Are you not making some implicit assumptions in this article - that the effect of someone like Inge will be spread across all players - which seem unlikely. If the clubhouse chemistry stuff is true, there's probably a disproportionate effect on younger players (perhaps meaning Inge was less valuable to the Tigers, who, I suspect, were significantly older than the 2012 As). It's also likely that different players work well with some colleagues and not others - some players will respond much better than others to a big, extrovert personality, others to someone who gets really into the technical side of things and so on. Given that, I'm not sure that the approach you've taken here is likely to yield positive results.

Thoughtful piece. Probably an impossible-to-quantify subject, but worth the effort.

In the 2010 THT Annual, I did something similar (not in terms of the math!) in which I looked at players whose teams had most outperformed expectations. I did this several ways:

- Their teams' Pythagorean variances over their careers (Ruben Sierra is a great clubhouse presence by that measure)

- Their teams improved the most compared to the year before the player joined the team (All sorts of biases, but Dennis Cook), and

- Their teammates most outperformed their projected WSAB totals (previous three years regressed). Smokey Joe Wood and Mort Cooper were the men.

I called it Luck, but who knows? Maybe Smokey Joe Wood was a great clubhouse presence.

Any notion to adjust for Inge's personality only being in Oakland for part of the season and not the full 162 game schedule? Maybe there is a 120 game cliff and on game 121 Inge becomes unbarable and annoying. Or just his lack of production makes other players feel better about their failure.

I liked the cardboard cutout angle: how a player's positive clubhouse influence must be measured against the positive influence that would replace him if he weren't there.

On the other hand, you might argue that the job of the coaching staff is to make Inge's positive influence unnecessary. The more that a coaching staff fails to provide a positive clubhouse, the more a player like Inge has an opportunity to fill the breach. In other words, a positive clubhouse guy is going to have more impact on a poorly coached team* than on a well-coached team.

*From a human resources perspective, not an in-game tactics perspective.

First, I most of us scoff about chemistry, but In my experience at a variety of non-baseball workplaces, I know there are people that can have positive or negative effects on the performance of colleagues. There are people who make other people better. there are people who make other people worse. It stands to reason that this happens in baseball. It probably really helps with some younger players.

That said, it will be hard to measure, and limited. I always want to say to someone arguing for good clubhouse/chemistry players, that perhaps they are a undervalued market ripe for exploitation--"Think, if you build a whole team of people like Skip Schumaker, David Eckstein, Ty Wigginton, and Brandon Inge, how great it would be. I mean, if they each add 5 wins with their personalities, if you get 20 of those guys, they'd be an unstoppable juggernaut of optimistic, winning, playing-the-game-the-right-way, good work habit personalities.

Is there some advantage to be gained by looking for the mirror image of good clubhouse guys? If there is a quantifiable effect to be found for positive clubhouse influences, it is natural to conclude that there is also a quantifiable negative effect for moody jerks. And voila, the sample size just doubled. Perhaps start with Albert Belle and work from there.

I've also seen firsthand how one jerk on a team isn't pleasant, but it is manageable. But put two jerks on a team and they feed off each other and pretty soon your team is split into two factions. Perhaps another possibility is that you need two clubhouse guys - both Inge and Gomes are necessary, sort of like a baseball version of the Wonder Twins (space monkey optional).

I don't know about Brandon's clubhouse presence being worth 10 wins but I do know his PR guy is by far the best in the business. This guy is the definition of a replacement level player but still gets ink like he's a perennial all star.

Brandon's excellence with the glove and struggles with the bat and strike zone are well reported, what's less reported is that he pitched a fit in the media about switching to third when the tigers signed Pudge then threw another fit when asked to go back to catcher later in his career (this time the fit resulting in the team caving). Perhaps there is such a thing as a 10 win clubhouse guy, but this hypothetical player would not object to a position switch for the good of the team.

The "Brandon Inge is a great guy" meme is an urban legend started by the Detroit media to cover up the fit about the move to third because the thin skinned Detroit management ant stand to have any controversey or criticism reported about its team. When a player struggles it can be pointed out only if balanced with comments that he's "pressing" and that "he's a really nice guy". Most of the comments about Inge's "good character" are akin to the comment that a blind date has a really good personality. I remember saying at one time, I'm tired of hearing about all these nice guys who aren't any good. I'd rather have some assholes who can play. A week later they traded for Gary Sheffield. Be careful what you wish for...