The Diminishing (but Positive) Returns of Tanking
Before we get going, a heads up: this article is about a mathematical model that explains tanking. I’ll give you a preview. The way baseball is currently set up, it’s no surprise teams tank. If you want to fix that, the game’s competitive structure must change. I suggest a few ways to accomplish that change at the end of the article, but be warned: the bulk of this is a no-nonsense dissection of why teams keep tanking even as the returns go down. Personally, I think the game should make the changes I suggest, because the boom and bust cycle of team contention makes for a fraught fan experience. The way the game is set up now, however, it’s no surprise that teams do it.
The logic behind tanking is straightforward and solid. Being in the middle is the worst; there are no prizes for winning 85 games, flags fly forever, and so on and so forth. You’ve surely heard it enough times that you don’t need a repeat, but just for completeness’s sake, we’ll do it one more time.
By trading present concerns for future value, you make your team better in the future. As a byproduct of trading present concerns away, your major league roster gets bad — bad enough, hopefully, that you’ll move to the top of the draft. Additionally, with no pesky need to be competitive, you can use your major league roster to give borderline players extended tryouts. Hit on a few of them, and that’s even more tailwind for the future.
In essence, tanking is making a bet that taking a step back now will let you take two steps forward sometime in the future. Even if that isn’t the case, being quite bad for a while and then quite good for a while sure sounds better than being mediocre the whole time. Tanking works on both axes, which explains its continued appeal. Do you think your team will win something like 77 wins? Blow it up! 75 wins? Blow it up! 70 wins? You guessed it.
Tanking isn’t the only way to build a good roster. It’s not even the best way to build one. The best way is by building for the future and present at the same time. The Yankees and Dodgers, and to a lesser extent the Cardinals, Nationals, and Rays, are current exemplars of this model. If you start with a solid roster and manage player acquisition and development well, there’s no reason you need to take a step back, particularly if you can supplement unexpected holes with the money you bring in from all that winning you’re doing. Every team in baseball would prefer that model. If you’re starting with a 70-win husk, however, you can’t exactly start competing for division titles tomorrow.
Ten years ago, that was the end of the story. Zigging while the rest of baseball zags is a great way to get ahead, so long as zagging is a decent decision in a vacuum. As more and more teams tank, however, the equation starts to get murkier. Leaving aside the fact that it’s not great viewing, multiple tanking teams fight each other on many axes.
By selling off parts at the same time, they lower the return on those parts. By competing for spots in the draft, they make the expected draft returns of tanking lower. By both getting good sometime in the future, they lower the value of being good in the future — being the best team in the league is worth a heck of a lot more than being one of the two best teams in the league. The more teams that tank at once, the more these effects get magnified.
That’s all straightforward, but the quantitative value of these effects is less clear. I decided to construct an abstract framework to better understand how much worse tanking gets when multiple teams attempt it at the same time. I don’t claim that it’s a perfect representation of what happens when two teams try to bottom out at the same time, but putting some rough parameters around the situation feels like a step in the right direction.
First, consider this 10-team subset of a league. Why 10 teams? It gives our league enough differentiation between the best and worst without trying to simulate all of baseball. In the first year of our simulation, we know each team’s true talent level. If there were no luck in baseball, here’s how many games each team would win:
| Team | True Talent Wins |
|---|---|
| 1 | 91 |
| 2 | 88 |
| 3 | 86 |
| 4 | 83 |
| 5 | 81 |
| 6 | 81 |
| 7 | 79 |
| 8 | 76 |
| 9 | 74 |
| 10 | 71 |
Of course, there is luck in baseball. Even if you know how good a team is, runs scored and runs allowed don’t always cleanly translate into wins, and talent doesn’t always translate cleanly into production. To simulate this, I bumped each team’s win totals randomly, with a standard deviation of nine games, a number that Pete Palmer derived in 2017. I then re-scaled teams’ winning percentage using the odds ratio method assuming they played each other team an equal number of times.
