Social Molecules in Professional Sports

Former San Francisco sports columnist Joan Ryan has a new book out, the result of over 100 interviews, on team chemistry. "Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry" to be released next week. Here's a teaser, describing the transformation of Aubrey Huff:

When the Giants signed Aubrey Huff as a free agent before the 2010 season, they were gambling on a player who had a dubious reputation within the game. It seemed surprising that general manager Brian Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy, each attuned to harmony in the clubhouse, would welcome such an edgy character.

Huff had serious doubts of his own, wondering if he had any chance of being accepted, and by the 2011 season, he had begun to wear out his welcome. More recently, Huff found himself uninvited to a planned reunion of the 2010 team because of his incendiary Twitter comments on politics and gender. But for a few months in what became a World Series championship season, Huff’s persona underwent a powerful, legitimate makeover. For the first time in his career, he felt welcome. Teammates wanted to know his good side, and it slowly emerged. His quirky sense of ... (full story at link)

The paper says the book is a work "mixing the deeply emotional with the highly technical, presented with the kind of sensitive, authoritative touch readers came to expect from Ryan during her days as a columnist" and that Ryan worked on it for 10 years.


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Further Reading:

Edison on Social Molecules:   offlinereport.net

Social Molecules with Sheryl Crow:   offlinereport.net





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.