MLB Owners Concerned About Tanking

[ndistops]

I'm not the first person to suggest it, but there's been the idea of giving the 1st pick to the team that is the one who just missed the playoffs.

In baseball?

That's more of a basketball idea, I suppose. But it could discourage tanking if the next best thing to making the playoffs is narrowly missing them instead of putting an awful product on the field.

It's probably a better idea in baseball than basketball. In baseball any playoff team could win it all. In basketball you have 0 chance as an 8 seed, so any smart team in that spot would probably try to fall out of the playoffs.

I'm in favor of the 'equal chance for everyone who misses the playoffs' idea, certainly in basketball, and there's probably a case for it now in baseball.

[Freed Roger]

Which teams are tanking this year? Seems like tanking may be up a bit.

[JoeMcKim]

I find it worse when teams like the Marlins win the WS then follow it up that very offseason by having a fire sale.

[Hoot45]

Which teams are tanking this year? Seems like tanking may be up a bit.

Padres opening day payroll is $68 million and $31.5 million of it is actually going to players not on the active roster. They have three Rule 5 pickups on their opening day roster including our own Allen Cordoba who hasn't even played above rookie ball. They could easily lose 100 games.

[dmarx114]

Back in the day, didn't they just call it re-building?

[pioneer98]

Back in the day, didn't they just call it re-building?

To me, what the White Sox are doing is what I'd call "rebuilding" - trading some of your top players for top prospects that are pretty close to being MLB-ready. Then hanging onto good players like Quintana that should still be around when the rebuild is done. A rebuild may not get results the very next season, but should within 2 seasons, or 3 seasons tops.

A lot of teams are not trading for prospects like that, and don't hang onto any players like Quintana, either. They are planning to lose really, really badly for 2 years or more on purpose. Rather than going after prospects that are nearly MLB ready, they are losing to get high draft picks that they use to draft players that could take 3 or 4 years to even reach MLB. You can argue that tanking is just a different way to rebuild, but planning to lose 90+ games for 2 or 3 straight years is bad for the game IMO. The NBA has a lottery to reduce the incentive to do this kind of thing, even for 1 year. I don't think it would be bad if MLB did something to reduce the incentive to lose on purpose.

[ndistops]

Back in the day, didn't they just call it re-building?

To me, what the White Sox are doing is what I'd call "rebuilding" - trading some of your top players for top prospects that are pretty close to being MLB-ready. Then hanging onto good players like Quintana that should still be around when the rebuild is done. A rebuild may not get results the very next season, but should within 2 seasons, or 3 seasons tops.

A lot of teams are not trading for prospects like that, and don't hang onto any players like Quintana, either. They are planning to lose really, really badly for 2 years or more on purpose. Rather than going after prospects that are nearly MLB ready, they are losing to get high draft picks that they use to draft players that could take 3 or 4 years to even reach MLB. You can argue that tanking is just a different way to rebuild, but planning to lose 90+ games for 2 or 3 straight years is bad for the game IMO. The NBA has a lottery to reduce the incentive to do this kind of thing, even for 1 year. I don't think it would be bad if MLB did something to reduce the incentive to lose on purpose.

And it's clearly working fabulously.