For example, if we ran this season an arbitrarily large (100,000 in this case) number of times, here’s how often each team would finish first in our ten-team league:
| True Talent Wins | Win League% |
|---|---|
| 91 | 34.0% |
| 88 | 21.6% |
| 86 | 15.6% |
| 83 | 9.0% |
| 81 | 6.1% |
| 81 | 6.1% |
| 79 | 3.9% |
| 76 | 2.0% |
| 74 | 1.2% |
| 71 | 0.6% |
Heck, even the 71-win team wins sometimes on a long enough time horizon. That’s the nature of baseball — every so often, a team catches lightning in a bottle. This model isn’t complete — there are no Dodgers in this world. It’s also not deterministic; I’m using a Monte Carlo simulation, which is why the two 81-win teams don’t have equal outcomes. Run this again, and you’d get slightly different answers. For our purposes, however, it’ll be good enough.
Next, we need to simulate several seasons. Tanking is a many-year process, so just looking at a single year doesn’t make much sense. I decided to simulate 10 seasons, long enough to let a tank job come to fruition. After each season, I bumped each team’s true talent level up or down randomly, again in a rough simulation of real life. Teams aren’t static piles of talent over time. They get better or worse between years, as players develop or trades and free agency. I also included a small mean reversion component (5% of a team’s talent level relative to average) to account for the fact that the salary and draft structure of baseball exerts a normalizing pressure.
Let’s look at our 10-team group again. This time, we’ll look at the percentage of first-place finishes each team has over 10 years of play, again repeated 100,000 times:
| True Talent Wins | Win League% |
|---|---|
| 91 | 22.6% |
| 88 | 17.0% |
| 86 | 14.0% |
| 83 | 10.4% |
| 81 | 8.5% |
| 81 | 8.4% |
| 79 | 6.9% |
| 76 | 5.0% |
| 74 | 4.0% |
| 71 | 3.0% |
Mean reversion matters a lot. The best teams are still the best teams, but regressing 5% of the way to the mean (a 91-win true talent team becomes a 90.5-win true talent team, for example) pushes everyone together over 10 years. The best teams are still the best teams, and the worst teams are still the worst, but time flattens things out.
Now we have our neutral-state world. Let’s introduce a tanking team to break out of the downside of being in last. Our last-place team is going to embark on a stylized tanking campaign. In year zero, they’re going to drop 20 wins. That’s exaggerated, but we’re going for broad strokes. That step back will last four years. In year five, they’ll gain 35 wins. Again, the actual transition would be more of a glide path, but in the name of expediency, we’re making it a single step higher.
Tanking slightly increases the total number of games the team wins, and more importantly, it increases their cumulative championship odds significantly. Why? It avoids being run-of-the-mill bad; being a terrible team for a while doesn’t affect your championship equity very much, because as we learned, the 71-win team almost never wins in the normal course of things. Leapfrogging upwards at the end, on the other hand, puts you right in the mix at the top of the table. The tanking team is living large now:
| True Talent Wins | Win League% |
|---|---|
| 91 | 21.2% |
| 88 | 15.9% |
| 86 | 13.0% |
| 83 | 9.5% |
| 81 | 7.6% |
| 81 | 7.8% |
| 79 | 6.2% |
| 76 | 4.6% |
| 74 | 3.6% |
| 71 (Tank) | 10.6% |
You read that right: the team that started bad and got worse projects to win the fourth-most league crowns over a 10-year period, even after completely punting the first four years. Don’t read too much into the specific numbers, because the values I’ve assigned to the tank and also to year-to-year variation aren’t gospel. This, though, is what drew teams to a tank-and-rebuild strategy in the first place. It saves money. It increases cumulative championship probability significantly. What’s not to like?
