The Tanking Problem (from a Nats fan, of course)

As college basketball winds down and baseball starts up, I find myself thinking more and more about winning and losing, in general and specific terms. Mostly, I’m worried about tanking, or the idea that you gotta lose a lot to eventually win a lot. As a resigned Nationals fan, that idea hits close to home. Here’s why tanking sucks, why it exists, and why it shouldn’t exist. 

A little preface, drawing directly from my experience with college sports. No, tanking isn’t a problem in college, but the need for sustained success at all times, in any form, is obvious in college, so I’ll use it as an example here. 

The Virginia Cavaliers are good at basketball, year in and year out. You can debate with me until the sun explodes whether or not UVA was elite this year, but you can’t question the results. The Wahoos finished 25-8, won a share of the regular season ACC title, and made the conference championship game. They earned every bit of the 4 seed they received on Selection Sunday. At its best, UVA was as good as any team in the country.

They lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, yet again, to the Furman Paladins, a 13-seed making its first appearance in the tournament in 40-ish years. The game was winnable, of course, and I refuse to break down the ending of that game, lest I invite more unwarranted criticism of Kihei Clark. The point here is that the ending of this season, accompanied by how fans felt about the quality of this team at certain points of the season, created a bit of conflict (for me, at least). Since 2018, UVA has lost in the first round of the tournament 3 times, each time as the significantly higher seed. 2019, of course, brought us a championship, which I don’t think anybody would trade for anything. The primary point here is that even though the Hoos ended the season in heartbreaking fashion, they still had a largely successful season. Winning the championship in 2019 did not harm their future success; rather, it boosted their reputation and gave them incentive to continue winning. 

Let me draw a comparison. The Washington Nationals won the World Series in 2019, their first in franchise history, just like UVA. The difference lies in the aftermath. Virginia has failed to advance past the first round, but they have fielded competitive, tournament-focused teams. Essentially, UVA hasn’t “tanked”, which is probably due to the many differences between college basketball and professional baseball. The Nationals have tanked, selling off every promising, expensive star they had. The result is a few years of guaranteed losing. They aren’t doing this alone; teams like the Pirates and Athletics are also in full-scale tank mode.

So why is tanking a problem in professional leagues but not in college sports? The answer, as you probably already know, lies in incentivization. Professional sports incentivize losing through the amateur draft: the more you lose, the earlier you get to pick your players. College sports are the opposite, at least in the most direct possible comparison, which is the recruitment cycle/transfer portal. Lose most of your games, and no prospective pro wants to come to your school. Thus, every school is motivated to field a competitive team, year in and year out. 

I’ve questioned many times the futility of such a system in professional sports. It seems to be universally accepted as the best system, for some reason, and yet parity is nonexistent. In the MLB, payrolls range from $334.2 million (Mets) to $42.4 million (Athletics). Payroll isn’t the only indicator of a team’s desire to win, but it does the trick for the most part, as is obvious by the difference between the Mets, a perennial title contender, and the Athletics, a perennial basement dweller. There’s no real salary floor, besides the requirement that each team play each MLB player the league minimum, a comparatively-paltry number ~$700k a year. There’s no salary cap besides a luxury tax threshold, which billionaires committed to winning have no qualms about blowing past. 

So why do teams have to tank, if they’re owned by billionaires who want their teams to win? A few reasons. First and foremost, baseball is a business. If an owner doesn’t think his team has any chance of winning, he’s gonna spend as little money on it as possible. Losing teams aren’t profitable unless payroll is slashed significantly. Second, the draft. The MLB draft is anything but a sure bet. First-round, even first-overall picks don’t always pan out (looking at you, Mark Appel!) However, every draft has one or two players that are seen as relatively safe bets, and those players always go within the first few picks. Losing gives you a shot at those picks, albeit less guaranteed with the draft lottery now in pace. Players like Bryce Harper, Carlos Correa, Stephen Strasburg, Adley Rutschman, and Gerrit Cole all turned into legitimate superstar players with the potential to completely reverse the course of their team. Let’s look at Bryce.

The Nationals drafted Bryce a year after Stras, and he immediately lived up to the hype. He also walked following the 2018 season, signing a mega-deal with the Phillies. The Nationals got a few things out of Bryce. They got otherworldly production while he was on the team, and they got major entertainment value, which means more tickets sold and more money made. They didn’t get a postseason series win until the year after he left, but who cares? The Nationals were relevant again, and Bryce had a lot to do with it.

66% of all first round draft picks play in the major leagues. That percentage is probably higher when drafting first overall, but still: how can any team rely on the draft as a means to pull your club out of the weeds with a 66% success rate? That doesn’t even account for the productivity of that player, only if they even get an at-bat in the Majors. Yes, the draft is the most cost-effective way to acquire talent. Free agency, however, not only incentivizes spending on the team but also brings in players that are almost guaranteed to be productive. On the 2019 Nationals, for example, Ryan Zimmerman, Anthony Rendon, and Stephen Strasburg were by far the most impactful players the Nationals drafted themselves. Sure, we won a World Series, but to get those players Nationals fans had to suffer through years and years and years of complete failure. Only once those players had asserted themselves as solid starters did ownership begin to fully invest in the rest of the team, adding key pieces like Patrick Corbin and Max Scherzer. The free agency rental model is the reason teams like the Mets and Dodgers remain perennially competitive, and the Nationals’ unwillingness to pursue such a model is the reason they aren’t. 

You’re probably wondering what on earth I’m talking about at this point. Well, the bottom line is that the draft, as it stands right now, is ridiculously loser-friendly. Yes, I know that’s how it was created. Yes, I know we shouldn’t just give the good teams the best picks because that doesn’t support parity. The problem lies in the fact that the very worst teams get the very best picks. There needs to be a fine balance between encouraging teams to win ballgames and produce competitive teams, and still giving middling/bad teams a chance to revive themselves. The draft should cater to those teams stuck in limbo, those who missed the playoffs by a relatively small margin that can’t compete with the big-market teams. The draft should NOT cater to the teams with no desire to win at all. I’m not saying baseball should be just like college sports, but I think too much emphasis is placed on tanking, which should not be the only viable strategy for a team looking to create long-term success. 

The detriments of tanking are obvious if you’re a fan of any team in that unfortunate position. The Nationals won’t be competitive or interesting for a few years, bare minimum. The Pirates already haven’t been competitive or interesting for many years, accompanied by the Royals, Tigers, Orioles, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Athletics, and Marlins. That’s 9 teams, almost a third of the league. All of those teams were not legitimate playoff contenders at the same time. That’s bad for the fans of those teams, but the major problem is that that’s really, really bad for the sport as a whole. It’s hard to become invested in a bad team just because they play near where you live. That means incredible seasons of baseball are completely ignored by entire fanbases and regions that have no skin in the game. 

If the MLB is serious about growing the game, rule changes and the WBC are a great place to start. But increased parity needs to be a priority, starting with a salary floor, changes to the draft, and potentially a salary cap. Let me know what you think; maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m just annoyed as a Nats fan, but the fans of teams like the Pirates and the Royals deserve more. 

Frustrated,

Emory