a road trip without a fistfight, yet they won championship after championship. Why didn’t the lack of chemistry matter for them?

Conversely, what about good-chemistry teams that don’t win? The 2007 Washington Nationals come to mind. Spring-training stories gushed about their fun team dinners and how they brought back the old-school kangaroo court to foster camaraderie. That team finished sixteen games out of first place. They didn’t have the talent. The satirical Onion once ran a headline that captured this perfectly: “Great Team Chemistry No Match for Great Team Biology.”

Hall of Fame baseball manager Jim Leyland falls in the talent-is-everything camp. We talked one spring afternoon in 2010 inside the visiting clubhouse in the Oakland Coliseum. He was managing the Detroit Tigers at the time, the fourth and final team in a storied career that earned him three Manager of the Year Awards and a bronze plaque in Cooperstown. He waved me into the cramped manager’s office, stubbing a Marlboro out in a paper cup on his desk. He had the leathery face of an old baseball man and the curmudgeonly demeanor, too, which is to say he gives the impression of being, at all times, one scotch away from taking a swing at someone.

“To me chemistry was a subject you took in school,” he said, and he tapped another cigarette from the pack.

“I had teams that’d go to chapel together every Sunday, couldn’t win a game. So that don’t mean shit to me. Forget chemistry out here. Don’t worry about it. Don’t think about it. It’s so overused in sports. It’s the first thing normally some journalist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about brings up. Whenever somebody’s losing, you hear they have bad chemistry. There’s ‘problems in the clubhouse.’ There’s a problem here, there’s a problem there. All it does is get managers fired, whether it’s true or not. It gets players traded.

“Listen, it all begins and ends with talent. If you have a horseshit team, they can all go out to dinner together, but they’re not going to win a lot of games. That’s why I’m all about talent. That’s what this is all about. Now whatever you get beyond that — everybody likes each other, that’s all bonus. That makes your season more enjoyable. It doesn’t necessarily make it more successful.”

As ten minutes with Leyland stretched to forty, however, the manager began to change his tune, sort of. He agreed that “personality and people skills create the electricity” and that players need to trust that “each guy is not on his own agenda.” He got worked up about the impact of veteran players in the clubhouse.

“Let me tell you this,” he said. “Good veteran players are the best tonic your team could have. The younger players see that if the veteran players believe in the program, they’ll follow suit. But if you get veteran players that are pissed off they can’t play anymore, that’s the worst scenario you can have.”

Wasn’t he saying that factors beyond talent can affect how a team performs?

Tony La Russa, another Hall of Fame manager, would give a resounding yes. La Russa was still coaching the St. Louis Cardinals in April of 2010 when we talked in the visitor’s dugout at AT&T Park. He had won two World Series championships by then and would notch a third in 2011, his final season as a manager. Intense and declarative about most things and particularly so about team chemistry, La Russa has been honing his understanding of the concept since his first managerial job in 1979.

“If you think players can be around each other every day for eight months and it doesn’t matter what the vibes are between them, you’re foolish,” he said.

Get him going about team chemistry and he’s like Elmer Gantry delivering a TED Talk, preaching its power in detailed themes and sub-themes with examples and supporting evidence. In short, he said, chemistry can be distilled to three values: respect, trust, and caring. He drills those values into his players. He recruits and mentors team leaders to model and evangelize them in the clubhouse.

“The larger that leadership group, the better it is for the team and each individual. [Former manager] Chuck Tanner said if you have good chemistry, it’s like you traded for a superstar, and I believe it.”

That same season I spoke with La Russa, the San Francisco Giants were beginning to emerge as what some might call a case study in chemistry. Manager Bruce Bochy referred to his 2010 club as “a band of misfits” and “the Dirty Dozen.” No one predicted these cast-off veterans and unproven youngsters would end up on a cool Wednesday in November riding trolley cars up Market Street through a shower of confetti. However, despite having witnessed this unlikely championship season firsthand, I was no closer to understanding the dynamics of team chemistry than I was driving home from the ’89 team reunion a year earlier.

That December, I went to Orlando for Major League Baseball’s winter meetings, the annual gathering of managers, general managers, executives, and media (plus out-of-work baseball people looking for jobs). I was learning a ton about clubhouse behavior and relationships, and how folks inside baseball perceived chemistry. But I still had a thousand questions.

How do we know team chemistry actually exists? If it exists, what is it? Is it similar to romantic chemistry, some magical connection that happens among and between certain human beings? And how does it affect performance? After all, why even talk about team chemistry if it doesn’t affect performance?

My search for answers split into two strands that curled around each other like a double helix. One revolved around the friendships, resentments, humor, fights, ego, and humility in the clubhouse, the other around the science of how and why such things matter to performance.

Both, however, start in the only place they can: the human brain.

CHAPTER ONE

YOU COMPLETE ME

Two doors down from the No Name Bar in Sausalito, California, sandwiched so tightly between two tourist shops I almost miss the entrance, is the office of UC San Francisco psychiatrist and psychotherapist Thomas Lewis. He’s the principal author of A General Theory of Love,* a beautiful mindblower of a book that includes this sentence:

“[No human] is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete.”

As we know from the orphanage studies and cases like my father’s, the human brain, for all its power and complexity, does not come preprogrammed with everything necessary to live. But that’s not the open loop Thomas Lewis is talking about.

Mammals need other mammals to flourish, and humans most of all. I remembered enough from high-school science to know that early humans evolved into one of the most social, cooperative species on earth because, of course, they needed each other to stay alive. They weren’t fast enough or strong enough to battle mammoths alone. Coordination required communication. Before language in our little hominid tribes, we still managed to let each other know where food could be found, which berries made you sick, and how to bring down a bison ten times your size.