Next, let’s add a second tanking team. Now our 74-win team is also going to be tanking. This does two things: first, it slightly decreases the returns to tanking. In our model, I simply lopped a win off of the tanking reward at the end of the rainbow for both squads. Next, those two teams will now be competing for titles. That cuts into the number of titles they should expect to win when the returns come in. Observe:
| True Talent Wins | Win League% |
|---|---|
| 91 | 20.4% |
| 88 | 15.1% |
| 86 | 12.1% |
| 83 | 9.0% |
| 81 | 7.1% |
| 81 | 7.3% |
| 79 | 5.8% |
| 76 | 4.1% |
| 74 (Tank) | 10.6% |
| 71 (Tank) | 8.5% |
The top teams continue to lose championship equity to the two tankers, but now they’re cannibalizing each other as well. When one team tanked, that team gained 7.6 percentage points of championship equity (10.6% – 3%). When two teams tanked, they gained an average of 6.1 percentage points. Let’s toss a third tanker in the mix, while simultaneously lowering the rewards by another win:
| True Talent Wins | Win League% |
|---|---|
| 91 | 19.7% |
| 88 | 14.5% |
| 86 | 11.8% |
| 83 | 8.5% |
| 81 | 6.8% |
| 81 | 6.9% |
| 79 | 5.5% |
| 76 (Tank) | 10.3% |
| 74 (Tank) | 8.8% |
| 71 (Tank) | 7.1% |
Now we’re looking at only 4.7 percentage points of average gain for tanking. You’ll notice, though, that each team is still “right” to tank, if the objective is simply to maximize the number of championships you’ll win. Each team is improving that number despite the diminishing returns available. Finding 20 dollars on the street isn’t as good as finding 50 dollars on the street, but it’s still better than nothing.
Let’s keep it going! I kept adding a tanking team and reducing the returns to tanking until I found an equilibrium. Here’s what happens to teams’ win probability as more and more teams tank:
| Teams Tanking | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team 1 | 22.6% | 21.2% | 20.4% | 19.7% | 19.6% | 20.0% | 20.7% | 22.7% |
| Team 2 | 17.0% | 15.9% | 15.1% | 14.5% | 14.4% | 14.8% | 15.5% | 16.8% |
| Team 3 | 14.0% | 13.0% | 12.1% | 11.8% | 11.7% | 11.9% | 12.4% | 13.7% |
| Team 4 | 10.4% | 9.5% | 9.0% | 8.5% | 8.4% | 8.5% | 9.0% | 9.9% |
| Team 5 | 8.5% | 7.6% | 7.1% | 6.8% | 6.8% | 6.8% | 9.3% | 8.1% |
| Team 6 | 8.4% | 7.8% | 7.3% | 6.9% | 6.7% | 10.5% | 9.2% | 8.2% |
| Team 7 | 6.9% | 6.2% | 5.8% | 5.5% | 10.7% | 9.0% | 9.0% | 7.0% |
| Team 8 | 5.0% | 4.6% | 4.1% | 10.3% | 8.5% | 7.2% | 7.2% | 5.5% |
| Team 9 | 4.0% | 3.6% | 10.6% | 8.8% | 7.4% | 6.2% | 6.2% | 4.7% |
| Team 10 | 3.0% | 10.6% | 8.5% | 7.1% | 5.8% | 4.9% | 4.9% | 3.6% |
It doesn’t make sense for the eighth team to tank; they’d actually lose 2.7 percentage points of equity by giving up on the early, relatively non-competitive years. Don’t take this as some immutable statement of fact that 70% of the league should try to tank. I could monkey with the initial assumptions and form a completely new grid. For example, here’s how it looks if tanking only adds a net 10 wins in year five and if the returns decrease more quickly as more teams tank:
| Teams Tanking | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team 1 | 22.6% | 21.8% | 21.4% | 21.6% | 22.2% | 23.4% |
| Team 2 | 17.0% | 16.4% | 16.0% | 16.1% | 16.5% | 17.4% |
| Team 3 | 14.0% | 13.4% | 13.2% | 13.2% | 13.6% | 14.2% |
| Team 4 | 10.4% | 9.9% | 9.7% | 9.6% | 9.9% | 10.5% |
| Team 5 | 8.5% | 8.0% | 7.8% | 7.8% | 8.0% | 8.5% |
| Team 6 | 8.4% | 8.0% | 7.8% | 7.8% | 8.0% | 7.3% |
| Team 7 | 6.9% | 6.5% | 6.3% | 6.3% | 7.3% | 6.2% |
| Team 8 | 5.0% | 4.8% | 4.6% | 6.9% | 5.8% | 4.9% |
| Team 9 | 4.0% | 3.8% | 7.3% | 5.9% | 4.9% | 4.2% |
| Team 10 | 3.0% | 7.4% | 5.8% | 4.7% | 3.8% | 3.2% |
Now the fourth team to tank gets barely anything, while the fifth team shouldn’t tank regardless of what its competitors are doing. You can toy with the exact constants in the model as much as you’d like — you could make a league where every team except the best one should be tanking, or where only one team should, with enough tinkering. If you want to get fancy, you could create staggered tanking over time: when the first wave of tanking teams gets good, teams that avoided it in year one may want to change course.
