here’s the article : MSN
On some of it I don’t think its as much as planned tanking as cheap or not superrich ownership who wont/cant spend the money they need to be competitive ………
And come on I’ve never seen an entirely competitive league … divisions where the champs were decided by a game in a half sure but there’s always been 1-4 teams that were 60 games back by the all star break even in the 20s-70s “golden age”
I mean I can see where a new gm comes to a team and thinks " This team is utter shit and well they might win enough to keep attendance going and I can try a few guys but lets just start planning for next year" But this guy is claiming that teams aren’t calling up talent from the minors on purpose ………
Several things. Tanking is much less of a benefit in baseball. One player can make a huge difference in basketball – think Lebron James and compare the Cavaliers this year and last. Furthermore, it’s obviously much easier to evaluate the talent in the basketball draft. Top draft picks come in and play right away. In baseball, it’s usually several years, and some highly touted picks never really make it.
It certainly is true that teams that aren’t going to make the playoffs trade talent at the end of July for prospects, but I woudln’t call that tanking, and I think most fans would agree with it.
Another thing teams do is don’t bring up talent as fast as fans would like. But it really is much harder to hit in the majors than in AAA. Furthermore, the players the the fans are all excited about are have very good stats so the chances are they’ve been lucky as well as good and you’ll see regression to the mean when they’re brought up.
Almost certainly teams do leave some players in the minors because time on the major league roster determines how long before the player can become a free agent. But again, if you’re a small market club, this action is likely only giving up playing time of future stars now for playing time later, and generally that time at age 25-28 is better than 22-25.
There’s too many degrees to make it a simple yes/no.
On one level you have teams like the Pirates, who can’t or won’t spend the big money to play the free-agent market and let their best talent go when they can’t control the player’s salary anymore.
Then you have situations like when the Marlins won the 1997 World Series. Just five days later, owner Wayne Huizenga starting dumping talent, including Moises Alou, Robb Nen, Devon White, Jeff Conine, Kevin Brown, Ed Vosberg, Dennis Cook and Kurt Abbott. After wringing out as much value as he could, Huizenga sold off the shell of the franchise after the 1998 season.
But the Cubs and the Astros were basically .500 teams with enough money to spend to refresh their talent and remain competitive every season. Instead they didn’t even try. That isn’t just being cheap, that’s a deliberate strategy for tanking.
If you mean what the Philadelphia 76ers did a few years ago, there’s just not the same motivation to tank in baseball. Baseball has different draft probabilities.
Mr. Gasper doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. To use his pictorial example, the Blue Jays, they’re not trying to lose to get a higher draft pick; they’re dumping old guys who are expensive and won’t help them win in the future. He uses the dispatch of Kendrys Morales as an example of them not trying to win, but it is plainly obvious to anyone who has ever watched baseball and who has seen Kendrys Morales play baseball that the Jays got rid of him because he doesn’t help them win. The Blue Jays aren’t cutting salary because they don’t want to have good players, they’re cutting salary because their expensive players were all old, mostly not very good, and have zero chance of being on the next Toronto championship team. No other realistic approach would have made them a winning team as soon as this one. None.
That is generally true of almost ALL the teams he talks about. A team that is simply doomed to go 75-87 has no reason to hold on to an expensive 33-year-old player to scratch out those 75 wins. Fans don’t really give a shit if the team goes 71-91 instead. Dump him and give playing time to the kid who will help you go 95-67 in a few years.
well going by the nba version it means you make a conscious decision to make no improvements on a last place team and you almost encourage the losing by not giving a damn and saying well at least we’ll get first place in the draft …….
everyones answers is pretty much what my lines of thinking were …and the writer of the article was fulla bs ……
While the concept of the sabermetric WAR, or “Wins Above Replacement” measure, is somewhat abstract, it plays into what RickJay is saying.
Conceptually, a player’s WAR rating captures how many additional games his team wins over the course of a 162-game season, because he’s playing, as opposed to if he wasn’t on the team, and his roster spot was occupied by a “replacement player” (i.e., a player that the team calls up from their minor league system).