Walking upright elongated our vocal tract, which produced a broader and increasingly nuanced range of sounds. With our face no longer covered in hair, facial muscles became visible. We learned to “read” the messages embedded in the variety of muscle combinations, particularly around the eyes: worry, joy, fear, confusion, surprise. We could now see the blush of embarrassment and the flush of love. Our largely hairless body, with eighteen square feet of exposed skin, became a soft keyboard for the language of touch: I trust you, It’s OK, Stop that. Our eyes changed from almost completely brown — like the eyes of other primates — to having bright white sclera around our corneas, allowing us to convey immediately where we were looking — Pay attention to that snake over there! — and also enabling others to get a glimpse of our intent: deceit, kindness, malevolence. The big, jutting primate brow disappeared, clearing the way for our eyes to be more easily observed. Over the course of three million years, our brain quadrupled in size. This was an unusual development.

Brain size generally corresponds to body size. Elephants have enormous brains; squirrels, small ones. Ours are way bigger than our bodies would dictate. In fact, we have the largest brain relative to our body size of any animal. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar concluded that our brain grew so large not so much to house our intellect but to accommodate our massive amount of social wiring.¹

The modern human brain holds around one hundred billion neurons, which are like the brain’s motherboard, ceaselessly downloading info from everything in our vicinity and routing it to the appropriate departments for processing. Our brain gathers signals from everyone around us — tone of voice, body language, odor, behavior — a “veritable dictionary of mood and intention,” as biologist E. O. Wilson puts it. Our face continually sends signals we don’t even know we’re sending. We have muscles in our chin, the bridge of our nose, and our forehead that most of us cannot consciously control. For example, if you asked people to pull down the corners of their lips without moving their chin muscles, only about 10 percent could do it. But almost everyone does it automatically when they’re profoundly sad. These hardwired expressions are almost always fleeting, disappearing behind the expression we want the world to see.

We pick up on the signals and react not only by altering our own mood and body language, but our heart rate, hormones, and metabolism — a thousand tiny recalibrations every moment. This is the dance of human tribes, each of us forever influencing one another with such speed and subtlety that we barely notice.

Thomas Lewis’s book never mentions team chemistry, but on page after page that’s what he describes.

“I know almost nothing about sports,” Lewis said as he sank into a black armchair and crossed his ankles on the ottoman. “I have patients come in and talk about sports, so I’ve heard about it, but I didn’t get that gene.”

Short stacks of paper formed a ragged semicircle on the floor around his chair. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves gave way to a picture window that opened to a view of the Sausalito Ferry and Richardson Bay.

Lewis had the soft and calming voice you’d expect from a psychiatry professor, but his husky build and Saturday-afternoon-at-Costco loose pullover brought to mind a hockey dad. The small table on his right was a clutter of three soft-drink cans, a crumpled coffee cup, and a half-empty bottle of mineral water.

Lewis told me about giving a lecture one day when a woman asked a question about heaven. He doesn’t remember the specifics. What he does remember is being struck for the first time by the near universality of people’s concept of heaven: a reunion with the people we love. Hell, on the other hand, is banishment. I thought about Tom Hanks’s character in Cast Away, who survives in part by turning a volleyball into a companion named Wilson. The success of the film depended on the audience buying into Hanks’s emotional connection to the ball. We did, even if we didn’t know exactly why.

“Relationships are ultimately the central thing for human beings,” Lewis said. So much so, he said, that we are often literally in sync with those closest to us. The heart rhythm (not heart rate) of a mother and baby, for example, will synchronize to within a second of each other. “And it’s specific to that mother and infant,” Lewis said. A woman’s heart rhythm doesn’t synchronize with a baby that isn’t hers. Similarly, the respiratory rates between people in a conversation, if they have a close relationship, will synchronize.

I understood the open-loop system in the extremes, namely abandoned children and lonely, isolated adults. But what about the rest of us in everyday life? What do other people supply to us that we can’t generate on our own?

“There are a lot of aspects of life that are hard to observe, I think, if you’re not a psychiatrist. I wonder sometimes, how do people get along?” Lewis said, smiling.

In a clinical session, he said, he is so attentive to everything about his patient that he notices how he is changed from hour to hour, depending on the client. “Everything about another person is contagious,” he said. “You can tell that a part of who you are in the moment comes from who the other person is. You’re not the same person. Not radically different, but different enough that it’s noticeable.”

I wondered what kinds of things he noticed.

“You just feel like: Oh, I’m funny with this person,” Lewis said. “Or I’m smart, or have more ideas, or can’t think of anything to say. You get changed. And that’s because part of who you are is determined by other people.”

I knew exactly. I also felt particularly funny with certain people. I asked Lewis if I was mimicking my friends’ funniness or were they tapping something in me I already had?

“There really isn’t a ‘you’ in the way you think there is,” he said. “There is a you that is unchanging. But a part of you is always supplied by other people.”

I had to wrap my brain around that. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew there was something to it. Who I am with my sisters and brothers in Florida is different from who I am with my friends in San Francisco. Who I am with my husband is different from who I ever was with boyfriends before him. Who I am with my son is totally different, for good or ill, from who I am with anyone else on the planet.

The chatter of tourists drifted up from the street. I told Lewis that there are people in sports who reject the suggestion that anything other than talent, training, and preparation account for an athlete’s performance. Lewis arched his eyebrows, which qualified in his range of measured emotions as flabbergasted shock.

“That,” he said evenly, “is very surprising to me.”

In early 2017, I was asked to interview Michael Lewis onstage for a Bay Area speaker series. His book Moneyball popularized the notion in baseball that if you couldn’t count it, time it, or measure it, it didn’t matter to performance. In other words, chemistry was as relevant as lucky underwear. He had just published The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. It’s about the extraordinary relationship between Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who summoned from each other such profound work on behavioral economics that it earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize. (Tversky had died by then, and Nobels are awarded only to the living.) Each was brilliant in his own right. But together they changed how we think about thinking. Lewis’s book describes how they supplied new facets to one another’s personality. The men could hardly be more different: Tversky was funny, self-assured, and sharply critical; Kahneman was quiet and, as Michael Lewis put it, “a welter of doubt.” But in Tversky’s company, Kahneman felt funny and confident, something he’d never experienced. With Kahneman, Tversky was agreeable and uncritical. Their relationship was about who and what the two of them became in each other’s presence.