Regardless of what your specific outcome grid looks like, two things are clear. First, more teams tanking lowers the efficacy of each individual team’s strategy. Second, even if tanking gets less effective as more teams do it, it’s still a good plan for each of those teams. If you’re the second-worst team in your league and the worst team is tearing down, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. You’re not competing now, and their long-term plan will make it hard to compete in five years — there will be an extra good team in the league then, after all. What can you do other than tank alongside them and try to compete in five years?
This paradox explains why teams continue to tank. The returns really are worse when multiple teams do it; sometimes, you’re the Phillies and tanking doesn’t get you where you hoped to go. The more teams compete to occupy the same space, the harder it is to occupy that space.
Even knowing that, however, if your entire goal is to maximize the number of times you win the title (in this case, first place in our 10-team league), you should still tank. It’s unfortunate, certainly, that the actions of other teams hurt your expected returns, but the returns are still positive. You might not enjoy your rebuild as much as you’d hoped, but it still beats sitting in the middle, particularly if you can save your owner some money while doing it.
If you generally agree with the construction of my model but also dislike tanking, you might find this conclusion depressing. Within the framework I’ve laid out, I think that’s simply unavoidable. Being the worst competing team in the league at a given time just isn’t going to work out well, regardless of assumptions. If you want to fix it, you’ll have to change the framework.
What do I mean by that? The reason that tanking works is that baseball’s structure makes it somewhat easy to move wins across time. The long team-control window and draft structure mean that accumulating prospects is both doable and valuable; if you set up a core of cheap talent, you can supplement it with free agents and reach phenomenal competitive heights without breaking the bank.
To stop that from being the case, the compensation structure needs to change. I don’t mean that players need to get a bigger piece of the pie — that’s a reasonable point, but it’s not part of this discussion. Simply moving the distribution of money around — paying free agents less but young players more — would do a lot of good. Shortening years of team control, with the understanding that free agent paydays would come down commensurately, would also stop teams from blithely kicking wins forward at the expense of today’s team.
Changing the draft would help. The NBA switched to a draft lottery to make finishing last in the league less attractive. Any number of structures — a draft order determined by games won after being eliminated from playoff contention, a set order, giving teams a set bonus pool and abandoning a draft altogether — could make finishing at the bottom of the standings less valuable from a draft perspective. Heck, tying shares of the league’s television deal to a minimum competitive standard would stop tanking in its tracks.
This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, and many of these decisions might not be feasible. The point of this conclusion, and of the article as a whole, is merely to emphasize this: if you want to stop teams from purposefully tearing down today to build for tomorrow, you can’t just hope that this is merely a phase, that too many teams tanking will make the entire act pointless. Being one of two tanking teams isn’t as good as being the only one, of course. But if you’re already bad, it’s likely still better than standing pat. Fixing that core fact will require a major change to the competitive structure of the sport.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
I think maybe the only thing you could get both players and owners to go for is some sort of change to the draft order to make it more advantageous to be mediocre, which I’m still not sure would actually be enough to stop teams from tanking given the strong incentive not to spend money on a non-playoff team under the current structure and the less certain and impactful nature of players taken in the MLB vs. the NBA draft. Every other thing you could do would run into the resistance of either the players or the owners or both, which if last offseason is any indication would torpedo even the best intentioned reform.
Yep. I don’t changing the draft order would matter much at all. The best three highest WAR players in the league last year were 1) signed for $50,000, 2) drafted in the second round, and 3) drafted in the fourth round. Stark difference from the NBA and NFL.
Teams tank not because they want a roll-of-the-dice draft pick that is probably worth $20M or so, but because they don’t want to lose too much money during their down years. Expanded playoffs mutes tanking a bit — but it doesn’t cure it altogether.
