King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Better living through chemistry: Does trading away your team's heart and soul really mean anything? The next two months will offer some clues.
Aug. 2, 2004 | The flurry of deadline dealing Saturday might or might not affect who goes to or wins the playoffs this year -- the columnist stated boldly -- but it sets up the rest of 2004 as a nice little referendum on team chemistry, one of my favorite subjects.
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I think "chemistry" is a kind of superstition in sports. It's also a trait that's applied in retrospect to explain away the shortcomings of a commentator's predictions. "I thought the Monsters would be lousy this year but they're actually pretty good. They must have great chemistry. The Mammoths, meanwhile, who I thought would be great, are terrible. Clearly they've got bad chemistry."
Chemistry is easy to talk about because it's impossible to measure, impossible to disprove any statement made about it. This makes it almost the exact opposite of actual chemistry, by the way. A better word would be "metaphysics."
The Monsters are probably all happy because they're winning. And the Mammoths are probably grumpy because they're losing. And let's not talk about those harmonious teams that are lousy, or the championship teams whose players can't stand each other. Chemistry's far too important to seriously consider whether it actually exists.
Aside from "deadline winners and losers," no phrase was typed more often this weekend by baseball typists than "heart and soul," in regard to Paul Lo Duca, the catcher the Dodgers traded to the Marlins. He was not just the heart of the Dodgers, not just the soul, but the heart and soul, people. As in, I fell in love with you, heart and soul, the way a fool would do, madly.
In other chemistry news, the Red Sox traded away clubhouse cancer Nomar Garciaparra, the sulking superstar shortstop, to the Cubs and, in the same deal, got light-hitting Twins first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz, who had gone from being a heart-and-soul (because you held me tight) to being an unhappy camper when his name began appearing in trade talk. Presumably, he'll return to heart-and-soul status in Boston (and stole a kiss in the night). In a separate, minor deal, the Red Sox got Dave Roberts, an outfielder and reputed "clubhouse guy," from the Dodgers.
A lot of the criticism of the Dodgers' end of the Lo Duca deal is how they traded away their heart and soul (I begged to be adored), a decent if overrated and aging catcher.