In the green room before the onstage interview, I hoped to ask Lewis how and why these two men were able to influence each other to such a significant degree. I wanted to know if writing The Undoing Project had altered his thinking on team chemistry fourteen years after Moneyball. First, though, to break the ice I mentioned to Lewis I had been meeting with his good friend, a UC Berkeley social psychologist named Dacher Keltner, to whom Lewis had dedicated The Undoing Project. I told him that Keltner might collaborate on a study for my book.

“What’s your book about?” he asked.

“Team chemistry.”

“Doesn’t exist,” he said.

And that was that. I found this puzzling. If Tversky and Kahneman could change so markedly in each other’s company and elevate the quality of each other’s work, wasn’t it possible that any two human brains could do the same? Even two athletes’ brains? Perhaps the stumbling block for him was applying the phenomenon to groups. Yet history is rife with examples.

The “Lost Generation” of writers and artists in Paris after World War I — Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso — inspired each other to take risks in their work, to be bold and audacious. The result was groundbreaking literature and art. The same was true for an earlier group of French painters whose cross-pollination of ideas and energy created Impressionism; and for Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic colleagues in Vienna; and for Charles Darwin and his network of biologists, geologists, and ornithologists in London and Cambridge who drew out the best in each other to hone a theory of natural selection.

By sharing knowledge, energy, motivation — and enjoying the discovery process together — the artists and scientists produced something more exciting than each could have produced alone.

I watched it happen with the Giants in 2010, my third year as the team’s media consultant. I didn’t exactly see it. I didn’t know enough yet to read the signals — embedded in voice, touch, facial expression, words, humor, nicknames, eye contact, a thousand things — crisscrossing the clubhouse like neurons in one big brain. I couldn’t see how this web of connections and recalibrations, this complex interplay of relationships, was coalescing into something all its own — a culture. And how this culture became like a gravitational force, bending everyone toward each other and a common goal.

For fifteen years at the Giants, prickly home-run king Barry Bonds was the bright, scorching sun around which the rest of the organization orbited. Three years after he left, a new dynamic took its place, turning two unlikely men into team leaders and a band of misfits, castoffs, and youngsters into World Series champions.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ARROWLEAF

“Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up. It means you trust them even when they do screw up.”

— Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios

Not everyone sees the thin layer of paranoia that coats certain clubhouses, but Aubrey Huff did, and right away. His history and personality had conditioned him to expect it. He reflexively scrutinized teammates’ words and tone of voice for the subtle derision, the hidden agendas. He was still in many ways the uneasy, awkward kid in Mineral Wells, Texas, whose father had been shot and killed at the apartment complex where he worked as an electrician. Aubrey was six years old. On weekend nights during high school, he preferred the batting cage behind his mobile home to the minefield of teenage social life, swinging the bat beneath the floodlights long after his mother, grandmother, and sister had gone to bed. He was the most valuable player at the three-thousand-student Vernon College in north Texas before transferring to the super-competitive baseball program at the University of Miami. He felt like a sheltered hick among the brash, frat-boy athletes. He adopted an arrogant, hard-partying, sarcastic alter ego he called Huffdaddy.

That’s the person I met when he arrived at the Giants’ spring training facility in January of 2010.

The Tampa Bay Rays had drafted him in the fifth round in 1998, and he reached the big leagues just two years later. In Huff’s five and a half years there, the Rays finished in last place five times. They lost more than a hundred games three times. Traded to the Houston Astros in 2006, Huff experienced half a season of winning baseball, though just barely: The Astros finished 82–80. Huff was twenty-nine. Then it was on to the awful Baltimore Orioles for two and a half more seasons of last-place finishes.

Over the years, Huff had become indifferent both to winning and to the team concept. He was not known for logging hours in the gym. He tended to show up at the ballpark right before stretching and was in his car by the time the stadium emptied. Go to the field, get your ass kicked, go home. At the start of each season, he’d hang a new calendar in his rental house and count down the days until he could pack up for the winter. This isn’t to say he didn’t play hard. He did. He played in all 162 games in 2002 and led the Rays in home runs for most of his years there. Good stats, every ballplayer knows, secured you a good contract. But by 2010, those days were over for Huff. He was thirty-three years old. He had never played in a postseason game. One could argue he had never played in a meaningful game, when the team’s fate hung in the balance. In short, he wasn’t a winner, on or off the field. In the midst of his three-year, $20-million contract with the Orioles, he went on a local radio station after downing nine Bud Lights and called Baltimore “a horseshit town.” He was traded the following season and finished out 2009 with the second-place Detroit Tigers. After being benched for poor play, he responded by pouting and stewing in the dugout.

“In all honesty, going into the off-season, I was thinking if nobody calls, thank god. I’m done. Just ride off in the sunset, and before you know it nobody will remember me. I was just totally over it,” Huff told me during a long phone conversation years later. He barely picked up a bat or lifted a weight that winter, before the 2010 season. He lurched from the strip clubs to the casinos and back home to his wife on a roller coaster of alcohol and Adderall. His marriage was falling apart.

As spring training drew near, the Giants had struck out twice on signing a left-handed first baseman who had some pop in his bat, and Huff became their best option. They offered just one year at $3 million — a lot of money for most of us, but a comedown for the ten-year veteran. Huff took it.

Only six of ESPN’s thirty-six baseball commentators predicted the Giants would reach the playoffs in 2010. No one at Baseball Prospectus did. The team had no slugger with the power of past Giants greats like Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Will Clark, or Barry Bonds. In the pitching rotation was a twenty-year-old country boy named Madison Bumgarner, just two years removed from high school. Their ace, Tim Lincecum, a long-haired, pot-smoking, waifish introvert, looked like a bat boy but threw like Sandy Koufax. In his three years in the major leagues, he had already won two Cy Young Awards as the best pitcher in baseball. Their up-and-coming catcher was a crew-cut rookie out of Georgia with the Old West name of Buster Posey.