The question we need to ask is, I guess… is tanking *really* bad for the sport? In the NBA, yes. No one wanted to watch a team play the Process 76ers, because the games were an awful show. I still thought the Astros, even at their low point, were worth watching when they played my team. After all, those Astros still won a third of their games.
Yeah I think tanking is bad in baseball but baseball fans should thank their lucky stars it’s not as bad as it is in other sports.
Basketball is totally screwed short of adding more players to the floor, for instance. Adding Lebron alone increases your playoff odds to 100%, that’s just what happens when you have 5 guys on a tiny floor and a basket that’s 10 feet in the air where 3 is more than 2. It seems you know what you have on your team very quickly and their ceiling is apparent. If that ceiling isn’t “one top 5 guy, “ you need a top 5 guy to win. and the only way to acquire one of those is through the draft (or be in a coastal city with a huge market).
Football is a stupid sport run by stupid people who’d rather be stupid than win…. so it’s hard to know if tanking works. A whole lot of social forces keep that sport from equilibrium. It’s hard to know if tanking “works.” But picking a QB is so hard it doesn’t seem to really help that much.
I appreciate the analysis here because baseball is nicely structured to deter tanking. It’s nice that there are diminishing returns to it too.
If this is a problem (and I don’t think that; dirkwbeck has good examples as to why it doesn’t matter), the answer is to award draft order based on the number of wins you compile after you are mathematically eliminated from the playoff race. So if Team A is eliminated on August 15, they have a chance to pile up more wins than Team B who is eliminated on September 1st. But they have to execute.
Whether this would actually motivate teams is unclear to me. I’m pretty well convinced that teams are not strip-mining their team in order to lose, so I would expect that it wouldn’t change a lot. But if it did, then it would also totally gut the trade deadline, and probably a lot of offseason trades too. But if so, it would be okay because it reduces the number of teams who aren’t trying to be competitive, and increasing the value of teams who do trade top players.
This means a crappy team in a division where the winner squeaks by with 85 wins is officially eliminated from the playoffs (and now earning draft order qualifying wins) much later than a potentially very good team in a division with a 116 win Mariners team. Would not repeated seasons of this begin to concentrate high draft picks in one division?
That’s an easy fix. The win tally starts when a team is officially eliminated based on the record of the team holding the last playoff spot regardless of that team’s division. I do worry that this would create a very strong incentive to lose early and that would be worse than what we have now.
For the record, I really like that idea. I would worry that it would create one more incentive for teams to keep young talent in AAA to start the season. Though, I guess, it would also give teams incentives for calling up young talent late in the season before that one.
Second and third tables are the same?
Whoops, should be fixed now.
First table also shows team 7 with 89 wins – should be 79 I believe
Bah, fixed that as well. Not my finest day of transcribing.
Good stuff, Ben. The point about building for the present and future simultaneously was something I was just thinking about when Seattle traded for two years Rafael Montero.
The poster child for the eternally mediocre team were the 70’s/80’s Cleveland teams, constantly churning out a few stars, trading players left and right (usually pitchers for hitters one year, hitters for pitchers the next) but almost always running between 75-85 wins. Never true contenders, rarely truly awful.
It wasn’t until Mr Jacobs took over and Gabe Paul tore it all down that they got it all in sync and produced a decade of contenders. They were among the first to tear down (I don’t really cotton to “tanking”) and the first to sign a young core to extended contracts. They even prepared John Hart for the GM role by having him manage the onfield talent so he could better understand the challenges ahead. That is something teams still rarely do, even in tbe midst of a teardown.
Teams do teardowns because they work more often than not.
Phillies and Royals not withstanding.
Would some sort of “poverty” tax work? I.e. if a team spends less than X amount on payroll, they forfeit draft picks, become ineligible for revenue sharing, etc. this would ensure each team is TRYING year to year.
What am I missing here?
That would also keep teams honest and keep ownership groups out who were only interested in extracting value (possibly the Marlins?).
Anything to make John Fisher care is cool by me. Sick of seeing all the talent wasted in Oakland because the owner is pinching pennies.
It would incentivize teams to pay for garbage veterans and would take playing time from younger players unless something was also done to reduce team control on young players.
