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Joe Cowley of the Chicgao Sun-Times worries that the White Sox have become boring:
The ''Captain Morgan'' home-run pose is gone, disappearing from the South Side when Nick Swisher was traded to the New York Yankees in November.
No longer heard in the clubhouse is Juan Uribe calling Mark Buehrle ''Bailey'' because that was the only way Uribe could pronounce his name. Or Uribe calling his teammates ''white people'' because, for the most part, he didn't know their names. Absent from postgame on-camera interviews are the shaving-cream pies, courtesy of backup catcher Toby Hall.
Frankly, for the first time in the Ozzie Guillen era, the White Sox are a rather boring group -- a swaggerless collection of mostly choirboys. Does that translate to losses on the field? At least one player thinks it might.
Chemistry is a funny thing. When a team is winning, characters like Swisher, Uribe and Hall are said to add "swagger" -- a horribly overused and ultimately meaningless term the Miami Hurricane football team will have to answer for introducing one day. When a team is losing, those same characters are said to be "distractions" or worse. Likewise, when a serious, veteran-laden team like the Jermaine Dye/Paul Konerko/Jim Thome White Sox are winning, they're considered "professionals," and when they're losing, well, they "lack that certain swagger."
In other words, in the absence of a truly distracting force like a mid-2008 Manny Ramirez, a team's chemistry is almost always a retrospective application based on wins and losses, rendering the concept rather meaningless in my mind.
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Sox fans wipe their backsides with Cowley's 'journalism'. The team is loose and they're playing well enough despite the pile of injuries they're buried under. GO SOX!
The problem with chemistry is not that it doesn't exist, its that noone outside of the game, from the fans to the journalists, can really get a good grasp of it. Even if we knew that a team had better chemistry than another, it would be impossible to quantify, and probably means very little in terms of wins and losses over a season. So the best strategy is to dismiss these articles, as you have, and focus on what we do know.