With Barry Bonds gone, the hierarchy within the team flattened. No emperor meant no minions, no one walking on eggshells, afraid of drawing the star’s criticism. The judgment fell away. Lincecum was a rock star in San Francisco, mobbed by fans, hounded by reporters, wooed by sponsors. He could have been a diva. Instead he was one of the guys, having a great time. Same thing for the other young players and the smattering of aging veterans, who understood how short a career is. They all wanted to win — and have fun while doing it.

What happened that season reminded me of E. O. Wilson’s description of an arrowleaf plant. When one grows on land, its leaves are shaped like arrowheads. In shallow water, they look like lily pads. Underwater, they’re long, seaweedy ribbons. The environment awakens something in the plant, freeing it to transform into the shape best suited to its surroundings.

I happened to be in the hallway when Huff arrived at the Giants’ Scottsdale, Arizona, ballpark for his first day of spring training. He strutted toward the clubhouse like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: shoulders back, chin up, grin wide, as if crowds might part to make way. This was Huffdaddy, the swaggery guy with armor around his insecurities. He was girding himself for a fourth new clubhouse in five years. He stuck his head into a side room where coaches were drinking coffee around a conference table. “Aubrey Huff,” he announced to each man, circling the table and shaking hands like a seasoned salesman.

In the clubhouse, a few other early-arriving players were changing out of their street clothes. Huff knew they’d be well aware of his reputation as a shitty teammate. He set down his equipment bag at his locker and braced for the chore of introducing himself to men who might be less than excited to have him on the team. He was stashing deodorant and shaving cream when pitcher Matt Cain appeared with his hand out, welcoming him to the squad. Then Tim Lincecum came by. One by one, players greeted him. “There was an aura in the air, the way everybody talked to each other,” Huff said later. “The way everybody looked at each other. It just felt so much different than anything I’ve been a part of.”

Later, he watched as players from all different backgrounds squeezed shoulder to shoulder around a table in the middle of the clubhouse, slapping down cards in high-stakes games of booray and hearts. Huff remembers liking the eccentric closer — a twenty-fourth-round draft pick named Brian Wilson — with his black nail polish, Mohawk, and a black beard that would spawn half a dozen Twitter accounts. He also took to the sunny Dominican veteran Juan Uribe — plucked from the free-agent scrap heap a year earlier — who called everyone “Papi.”

“Uribe, what’s my name?” Huff asked one day, later in the season.

“Papi, you know I know your name,” Uribe said.

“No, what’s my name?”

“Shut up, I got you.”

Huff laughed when he told the story later. “He had no fucking idea what my name was. And it was perfectly OK with me.” Huff had his own quirks. He once ambled toward the clubhouse bathroom buck naked, asking if anyone had seen his toothbrush. It was protruding from his rear, a sight that broke up his teammates as intended. (“Now, the bristles weren’t in my butthole,” Huff made sure to tell me.) Later he began wearing a red thong under his uniform pants to rally the team out of a losing streak.

By the end of spring training, Huff was periodically joining the card games and lobbing sarcastic Huffdaddy remarks across the room. But he kept a safe distance. He knew he was just a replacement part and operated as he always had, like an independent contractor loyal only to himself.

Early in the season, however, that changed. The Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates in San Francisco. Huff crushed a pitch to the right-field wall. As the ball caromed past the fielder, he rounded first and made for second. Already gasping for air, Huff tapped second and headed to third. His eyes bulged at the sight of the coach leaping wildly and waving him home. He chugged down the line and slid across the plate with the grace of a sandbag, completing one of the most entertaining and least likely inside-the-park home runs in history.

Teammates swarmed Huff in the dugout, roaring with laughter and slapping high fives. Huff sank onto the bench, red-faced and heaving, but also laughing. Someone handed him a cup of Gatorade. Young third baseman Pablo Sandoval fanned him with a towel. In the clubhouse after the game, the barbs and howls erupted all over again each time the TV showed replays of Huff’s runaway-beer-truck trip around the bags. The funniest digs came from Huff himself.

“That’s when I felt finally that I was really part of a team,” Huff said later. “I finally felt part of the guys.”

From a physiology standpoint, the warm, exultant reception from teammates almost certainly set in motion the production of oxytocin in Huff’s brain. He experienced the physical sensation of acceptance. Huff’s heart rate slowed. A rush of serotonin and dopamine — piggy-backing on the oxytocin — lifted his mood and his energy.

Over time, he began to feel an ease he hadn’t known since, well, maybe ever. He became more open to the everyday signals of trust and became more trusting, more accepting, and less self-centered in return. His life outside of baseball was a mess — he was still drinking and popping Adderall, and his marriage was still crumbling — but with his teammates he could be the person his teammates seemed to think he was. He began arriving at the park early and leaving late. He rediscovered his power at the plate and led the team in doubles, triples, and home runs. Most surprising, he found teammates gravitating to him for advice or a laugh, as if he were a leader.

“They’d ask me about things,” he said, “and that had never happened to me in my life.”

Paul Zak picked me up at my hotel in Ontario, California, on an August morning in 2016 in a black Mercedes with a vanity plate that read OXYTOSN. He was trim, tanned, and sported a stylish touch of gray at the temples. He dressed like a hip politician: crisp blue dress shirt with the cuffs turned up at the wrist, a leather braided bracelet, pleated slacks. I had seen his TED Talk, so I knew the hug was coming. He hugs everyone he meets. Hugs are known to release oxytocin.

Zak is an economics professor and the founder and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His economics studies had piqued his interest in the nature of trust. The most prosperous countries had the most trusting cultures; only when people trust that banks, governments, and businesses are behaving fairly and honestly can economies flourish. Zak got to wondering what made one person trust another. Was there a biological mechanism of trust?

