How to win Teammate Chain

Teammate Chain hands you two players and asks you to connect them through people who shared a roster. It sounds like a memory test, and partly it is. Mostly, though, it’s a search problem, and a few habits make the search much shorter.

Think in team-seasons, not players

Every link in a chain is really a single team in a single season: the 2004 Red Sox, the 1996 Bulls. Two players connect only if they were both on that roster in the same year. So when you look at an end of the chain, don’t ask “who did he play with?” Ask “which teams was he on, and in which years?” Then picture each of those rosters.

Tap any player card in the game and it shows that player’s team history. Use it. A player you know as a Yankee might have spent one season in Kansas City, and that one season might be your bridge.

Look for the rookie and the veteran

The hardest pairs are the ones from different eras: a 1980s star and someone who debuted last year. You can’t jump decades in one link. Rosters do it for you, though, because every roster mixes old players with young ones.

The move is to find a veteran late in his career who played with a rookie early in his. Each of those pairings carries the chain forward fifteen or twenty years. It’s exactly how the shortest chain from baseball’s first season to today works: Nolan Ryan, in his final seasons with the 1991 Rangers, played with a 19-year-old Ivan Rodriguez. Rodriguez, near the end of his career on the 2005 Tigers, played with a 22-year-old Justin Verlander making his first starts. Two links take you from a pitcher who debuted in 1966 to one who was still pitching in 2026. The full chain from 1871 needs only 9.

Use the journeymen

The best middle links are rarely stars. They’re the players who changed teams every year or two: relief pitchers, backup quarterbacks, veteran defensemen. Every move put them on a new roster full of new teammates. In our baseball data, Rich Hill shared a roster with 944 different players, more than anyone else in the game.

You don’t need to remember these exact names. Just remember the type: if you’re stuck, think of the well-traveled role player who passed through both teams. The full top ten for every sport is a good list to skim.

Build from both ends

The chain grows from either end, and you can switch sides whenever you like. Use that. If the start player is a 1990s star and the end player is a current one, work forward from the old end and backward from the new one until they meet in the middle, usually somewhere in the 2000s.

A good rule is to add players from whichever end you know better first. One confident link that moves the chain ten years is worth more than a shaky guess at a direct connection.

Don’t spend strikes on hunches

Three players who don’t connect and the game ends. There’s no limit on how long the chain can get, so a sure link that adds a step is always better than a gamble that might save one. Guess only when you’re confident the two shared a roster. If you’re 60% sure, look for someone you’re 95% sure of instead.

Use the team-season endpoints

Some days one end is a whole roster, like “the 2015 Blue Jays”, instead of a player. Anyone who played for that team that season connects to it. These are easier than they look: think of the most famous player on that team, and you have a whole season’s worth of teammates to work with.

How small is the world, really?

Smaller than you’d guess. In our baseball data, 21,482 players across 3,135 team-seasons form one connected web, and nobody is more than 7 links from Tommy John. On average, any player is about 3.2 links from him. The other sports are tighter still. We wrote up who sits at the center of each sport if you’re curious.

So when a pair looks impossible, it almost never is. Two or three good links in the middle are usually all it takes.