I think the analysis here is really good. Really, really good. I am convinced by the analysis that it works this way. And I do agree that compensating younger players more (higher minimum salaries, moving arbitration a year earlier, etc) is the obvious solution to this. And I’m strongly in favor of it.
One thing I have been wondering about for years, though is that this really does create some serious competitive balance problems. The general response to this is something like “suck it up, all the owners are billionaires and these teams are money machines,” which is partly true. But the reality is that the era where teams like the Rays, Royals, and Brewers are having to pay twice as much to their players means they’re going to get even cheaper everywhere else, hurting their ability to compete. There really is a tension between these pro-competition measures and competitiveness for teams that can’t supplement their homegrown core with a bunch of free agents.
I’m of the mind that the natural complement to these proposals includes some reforms to revenue sharing…how much money is shared (more generous, yes), but also how it is distributed and what it can be spent on, in order to really make something like this work. But the details of it are also really complicated. I feel like some simulations of what various proposals would do would be immensely clarifying, if, say, the minimum salary was increased by 50% and / or arbitration was moved a year earlier.
I agree with this. This is about the only situation where it’s appropriate to say so on this website, but: it’s useful to consider that the NFL has more or less solved this. Apples and oranges *vastly* understates the difference between the two leagues, but the NFL has figured out how to allow small markets like Seattle, Green Bay, and Kansas City build sustained winners AND make sure that rebuilding cycles never need to last more than two years.
If the players agreed to a hard cap/salary floor model in return for shortening team control by (say) one year of minor-league level and one year at the major league level (i.e. both sides give the one thing they’d purportedly never give), I’d think that gets us closer.
Yes, this! Fans and writers seem to have largely accepted that baseball’s luxury tax system sufficiently constitutes “revenue sharing.” In reality, TV revenues have grown so disparate that MLB’s competitive balance meets only the barest of minimums. Having some teams with player payrolls 3-4 times that of others results in a third of franchise front offices essentially playing a starkly different contest, with the goal being to maximize value (i.e., $ per win) as opposed to maximizing … you know … wins. The NFL proves how much interest is generated when every team must succeed or fail under the same terms. The world won’t end if the Yankees have a losing season, as evidenced by Jets fans still existing en masse. Rather, Jets/Cowboys fans can be righteously pissed off when their teams suck (a form of justice!), whereas Royals fans can only shrug and try to take solace that the cards were stacked against them (victims of injustice!).
Small market teams have survived and occasionally thrive thanks to disproportionately long and cheap team control of young players. While that is a system I think most of us agree should change, it really can’t be diminished without larger markets agreeing to share substantially more revenue.
The other thing…and I commented with this on Craig’s article yesterday too, is that I think the normative parts of this piece need to be interrogated. Tanking in the NBA is on a completely different level than anything in MLB, to the point where the term “tanking” is not really appropriate here, especially with one that has an explicit reference to the NBA. You have teams letting Mark Madsen shoot 3-pointers to get into better draft position, and really, actively, trying to get worse. Even after the draft lottery! This is not what MLB teams do. I can only think of one team that has really, truly tanked in the recent past, and it’s the Astros, where they were truly and aggressively trying to be bad. The Pirates still employ Joe Musgrove. The Marlins employed a number of actual major leaguers such as Starlin Castro, JT Realmuto, and Miguel Rojas after they signaled they were rebuilding. The Orioles benched Chris Davis. The Tigers have not tried to convert Miguel Cabrera to being a pitcher. This is really not at all like the NBA.
If you really think that this is a problem, there are a lot better remedies than the lottery; you can always institute a system where you get a higher draft pick based on the number of wins you get after you are eliminated from the playoff race (so, for example, a team eliminated in August has a chance to pile up more wins than one eliminated in September, but if you have ruined the roster already good luck with that). But the timeline for how quickly players enter the NBA–and the consistency of high draft picks meaning good, productive players–is about as far away from MLB as any major sport I can think of.