By chance one day in 2000, on an airport shuttle in Nevada, Zak found himself next to anthropologist Helen Fisher, well-known for her studies on the biology of love. In discussing their respective work, she asked Zak if he had ever studied the connection between trust and oxytocin. At that point, he had never heard of oxytocin, the so-called love hormone.

He learned that oxytocin is produced deep inside the brain in a hormone-regulating region called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then dispatches oxytocin to the tiny, almond-shaped amygdala, which has a high concentration of oxytocin receptors. The amygdala is essentially the brain’s emotional scanner, interpreting every sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch for its emotional meaning. The amygdala tells us a friend’s curt tone, for instance, means she’s not happy. In animals, oxytocin fosters nurturing in rodents, monogamy in prairie voles, and social bonding in almost every species tested. When Animal A nuzzled, played with, or otherwise signaled to Animal B he was safe to approach, Animal B’s brain released oxytocin and was friendly in return.

To Zak, that looked a lot like trust. Was oxytocin the biological underpinning he was hunting for? With two colleagues at Claremont, Zak recruited students to participate in a well-known exercise called “the trust game.”*

They sat the students in cubicles and, at random, assigned them partners, who never saw each other or communicated directly. A computer screen in each cubicle told the partners they each had ten dollars in an account. It was theirs to keep just for showing up. But they also had an opportunity to increase the amount.

The first student was asked if she wanted to give some of her ten dollars to her anonymous partner and told that whatever amount she transferred would be tripled. If she gave five dollars, the partner would see his account balance increase by fifteen to twenty-five dollars. The anonymous partner now had the option of sending money back. If he sent ten dollars, for example, they’d both end up with fifteen, boosting their initial take-away by five. Of course, he could pocket the entire twenty-five dollars and call it a day. His partner would never know his identity. There would be no repercussions.

Zak found that 98 percent of the partners did send money back. The question was why.

He took blood samples from each student before and immediately after they made their decisions to send money. He measured the levels of ten different chemicals. Only oxytocin showed a before-and-after change — and only in the recipients, not the initial senders. In other words, receiving money raised the students’ levels of oxytocin. The more money they received, the higher their oxytocin level. Zak and his team were pretty sure at this point that one partner’s gesture of trust triggered the release of oxytocin in the other. But they couldn’t be sure. Maybe the chemical was released simply because of the mini-thrill of receiving money and had nothing to do with trust.

They pulled in more students for more rounds of the trust game. This time, the students didn’t decide for themselves how much to transfer to their anonymous partner. Instead, they picked a Ping-Pong ball from a bucket. On the ball was a number from one through ten, which determined how much the student transferred. The recipients knew the transfer amount had been determined randomly. The results were startling. The oxytocin levels of the recipients were significantly lower than those of students in the earlier rounds, and the amounts they sent back were significantly less generous.

Zak also studied distrust and found that its effect was just as powerful as trust — though only in men. In general, when male students received three dollars or less in a transfer, they were angry and sent back next to nothing. No surprise that their blood showed a spike in a high-octane testosterone called dihydrotestosterone (DHT). The more distrust the men felt, the more distrusting they were with others, with a correlating boost in DHT. On the other hand, when women received a transfer of three dollars or less, Zak found, their testosterone didn’t spike. They felt hurt, disappointed, and sometimes angry, but they almost always sent back a comparable amount no matter how small the initial transfer.

But Zak still couldn’t be certain that oxytocin, and not some other factor, was responsible for increasing the students’ generosity in the trust game. Via a nasal spray, he delivered synthetic oxytocin to half the participants and a placebo to the rest. The oxytocin groups sent back more than twice as much money as the placebo groups.

The conclusion: When people show trust in us, our brains release a surge of oxytocin, which primes us to be trusting and generous in return. Trust begets trust.

The evidence of oxytocin’s impact on bonding and trust, while not yet conclusive, became compelling enough to catch the attention of the US Department of Defense.

The military has long operated on the premise that bonding and trust are essential to performance. This is a big reason for boot camp: hardship fosters bonding. It’s also why soldiers still march during training. Marching into battle is an absurd strategy in modern war, as antiquated as muskets and bayonets. But it is still a staple on military bases around the world because marching in unison, like synchronous chanting and singing in religious rituals, facilitates connection and cooperation.¹ Similarly, the ritual of sports teams warming up before practices and games with synchronous stretches strengthens their bonds as it loosens their muscles.

At the core of team chemistry is the profound impact we have on each other, psychologically and physiologically, and research on the military continues to pile up the evidence. Studies have found that emotional connections not only foster selflessness and sacrifice on the battlefield but also help mitigate post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). UCLA did an astounding study on this, using the pension rolls from the Civil War.² Detailed medical records were kept on more than 90 percent of the thirty-five thousand soldiers in the Union Army’s pension program. This treasure trove of data allowed researchers an unprecedented look at the arc of the soldiers’ lives, from the actual units in which they served through old age and death.

Many units in the Union Army were made up of men from the same town. Because the pension rolls included the hometowns of every soldier, researchers knew which men fought alongside friends and neighbors and which men didn’t. Men in these connected units were less likely later in life to develop physical ailments like cardiovascular disorders, which are sometimes indicative of undiagnosed psychiatric conditions. In other words, being in a more tightly bonded company reduced the likelihood of suffering from what we now call PTSD.

The invention of synthetic oxytocin got the Department of Defense wondering if it could help accelerate the bonding process, thus producing high-performing units faster and protecting soldiers against wartime stress more effectively. In 2016, the Pentagon turned to a UC San Francisco researcher named Josh Woolley.

His lab — the Bonding and Attunement in Neuropsychiatric Disorders Laboratory, or BAND Lab — occupies a squat prefab building on the sprawling campus of the San Francisco VA Medical Center. It sits at the end of a narrow drive below the main parking lot, tucked out of sight like a toolshed on a grand estate. I visited him one rainy afternoon, passing a dusty artificial ficus tree in the entryway, the only nod to hominess in an expanse of filing cabinets and gray cubicles with nameplates like “C14 Thrive Lab” and “C15 BAND Lab (MD/Post-Doc Cubicle).” But I heard young voices and laughter and caught glimpses of researchers in jeans and sneakers under their white lab coats.

