Parity Is the Reward for Having Incentives to Lose

To be honest, I didn’t want to write about the “tanking” story anymore. After Buster Olney and Jayson Stark both wrote extensively about the issue in December and January, I published something of a rebuttal, and since then, follow-up discussions haven’t proven particularly useful, as both sides seem pretty entrenched in their interpretations. Olney and Stark are firmly in the camp that this is a huge systematic problem for Major League Baseball, and others — such as Joel Sherman — have also published pieces suggesting that MLB needs to intervene, so this issue isn’t going away.

Yesterday, Stark wrote another piece on the issue, soliciting comments from Tony Clark on whether the MLBPA is going to make this an issue in the CBA. Clark was diplomatic, keeping his options open, but didn’t really say anything particularly newsworthy. But there was an interesting comment in Stark’s column, from Stark himself, that I think is worth discussing.

The real issue ought to center on the system itself. If the system in place in this sport — because of the current draft rules, signing pools, international signing structure, etc. — is creating incentives for teams to lose, then baseball needs to fix that.

And if that system is creating incentives for teams not just to lose but also to lose a lot, then baseball really, really needs to fix that.

We can debate the magnitude of the incentives, and how vociferously teams are responding to those incentives, but one thing should be inarguable: there absolutely are rewards for losing in Major League Baseball. The worse you are, the better the draft picks you receive, and the more money you get allocated to spend both in the draft and internationally. If you’re really terrible, you get better access to young talent than if you’re just ordinarily bad.

Of course, these aren’t new incentives. The amateur draft was put in place in 1965, so teams have been rewarded for accumulating losses for 50 years. For the last five decades, baseball has rewarded losing by offering the best high school and college players to the worst teams, using the draft to promote competitive balance. And in many cases, repetitive high picks helped push franchises from miserable positions to contenders in fairly short order. The Rays landed Evan Longoria and David Price in successive drafts, then went to the World Series in 2008, the first of five 90-win seasons in six years. The Nationals got Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper in 2009 and 2010, then won 98 games in 2012, and have been a contender ever since.

Stockpiling draft picks is no guarantee of success, of course, but MLB saw the draft as one of the primary ways to give losing teams a chance to get back to the winning side of things, and instituted the bonus-pool system to remedy the fact that winning teams were getting too many elite talents in the draft by selecting “hard-sign” players who fell to the later picks because of their bonus demands. And because the international system was essentially the wild west, teams with money to spend found ways to win and load up on young talent simultaneously. The current pool-allocation systems were instituted in order to try and limit the ability of the highest-revenue teams to build impregnable juggernauts, and strengthen the draft’s ability to funnel top talent to losing teams.

The primary argument for rewarding losing — which isn’t a new concept — is to improve competitive balance. And perhaps not coincidentally, MLB is experiencing unprecedented levels of parity at this moment. In fact, Jayson Stark writes an annual article during the Super Bowl week promoting baseball’s competitive balance. This is from Stark’s most recent piece on MLB’s parity, published January 30th.

Time to use another Super Bowl as an excuse to write maybe my favorite piece of the entire year — the one in which I get to hold that (cough, cough) paragon of parity, the NFL, up to the blinding light of reality and find … (gasp) … that pretty much everything the NFL has worked so tirelessly to make you believe (that every darned team has a chance to win every darned year) is a bigger myth than the Loch Ness Monster. Whoah. Who knew?

But, meanwhile, unbeknownst to humankind (or at least the portion of humankind that doesn’t read the MLB page on ESPN.com), it’s actually baseball that has created a playing field on which just about everyone has a shot to live the postseason dream.

Imagine that.

Stark goes on to recount many of the ways in which baseball’s playing field is significantly more level than football, and how the same teams don’t get to win every year in baseball anymore. That used to be true, but as Stark has been pointing out for years, that has ceased to be true, and now baseball is leading the way among the major American sports in terms of competitive balance.

These two ideas — parity and tanking — touch on two sides of the same coin. For several decades, MLB has worked to give losing teams larger advantages in order to keep the game from repeating the dynasty eras where a few teams won almost every year. Now, for whatever reason, the narrative is turning against competitive balance, arguing that the systems that give a leg up to losing teams are a significant problem that need to be addressed post-haste. The reality is that the league has to choose one priority or the other; MLB can either reduce the incentives for losing, or they can continue to promote competitive balance, but they can’t really do both at the same time.

If you don’t like teams being able to stockpile high draft picks — and most of the suggested fixes have centered around that particular idea — then the alternative downside is longer turn-around times, with franchises stuck in the mud for extended periods of time. Maybe that’s preferable to some, and maybe they’d argue that baseball is better off with a bunch of teams acting like the Rockies, winning 70-80 games every year without ever really committing to a rebuild.

But I don’t know any Rockies fans who are happy with the Rockies path, and I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that the game as a whole would be better off with more teams following their lead. Sure, Rockies fans got to watch Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez over the last few years, and they didn’t have endure any 100-loss seasons, but they haven’t had a winning season since 2010, and they aren’t particularly close to having one in 2016, unless a lot of things go right. And still, they’re being lumped into the group of six “tanking” teams, despite the fact that they’ve continually held onto their best players for too long, and just spent the offseason loading up on veteran relievers.

The argument for reducing the rewards of losing is also an argument for reducing competitive balance in Major League Baseball. If you make it harder for losing teams to get better players, then losing teams are going to stay losing teams for longer. We can’t celebrate parity and decry the incentives to lose at the same time, because the rewards for losing are part of the system that create parity in the first place.

MLB has always had rewards for losing. Every sport with a draft has rewards for losing. If there’s a productive conversation to be had about the magnitude of the incentives, and whether there’s a better way to balance competing issues, then by all means, let’s have that conversation. But to simply state that any incentives that reward losing are a de facto problem that need to be fixed? Well, life just isn’t that simple.