A good (but not All-Star level) starting player in MLB typically has a WAR of between 2 and 4; an All-Star would probably have a WAR of more like 5 or 6. Thus, subtracting one expensive starter from a mediocre team, as RickJay notes, probably only costs that team a couple of wins, versus plugging in the young guy from the minors. (And, if the “replacement player” happens to be one of the team’s best prospects, he, himself, might well be better-than-replacement level.)
The perception that tanking is occurring is almost always exaggerated if one looks at how fans behave. For many fans, wishing for losses in order to acquire a better draft pick and/or future prospects is a way of maintaining interest to get through a season and quite a few think they know what is best every step of the way. The answers here have basically covered how it normally works with buying and selling in the market, so I’ll give a couple examples of how out of hand fans can get.
The Brewers hired a new GM after 2015 who quickly overhauled quite a bit of the roster and nobody was expecting the team to contend for awhile. In the middle of 2017 I remember a fan grumbling about one of the offseason trades that had been made. He was upset that a relief pitcher had been traded for Travis Shaw, who upon getting the playing time at the majors became an above average infielder. Shaw wasn’t young enough to be seen by this person as a piece for the future and was helping the team win too many games, so this could only be rectified by trading him. The particular vision of longer term rebuilding project a fan like this coveted centering around stockpiling prospects with high ceilings and youth was not what was to be. The Brewers overachieved in 2017 winning 86 games and became a contender with Shaw the next year. If this author is for real, I’m guessing he was lamenting the Brewers’ new direction 2-3 years ago.
It was an atypical path to revitalization for that to happen so soon. The point is fans get tunnel vision where they do not see the range of other possibilities. When the Raptors hired Masai Ujiri in 2013 and he said he would take time to evaluate the team, not many could have expected what the next 6 years had in store. The majority assumed there would be tanking or some sort of rebuild. On the Bucks also at this time, the team was awful by sheer accident and ended up with the worst record. Giannis was a rookie and a few months in he was quoted as saying how much he hated to lose. There were literally fans who thought that Giannis was moronic for this (because he wasn’t lusting after their goal for that season of losing as much as possible and to them he was oblivious).
I have sometimes witnessed baseball fans rooting hard for their team to lose in September and it is strange. It’s not affecting your odds nearly as much as it would in basketball.
At a certain point in September, the kind of fans I’m talking about would advocate throwing together lineups filled with the less formidable Sept. call-ups and pitching rotations even if it may be at the expense of some player development and evaluation that could be meaningful.
I’m a Mariners fan (as much as I’m a fan of any baseball team; I’m not a baseball guy but they’re the only team I follow at all). I’ve been hoping for years that they’d rebuild because what they had wasn’t working. They were just good enough that every year they seemed like they’d have a chance to make the playoffs but would end up failing. It wasn’t working and something needed to change.
This year they did that. They dumped their veterans and got young. They traded to build up their farm system (which was considered the worst in MLB). I figured they were going to have a few years st least where instead of being “good enough to tease you” they would be just plain bad. I wasn’t rooting for them to be bad, and tank for better draft picks. I just accepted it as reality.
Somehow they started this year good, and at 8-2 they have the best record in baseball. I don’t expect that to last; to me that’s like watching a bad NFL team win its first two games of the season and think they’re going to the Super Bowl. I expect them to come back down to Earth eventually. But I’m not mad at them and rooting for them to lose. To me that would be stupid. I agree with sacrificing the present to be greater in the future but that never requires you to lose games.
Even in the NFL, what good does it do you to tank and get the #1 draft pick if he ends up being Ryan Leaf? The draft is too risky in any sport to bank everything on. You need a comprehensive plan for a rebuild.
It’s also worth noting that some of the players who would have to “tank” are also playing for that one last contract before they have to step away from the game. And they have to go by recent stats to maximize their value. I’d imagine that they’re not all interested in “dumbing down” their season to let the organization grab a slightly higher draft pick than they would be in position to receive.
After all, some of these players are facing a contract that may have to last them the rest of their lives. And it’s gotta support them and their families.