Woolley said his office is too much of a mess for me to see, so we sat in a small room usually reserved for behavioral experiments, which is why there were high-definition cameras mounted in three corners and, on a table, a dozen or so “Biopac” systems that measure sweat, heart rate, cardiac impedance, and other automatic physical responses. Woolley has an MD in psychiatry and a PhD in neuroscience. At forty years old, he still looked like a grad student: glasses, short hair, plaid shirt, black jeans, running shoes, and bright, striped socks. He has long been driven to understand the psychological and physiological power of social connection. For him, the research is not an academic exercise. He still sees patients one day a week, mostly military vets, and is awestruck by what they were willing to sacrifice for their comrades.

He choked up telling me about the Vietnam radio operator who, under pounding artillery fire, risked his life remaining at the radio by himself to get help for his embattled unit.

“People were getting killed, and he stayed; he kept doing it, alone, even though he was in danger and people were dying,” Woolley said. “It was very moving. I was telling him it was amazing, and he was like, no. He was actually embarrassed by it. You read these stories about heroism and people that win the Medal of Honor and things like that — they often say it wasn’t heroic what they did. They just didn’t think about it that way. They thought, ‘My friends — what else was I going to do?’”

Woolley’s experiments with synthetic oxytocin, along with the work of several colleagues, landed them a Department of Defense grant for a three-year study on the neuropeptide’s impact on team cohesion among ROTC recruits.* Their goals were to better understand the psychobiological mechanism of cohesion; to develop a way to measure the cohesion of a team; to see if, and how, synthetic oxytocin could enhance it; and to determine any correlation to performance.

Woolley warned that the experiment might accomplish none of those things. He is critical of scientists who jump to sweeping conclusions that make interesting headlines in the New York Times science section but whose results, it often turns out, cannot be replicated. So he couched his own postulations with “We don’t know yet,” “That’s what I’m thinking now,” “This is just a first step.”

Woolley’s research targeted exactly what I was trying to understand about team chemistry — the scientific underpinnings of bonding’s impact on performance. The initial experiments in his double-blind study, which involved three strangers collaborating on a task, were conducted at UC Berkeley with student volunteers and, later, cadets. The work was arduous. From video of the testing sessions, researchers had to code the participants’ gestures and facial expressions — every nod, smile, and furrowed brow; every instance of eye contact and eye aversion. They had to note who took charge, who noticed a fellow participant’s confusion and stepped in to help, who offered the choice of snacks to her fellow volunteers. Every snippet of conversation went through a language-analysis program. Physiological data from body monitors were analyzed to see if heart rates, breathing, or other autonomous responses became synchronous and how the body responded during social interaction and task performance.

With a large enough sample size, Woolley said, the data could show a significant relationship between oxytocin and cohesion, and between cohesion and performance. Or not.

The results would be ready in two years, he said. Or not.

I checked back in two years. The results weren’t ready. As one researcher reminded me more than once, “Joan, science is slow.” It’s not that I expected team chemistry to pop out one day from behind a research paper or a clubhouse door and explain itself to me. But as my research mounted and my interviews multiplied, I started to feel like I was trying to solve a puzzle by picking through a mountain of random pieces.

Pat Burrell had been Huff’s larger-than-life teammate at the University of Miami. He had been the quarterback on his high-school football team and the star slugger on the baseball team. As a junior at Miami, he was named the best college baseball player in the country. That June, he was the first player picked in the MLB draft, by the Philadelphia Phillies. Philly fans expected Burrell to be the next Mike Schmidt, and though he had several outstanding seasons, he fell short of the hype. During the 2008 World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays, Burrell had just one hit, but it was a doozy: a double in Game 5 that would clinch the championship. Afterward, Burrell was a hot commodity, and the Rays laid out more than $16 million to secure his services for 2009 and 2010.

But Burrell, a golden boy all his life, played so abysmally and clashed so sharply with manager Joe Maddon that just twenty-four games into the 2010 season, with $8 million still owed on his contract, the Rays dumped him. “How bad do you have to be performing to be cut by a team that counts every penny more closely than Ebenezer Scrooge?” one Tampa Bay sportswriter wrote.³

Burrell was on the downside of thirty-three. He went home to Arizona and sat by the phone. Weeks passed. No offers.

In the meantime, Huff was lobbying the Giants’ brass to sign his old college buddy. He knows how to win, Huff told anyone who would listen. He’s the slugger we need in the lineup, a student of the game, a hero of the 2008 World Series! He was the Giants’ kind of player, Huff pushed: hard-nosed, old school, big bat. And he was from the Bay Area, a nice local connection. Because the Rays were paying his salary, the Giants could pick him up for almost nothing. They signed him to a minor-league contract in late May and by early June, he was in the Giants lineup.

Burrell arrived in the clubhouse seeming not a bit humbled by his failure in Tampa Bay. Broad-shouldered and square-jawed, he commanded the attention of every room he entered. His good looks and regal bearing brought to mind the prince in Beauty and the Beast, though he was princely in few other ways. Like Huff, he had a vulgar bent that stood out even by baseball standards. But he had a reputation for playing hard and smart, for being a winner.

He blossomed in his new environment, just as Huff had. He rediscovered his passion and energy. He radiated confidence. And the clubhouse, like the superorganism it is, absorbed that passion, energy, and confidence and became something new. Not radically so. More of a shift, the way a dinner party changes when a particularly charismatic guest arrives. Burrell would round up teammates for pregame stretching with an old-fashioned “C’mon, boys!” When the team lost, he let no one hang his head: “We’ll get ’em tomorrow.” He slung an arm around the bench players about to pinch-hit in a tight game. “You got this,” he’d say matter-of-factly, more reminder than exhortation. He pushed the players to look out for each other. After a Giants pitcher struggled through a long inning, wearing himself out throwing way too many pitches, Burrell barked at upcoming Giants hitters, “You have to take pitches! Give our guy time to catch his breath!”