Yes, and it seems “tanking” is much more likely to be ascribed after the fact to bad teams that get better. But often times it is a bad fit or doesn’t really explain the improvement. The Braves, for example, were led in 2020 by Acuña, Freeman, Ozuna, and d’Arnaud. Throw Albies in there too as he is also clearly on of their best players. None of these guys were acquired due to tanking. Most of the players acquired via trade and most of the top-10 draft picks have done little or nothing to help. It’s basically Fried and Swanson, and the Swanson trade was much more notable as an example of extreme stupidity by Arizona than anything else. Anderson is the only high draft pick that looks promising but right now he’s pitches about 1.5 months worth of games, so we’ll see.
One of the things I think baseball fans consistently underrate is how shockingly unproductive most prospects are, and this is especially true if you just limit it to the draft. Most don’t make it, and the ones that do are incredibly underwhelming.
In the 2008 draft, in the first round, there have been two guys picked who turned into absolute monsters (Gerrit Cole, who didn’t sign, and Buster Posey), a few guys who were a stars for a few years or a consistent starter (Eric Hosmer, maybe another guy), and a handful of guys who were occasionally solid starters although their careers have been bumpy (Aaron Hicks, Justin Smoak, Pedro Alvarez, Yonder Alonso, Jason Castro). The top 10 picks included Tim Beckham, Gordon Beckham, Kyle Skipworth, and Brian Matusz.
And that’s the first round. In a 2008 re-do by Jim Callis in 2018, Brett Lawrie (!!!) was picked #16, Lonnie Chisenhall got picked #18, and Mike Montgomery at #23. So you can come close (but not quite) fill an entire first round with solid starters or stars if you have 20/20 hindsight in 2008, and while 2008 might have been a particularly bad year, you can double that and it still is much less than what most fans think the talent is like in the draft.
What this means is that your route towards winning involves (1) being way, way above average in international scouting and picks after the first round, (2) signing lots of free agents, or (3) trying to move your wins from one year to the next. The first one requires being smarter than everyone else, a challenging thing to do; one day you’re way ahead of the curve, and suddenly you’re quite a bit behind it (see Huntington, Neal). The second one means being rich. The third just requires thinking over a larger time horizon and having a clear sense of how good your team likely is right now, and as a bonus, can even complement the other two.
This is a strange argument. The Braves definitely tanked in 2015 and 2016. They made a conscious decision to spend less money. They lost lots of games. They got high draft picks. In 2014 and 2017 they spent a little more money, but certainly not their maximum available resources, and they weren’t good. They got better draft picks (in each of 40 rounds) than they would have if they had spent as much money as they normally do, and are now spending.
Yes, It takes a lot of time to develop draft picks. They bust in MiLB alot more than they do in NFL and NBA. Especially if you’re drafting pitchers. Especially if they’re high school pitchers. But you can’t say the Braves didn’t spend the middle part of this decade purposefully tanking. Especially if you’re argument is, “Well Ackshully our good players weren’t drafted but signed as international prospects (by **checks notes** a scout and GM who were kicked out of baseball for nefarious activities involving signing international prospects), we’re really bad at drafting so we didn’t tank.”
You should really save the condensation for people that know more. It’s a really bad look when you don’t know what you are talking about.
The point is that “tanking” is not why the Braves are better now. The main thing the Braves got out of becoming intentionally bad was horrible seasons and depressed fans. So the point is that tanking didn’t work for the Braves, but national writers point to them as some success story of tanking. Signing Acuña and Albies worked, which they could have just as easily done without being bad on purpose.
I think one thing people forget is that the rebuilding phase is not just about the draft picks. It is also the trading away of veterans for prospects, which can be far more rewarding for the likes of teams like Oakland and the Rays.
Oakland in particular has a very poor record in drafting players, with the odd few exceptions of course. The Cubs were pretty good at signing free agent vets, then trading them away for prospects a few months later during their rebuilt phase.
Every team balances wins today versus wins tomorrow. Dodgers aren’t burning down their farm system to maximize wins today. I am for teams doing what they need to do to win whether it is today or tomorrow. I can see a point in trying to minimize moves based on getting higher draft picks. Easy solution would be to have a draft lottery such that the draft order of the 10 worst teams is random.
