I spent the past 10 years researching the phenomenon of team chemistry in sports. I learned that the human brain has quadrupled in size over 3 million years, growing so large not so much to house our intellect but to accommodate our massive amount of social wiring. For humans, relationships are everything. We are pack animals, truly interdependent beings, made whole from the outside in, relying on others to stir our emotions and boost our energy. This, I came to understand, is the foundation of team chemistry.

Joan Ryan 

I poured all of this into a book, which I wrote alone in my office day after solitary day.

The irony did not escape me.

My publication date was set for April 28, when I’d finally get out among people, appearing at bookstores, talking with interviewers, signing books. But the coronavirus swept it away before it began. Shelter-in-place meant I was more isolated than ever.

Then in late March an email arrived from an author I know. He and three others had hatched the idea that all of us with baseball books coming out during the pandemic ought to band together and help promote each other’s work. They called it The Pandemic Baseball Book Club.

It seemed a bit naïve. Writers are pretty normal people until our books come out. Then it’s the Hunger Games. The battle for every radio interview and magazine write-up is relentless and demoralizing. We obsessively check not only our own Amazon rankings but our competitors’, secretly harboring Gore Vidal’s bitter admission: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.’’

Still, I joined. Maybe some publicity would fall my way. Almost everyone in the club was a stranger to me and to each other. By profession, the original four were a biology professor, an illustrator and two sportswriters. A website went up. Accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook were launched. The illustrator-author designed a Pandemic Baseball Book Club logo. More baseball authors joined — who knew there were so many? — ranging from a law professor to the editor of the Paris Review. Six were first-time authors. Some had contracts with the Big Five publishers. One was self-published. They lived in Washington, Tennessee, New York, West Virginia, California.

We were encouraged to re-tweet each other’s posts. Some did, some didn’t. There was a Google doc with everyone’s contact info, but only a handful took advantage, mostly the four founders.

A few weeks into the venture, a Zoom meeting was scheduled. For the first time we could see and hear one another. Mark was at his cramped newspaper office in Rockaway Beach, Anika in her sun-lit artist’s studio in Nashville, Jason against a backdrop of crammed bookshelves and A’s memorabilia in Berkeley. I could see DB’s endearing way of squinting his eyes when he talked and John’s nonplussed calm in repeatedly re-positioning his phone as he hurtled down the freeway. A bit of everyone filtered through our laptop screens, lightly tugging us toward each other.

Over the next week I noticed an increase in retweets. Emails from fellow clubbies began to arrive, and phone calls, too, with ideas for each other’s books. We were shifting as a group from using the club solely as a vehicle to promote ourselves to genuinely rooting for each other. And our books were attracting attention.

“When you spend all that time working towards publication day only to see it wiped away, it’s a gut punch,’’ said Mitchell Nathanson, author of Bouton. “I think I would have given up if not for the camaraderie of the group. In fact, I know I would have.’’

I’d often remark to friends how unusual it was for competitive writers to band together like this. Then one day, it dawned on me that actually it wasn’t unusual at all. Alone and anxious in pandemic isolation, we 20 or so strangers bent toward our most foundational human instinct: We found ourselves a tribe.

Joan Ryan is an author and former San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist. She is the author of the new book “Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry’’ (Little, Brown).