Like Huff’s, Burrell’s performance on the field reflected his ease and sense of purpose in the clubhouse. He led the team in slugging percentage (total bases per at-bat) and was second only to Huff in on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS). His batting average soared from .218 during his tenure in Tampa to .266 in San Francisco. He hit eighteen home runs.

No one was affected by Burrell’s presence more than Huff. “It was almost like a long-lost brother had come home,” he said. Huff felt more capable and confident. He couldn’t let go completely of Huffdaddy — he was still loud and swaggery — but he cared about the men at the other lockers. It mattered what they thought of him. He could never be a leader on his own, but he could with Burrell, almost as if — in line with our open-loop nature — Burrell completed him. “I was not used to being the guy who people are looking to for answers,” Huff said, laughing, when we spoke on the phone. “I was the guy that kind of took it light in the clubhouse, and all of a sudden I felt this responsibility to be the guy that the media would go to after games, and I’m like, ‘Holy shit, I’m not used to this.’”

One day in the clubhouse at the end of August, Burrell found Huff and together they ushered Lincecum into the small office. The superstar pitcher had lost all five of his starts that month. The Giants had slipped six games out of first place. Lincecum didn’t seem to be listening to his coaches or manager Bruce Bochy, and he balked at suggestions that he improve his workout routine. He had been so spectacularly successful his entire life that he seemed paralyzed by failure.

“Timmy, man, I know you’re struggling, bro,” Burrell said, leaning forward in his chair, locking eyes with the young pitcher. “I know this is hard for you. But we need you, Bud, we need you.”

Huff mostly listened. Burrell was pointed but loving. “Look, Timmy, you’re our rock. If we don’t have you, we’re dead. We’re dead.”

“As I’m watching Timmy,” Huff told me later, “his head starts coming up, the chin’s coming up, the chest is coming out a little bit more. You could see in his facial expression, in his eyes, that somebody had belief in him. He’s 0 and 5. He’s getting bad press. Everybody’s on him. And then something was triggered inside of him. You could see it. I’m sitting there in awe watching and listening to this. And no shit, the very next start against Colorado, on September first, he shoved it up Colorado’s ass.”

What I had learned about the brain from Zak, Woolley, and others seemed to be playing out in the relationships and dynamics of these men. Huff and Burrell felt trusted and valued, triggering the release of oxytocin and dopamine and creating a newfound sense of commitment and connection to their teammates. They, in turn, showed trust in Lincecum, revving his own brain chemicals to shift how he believed in himself. This contagion of beliefs and emotions, the very core of team chemistry, changed the course of the Giants’ season. Lincecum went eight innings that day against the Colorado Rockies, striking out nine in the 2–1 victory. He went on to win five of his six starts in September. With seven days left in the regular season, the Giants climbed into first place and held on to win the division.

Something kept nagging at me. Where was testosterone in this sea of feel-good brain chemicals? Here we had a team of twenty-five highly competitive young athletes coursing with testosterone. You could see it in their nose-to-nose arguments with umpires and explosions at opponents whose home-run trots were too slow (Disrespectful!) or bat flips too theatrical (Showing up our pitcher!). Testosterone is one reason home fields give teams an advantage. Researchers have found that athletes’ testosterone levels are higher before home games than before road games, perhaps a vestige of ancestral tribes protecting their territory against outsiders. You would think that inside the clubhouse big, bad testosterone would counteract kind, generous oxytocin. But that wasn’t happening with the 2010 Giants. Oxytocin was winning. Nobody, including macho-men Huff and Burrell, was overtly jockeying for power. Nobody was commandeering the clubhouse sound system to foist his playlist on everyone else. Nobody was calling team meetings to mark his territory as leader. Why weren’t these calling cards of testosterone showing up in the players’ behavior?

Because testosterone has an engaging, social side.

Lab experiments found that in a group of strangers, high-testosterone people were the most highly regarded by the other members.⁴ They didn’t gain such status by overpowering the group, as you might expect from this somewhat misunderstood, macho hormone. Quite the opposite. They did it by fitting in, listening, helping out.

The researchers found that high testosterone fuels a drive for stature. This drive makes us adjust our mindset and behavior to whatever the group values most, thus allowing us to win over its members. In this way, testosterone is an arrowleaf. On the climb up the social ladder, the environment influences how testosterone expresses itself.

But the research also showed stark anomalies. Some high-testosterone athletes weren’t leaders at all. In fact, some were among the lowest-status players. What was going on? Scientists found that another hormone, cortisol, was altering testosterone’s impact.⁵ Though cortisol is commonly known as the stress hormone, its actual purpose is to counteract stress. The more stress you feel, the more cortisol your body produces to get you back to equilibrium. Thus, high levels of cortisol indicate high stress.

“Here’s what I think is happening based on research and intuitive leaps and my experience as an athlete in team sports,” said Kathleen Casto, a biopsychologist who has conducted substantial research on testosterone’s and cortisol’s connection to leadership, most recently with the 2016 women’s Olympic field hockey team.⁶ “If you have high testosterone, then you’re motivated for status among teammates. If you have high cortisol, maybe you’re an anxious person, stressed out. You don’t realize your [negative] impact on teammates. That results in low status. In other words, you want status, but you’re not good at achieving it.”

This suggests a physiological explanation for Huff’s transformation. He finally found himself on a team where he was accepted and valued. This would surely relieve the stress of proving himself, of defending himself against naysayers, including the one in his own head. Perhaps his cortisol level dropped during the 2010 season with the Giants, his behavior changed, and his teammates were drawn to him as a leader.