I think the biggest problem regarding teams struggling for long periods of time is that high revenue and some medium revenue teams are not overpaying at the deadline as often to win now. Getting a Top 100 prospect in a trade is like pulling teeth these days. It appears it takes less wins later to get a win now than it use to take 5-10 years ago (i.e., a win later isn’t weighted the same as a win today, but the difference between the two is getting smaller). This is minimizing the impact of a big avenue that teams helped themselves to rebuild.
What about relegation, like European soccer? You’d see the exact opposite of tanking: desperation to win every game.
Owners would never ever ever go for it, but I do enjoy that model immensely.
Cool. Instead of the same handful of teams winning and losing every year, you get to watch the same handful of big teams beat up on a *different* crew of losers every year.
Apart from seeing Leicester City win the Big One.
Which rather deflates your point.
(For other reasons, both structural and financial, I don’t see a relegation system as a remotely good idea in the MLB.)
Great article, thanks for writing it up.
Ultimately, isn’t this at least partially a function of not having a salary floor for major league teams? If cutting the payroll down below a certain point was penalized or banned, teams would essentially be forced to compete for those few percentage points in the middle of the pack in your 10-team simulation.
The obvious argument against this is that some teams would financially not be able to do so, but my answer to that would be: should teams that cannot viably compete every year because of their market size really be major league teams? It seems like a market failure to me that some teams are set up to by default lose 8 years out of 10, no matter the reason.
I think that would help increase overall player salaries and of course for that reason would only be done in conjunction with an actual hard cap. Also, depending on how it was structured, teams could still tank by trading veterans for prospects but keeping most of the traded players’ salaries on their books.
Great article, I am curious, if a bit pessimistic, whether the owners would ever concede even one less year of team control in arbitration. Nevertheless I think it would do wonders for the game and might even get at the difficulty of marketing young players. It’s hard to market young players when they don’t even reach the free agent market and earn their first real paycheck until they are not young anymore.
Excellent analysis, Ben — thanks.
A key insight that your simulations show clearly is that a team’s true talent level is very far from a guarantee of success (especially if we define success as winning a championship rather than, say, competing well on a regular basis and keeping fans consistently engaged). Everything’s “a bet.”
Therefore it would be interesting to inject a second level of uncertainty into the analysis of tanking: the risk that your couple or three years of favorable draft position might not generate the kind of elite true talent that you’d hoped. Maybe you could run some “first stage simulations” in which teams have a realistic shot at whiffing on a high pick, the kid gets hurt, etc.
You linked to a good piece on the Phillies’ “botched rebuild,” which asserts that “To date, they are the first team in what we might call baseball’s tanking era to fail at it.” Maybe that’s true, but I’d suggest going back through history carefully to see how often rebuilds get botched. In addition, since your simulations show that an average (81-win talent) team will win a championship a non-trivial percent of the time, we might want to re-evaluate the various examples of “tanking success” and see if they really created and/or maintained elite true talent levels or just lucked out. I suspect the batting average for tankers is lower than suspected — and, as you note, probably getting lower still as more teams buy the idea that it’s a sensible strategy.
The other thing that would add to this discussion is some real consideration of the economics of tanking. Is it really true that turning off your fans for several years is justified by the payoff of a championship year? Not sure anyone has really studied that.
Like most models of complex human motivations and interactions, this one simplifies what’s going on in MLB immensely (which is fine and duly noted in the article … you can’t model it otherwise). It assumes the only goal of owners is to win a championship, but that’s just substituting the imagined motivations of we-fans-if-we-were-billionaire-team-owners for the actual motivations of actual billionaires running their teams. There’s no evidence that most team management (especially owners) value championships THAT singularly. They value them, of course, but there are other goals to owning a baseball team. And to make it even messier, some teams have owners that barely interact with their teams (i.e. Braves) whereas others have owners that literally run them (Rockies).
There’s value to accumulating 85 nights’ worth of good feelings after winning a game, then a series’ worth of playoff baseball year after year. Maybe the hope that lightning will strike one year. That’s 85 days’ worth of good TV content, solid gate, and lots of hotdog sales. Another fun Spring Training the year after, all that. It might not feel that way to us, fans-on-a-blog, but it’s undeniable and shouldn’t be underestimated. I suspect many teams operate without that championship-or-bust attitude. