Intangibles examines team chemistry, with help from Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent -

One of the glorious things about Joan Ryan’s new book is how often her interview subjects tell her that her premise is utter baloney.

Willie Mays scolds her.

“Chemistry? Chemistry. There’s no chemistry!”

Jeff Kent scoffs.

“Listen, the best players are some of the biggest pricks to ever play the game. The biggest assholes. Selfish. Greedy.”

Jim Leyland takes another puff from his cigarette.

“To me chemistry was a subject you took in school. … I had teams that’d go to chapel together every Sunday and couldn’t win a game. So that don’t mean shit to me. Forget chemistry out here.”

Ryan, a nationally award-winning journalist who is now a media consultant with the Giants, welcomes the skepticism. That’s the point of this whole enterprise, to sort through the fact and fiction of what locker-room camaraderie — or lack thereof — might mean to a team’s overall performance.

The book is called “Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry” and, improbably, this dive into a squishy-soft concept like togetherness most resembles the best works about the statistical revolution, like Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball” and Bill James’ magnificent “Baseball Abstracts.”

In his early days, James used to listen to baseball broadcasters spouting trusty axioms over the airwaves and wonder, “Is that actually true?” Then he spent his nightshifts as a security guard at the Stokely-Van Camp’s pork-and-beans cannery unearthing the data that flouted conventional wisdom.

Ryan does essentially the same thing here with team chemistry, looking for evidence — yes, evidence — that the age-old saws about the importance of unity and playing together are true. Did it actually matter? Plenty of infighting teams won big (like the Swinging A’s). Plenty of polite teams finished last (like Leo Durocher said).

What exactly is team chemistry? It’s a question Ryan had considered since covering a 1989 Giants team that reached the World Series with a collection of divergent personalities that would have made sense nowhere else on earth. (Ryan dedicated the book to Mike Krukow, whose voice in these pages helps recount several memorable behind-the-scenes clashes involving successful Giants teams of the late-’80s.)

Mercifully — for the sake of Mays, Kent, Leyland and the reader — this is not 264 pages about the power of halftime speeches or players bonding around a campfire. Ryan writes almost directly to chemistry skeptics and, as with “Moneyball,’’ the result is a book that could just as well be taught in business school.

Ryan interviewed athletes and front-office executives, yes, but also CEOs, business leaders, sociologists and neuroscientists in her quest to gain, she writes, “some insight into how we perform better or worse based on who we are around.”

It’s a sports book, but some of the most riveting scenes take place at mundane places like a university call center where students had part-time jobs calling alumni for donations. The group had hit a collective slump, so bosses tried all kinds of things to boost productivity: pay increases, promotions, recognition, food and breaks. All of those ideas tanked.

But Adam Grant, an organizational psychology professor at the Wharton School at Penn, had researched motivation in the workplace. He struck upon a better solution. As Ryan writes:

(Grant) invited one of the scholarship recipients to visit the call center and briefly tell the workers how the scholarship had affected his life and how much he appreciated what they were doing. A month later, the workers had spent 142 percent more time on the phone and brought in 171 percent more money. Grant repeated the experiment with other groups and saw greater results each time. “There was no added compensation for the harder work,’’ psychology professor Barry Schwartz observed, “just a deeper sense of purpose.”

“Intangibles” also leans heavily on lessons from the military. (Ryan’s research included a flight to Alexandria, Va., to interview retired general Stanley McChrystal, who wrote a 2015 bestseller called “Team of Teams.”)

As Ryan explains:

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.

Ultimately, what emerges is that almost everyone believes in some version of chemistry, even if they speak about it in different terms. It’s fun to listen in on Ryan’s conversations with Kent and Leyland because, the longer they go, the more each acknowledges how much he believes a connection with teammates matters — even if he doesn’t use the “chemistry” word.

Kent recalled a time one of his early Giants teammates, Orel Hershiser, drilled Álex Rodríguez with a pitch as unspoken retaliation for A-Rod wiping out Kent a day earlier.

“It’s something that I can’t quantify for you,’’ Kent said. “It’s not a state. But it’s a pride. The old cliché is, ‘I’m in the foxhole with you.’ It’s just an emotional attachment. Does it lead to an extra hit? I don’t know. But it can lead to this:

“If Orel’s pitching, I might not ask the coach to give me the day off. I might not stay out late at night. I might say you know what? My buddy Orel’s pitching tomorrow so I need to go prepare. You may have a little more of an aggressive attitude that could lead to more success.”

Both Bonds and Kent speak with remarkable candor about their highly functional contempt for one another. Together, they help stomp out the notion that chemistry means being BFFs.

“Why do you care that Jeff Kent is over there looking at properties for his hunting place? Who gives a crap?” Bonds says now. “When it came to game time, what name would you want on the back of the uniform of the guy playing second base? I want Jeff Kent.”

For more modern readers, Ryan also provides the riveting theater of two unlikely leaders — Pat Burrell and Aubrey Huff — ushering Tim Lincecum into a small office at the end of August 2010. Lincecum had lost all five starts that month as the Giants slipped six games out of first place.

Lincecum seemed to be tuning out his coaches and manager Bruce Bochy and ignored the suggestion that he improve his workout routine. As Ryan writes, “He had been so spectacularly successful his entire life that he seemed paralyzed by failure,” so the two veterans pulled him aside:

“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 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 Sept. 1, he shoved it up Colorado’s ass.”

There are also revealing passages about the Warriors’ calculated selflessness under coach Steve Kerr and the bonding of the U.S. women’s basketball team under a surprisingly ruthless Tara VanderVeer. If there’s a flaw in the book, it’s the dearth of football material. With a Bay Area bent, there was much to be learned from the 49ers dynasty, when coach Bill Walsh used to urge players to “play as an extension of each other. One heartbeat.”

But that’s a quibble with an otherwise extraordinary glimpse into leadership, teamwork and — for the rest of us — co-worker relationships.

With her exhaustive research and breezy prose, Ryan has created something unique and lasting. Any team looking for a good bonding exercise would be well served to propose “Intangibles” at the next locker room book club.

(Photo: Steven R. Schaefer / AFP via Getty Images)

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