As recently as 2007, the Giants’ clubhouse had been as cliquey and snipey as a middle-school cafeteria. Many of the veterans were on the downside of their careers and kept to themselves except, it seemed, to cut rookies down to size for talking to the media too much, playing music too loud, celebrating a home run too exuberantly. I remembered what Jim Leyland had told me:

“When you get the veterans to buy into the program, that is a treat for a manager. When the veterans don’t buy into the program, and they can’t really play anymore, and you have to start replacing them with younger players, you got fucking chaos on your hands. Trust me.”

By 2010, with the veteran cliques gone, a new openness settled over the clubhouse. “It’s given all the younger guys a chance to be themselves,” Lincecum said that year. “They’re not just in their lockers staring at the wall or sitting at the table not talking.” Players seemed to feel a sense of belonging and trust that allowed for lots of joking and honest conversation. They looked forward to coming to the park every day. They knew they’d have fun. And they were winning.

As I write this, I can almost hear the talk-radio voices leap an octave. “They aren’t winning because they’re having fun! They’re having fun because they’re winning!”

Yes, of course, winning is more conducive to having fun than not winning. The converse is also true: Having fun is more conducive to winning than not having fun. In that 2010 clubhouse, players ragged on each other with insults that, to me, would be knives in soft flesh but drew howls of laughter, even from the target. Nothing seemed off-limits. No one ever seemed wounded. Little did I imagine that this humor, as juvenile and crude as it was, showed how much they trusted each other. Successful teasing requires mutual trust. You trust that the target understands the goodwill you feel toward him. The target trusts that your teasing means he’s part of the tribe.

“Joking cultures are trusting cultures,” said social psychologist Gary Alan Fine, who has been writing about and studying humor since the 1970s.⁷ “You can’t have a teasing relationship with people you don’t really care about.”

Teams, like most work groups, are not made up of equals. Some have more authority, money, and tenure. But to function successfully as a team, everyone needs to operate as if they’re equals. Humor, especially teasing, allows stars and coaches to show they’re one of the guys or gals. “One way for a high-status person to be effective is to be willing not just to be the giver of humor, but the target as well,” Fine said. “In effect, he’s saying, ‘I’m a leader, but I’m not different from you. I can take a joke.’”

Fine points out the words target and take. They suggest incoming fire. When we good-naturedly suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous insult, we show commitment to the tribe. It’s a form of hazing. The teasing asks: Do you trust us, and can we trust you?

How does this help performance?

In a truly trusting culture, trust is as taken for granted as gravity. We are oblivious to its pull, to its effect on our mindset and thus our performance. Consider a high-stress scenario. You’re pinch-hitting in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game. Or you’re making an important presentation in front of your organization. As soon as our brain registers the stressful situation, our heart begins to pump faster. Our mindset determines what happens next.

If we trust that our colleagues and bosses believe in us, that they’ll stand by us even if we fail, we perceive stress as a challenge instead of a threat. Our brain releases hormones that cause our blood vessels to open up, delivering the extra blood into our brain and muscles to fortify us. Our body is primed for action. We feel emboldened to take risks that can push our performance to the next level. We don’t have to play it so safe because we know, no matter what the outcome, our tribe will be there.

The opposite of a trusting culture is organized paranoia. “You start over-processing everything, scrutinizing everything everybody says, looking for unfairness and criticism,” said Rod Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It’s a productivity killer.”

Instead of nervous excitement, we face stress with nervous fear. We perceive the situation as a threat. Our blood vessels constrict instead of expand, limiting the flow of blood and oxygen to our brain and muscles. Our body goes into a virtual crouch, preparing for the blows of failure. “The physiology of positive emotion is the antithesis of the physiology of stress,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner. “Stress wears you down. It makes you cautious. It tightens you up. You choke.”

By season’s end, Huff had more home runs (twenty-six) and more runs batted in (eighty-six) than anyone else on the team. The Giants advanced through the Division Series, the National League Championship Series, and on to the team’s first World Series championship in fifty-six years, their first ever in San Francisco. Anchored by Lincecum, young pitchers carried the Giants, but it was Huff who anchored the offense. He had become a fan favorite, a go-to guy for reporters, and an honest-to-god team leader. Aubrey Huff.

But he never played as well or had such impact again. The following year, with a new two-year contract from the Giants, his performance and influence eroded to the point of irrelevance. He had become a star, at least in San Francisco, with the indulgences and scrutiny that came with it. His addiction to Adderall escalated, as did his drinking. He had panic attacks — one so severe he left the team without notice and was gone a week. His wife had filed for divorce several months earlier, though they ended up staying together, at least for a few more years. (They divorced in 2018.)

When the Giants returned to the World Series in 2012, Huff was on the bench. He had just one hit in ten plate appearances. Then his career was over.

But for that one season in 2010, in that particular clubhouse among those particular men, he was a leader. His was an ungainly, stumbling kind of transformation, but in some ways as elegant and awesome as the arrowleaf’s.

The sun was beginning to disappear behind the trees at Claremont Graduate University. Paul Zak and I had walked to a small campus café, and we returned to the question of defining team chemistry.

“I think chemistry is a real thing,” he said. “We have a shared chemistry, and oxytocin is part of that. Baseball’s insane because of the number of games they play, right? It’s hard because you’re tired and exhausted, and what do you have at the end of the day? You got a team. They need you, and you better recognize that you need them.

“That’s the ‘I got your back’ thing. I want to know that when the shit hits the fan in the game, you’ll break a leg. That’s what I really want to know. If that’s the case, that says I need to be that kind of person, too. Otherwise I’m not a member of the team.”

He took a sip of coffee, gathering his thoughts.

“I would say that — maybe you’re going to laugh at this — but I think it’s that you really have to love the people that you are on a team with. In a really fundamental sense. From a neurologic sense, for sure. Also behaviorally. You have to take that three a.m. phone call when his wife kicks him out of the house. You got to be fully in as a human being, not just as a player, I think. Because it’s too hard otherwise.”

Every now and then, a player who is the embodiment of chemistry itself arrives on a team. These players carry much more than their fair share of the chemistry load, seeming to lift whatever team they join. I call these men and women Super-Carriers.

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