Collaboration in sports is usually a good thing. Just about every team has a huge amount of talent in the locker room, and often it’s chemistry that separates champs from chumps.
How often do you hear of a team making a late season acquisition of a player who has won championships on different teams? It’s not often the most talented guy available; in fact, more often that not, it’s a just-above average player who’s an excellent “clubhouse guy.” He’s a natural facilitator—he keys great collaboration and he helps get people to perform.
(And conversely, you only have to look as far as my beloved Wrigley Field to see two cases of the opposite of great clubhouse guys-- Milton Bradley and Carlos Zambrano--people whose poisonous attitudes have been able to take down a team all by themselves.)
So when is collaboration a bad thing in sports? When it comes to building baseball stadiums.
The interesting thing about ballparks, compared to football fields or basketball courts, is that no playing fields are the same. Football fields are 100 yards long, basketball courts are 94 feet from end to end and 50 feet from side to side. Baseball stadiums are all wonderfully uniquely different.
This was brought to my attention by some smart folks at snippets.com who used Google Maps to trace the shapes of all uncovered Major League baseball parks. The variance in shapes and sizes are truly amazing. While some teams actually do play on baseball diamonds, others play on baseball rhombuses and baseball trapeziods.
I won’t rant about this being another reason baseball is the best, most interesting and unique sport on the planet (despite most humans being unable to make it through more than an inning or two without going go get something to eat.)
I will suggest that the very best cultures allow for individuality to thrive even when great collaboration makes the difference between success and failure.
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