We all work better in a positive workplace, we all contribute or produce more. How that is measured is really problematic for a baseball team – do we measure it in wins? how enthusiastic a player is about doing PR? and how do we KNOW when there is a positive clubhouse environment, and. who has contributed to that? beat writers, as mccarthy notes, will know way better than national writers…but even they only get what they get from the guys willing to talk about it.
a positive workplace is something every good manager should strive for, if for nothing else than to make managing employees easier. more importantly, though, it does affect productivity if you keep assholes out of the workplace and it helps people have better, less crappy lives. i don’t think you get to add it to a player’s WAR or consider it for awards determinations… but each team’s general manager and team manager should be looking at it.
for an enlightening read on the impact of positive vs. negative people in the workplace – and the value of a positive workplace, read The No Assholes Rule. it does include some quantitative analysis, as i recall, but again, i think a baseball team is going to be impervious to that kind of thing. it’s not for us to evaluate or reward, but for managers to keep an eye on.

Kind of like saying Roy Hallday is RG III

In short, Young was a good MLB player for a decade, but he was rarely as good as the narrative suggested….and the narrative wasn’t Young’s fault.

Of course, there are exceptions in the other direction, a parent/spouse/child dying may negatively affect focus/performance over the short term…but these are guys that have so much ability to focus already, it is unlikely that a happy locker room leads to anything improvement on the field.

Baseball isn’t a good parallel to the job place. There are few jobs in which you are constantly motivated to excel because if you do not, you will be replaced. Any analogous effect of contentedness on productivity/efficiency in a “normal” job is already accounted for by the fact that if you aren’t good at your job in baseball, you won’t have it for long.

I saw the Milkmen back in the day….

And people who proclaim good people don’t have a thing to do with winning baseball games expose why no one really considers the statisticians to be so smart to begin with. The fact that the smart kids haven’t figured out a way to quantify something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The smart kids who fail to recognize this are in a different set, the one called douchebags.

/throws dead kennedys

Tim Tebow has never produced at an adequate professional level for more than 1 or 2 games his whole career.

I think a more apt football comparison would be London Fletcher or Takeo Spikes.

doesn’t have a thing to do with winning baseball games, though. the good face doesn’t win a game just by being a good face, the good face has to produce, too.

FWIW: my favorite song on it is “Add it Up”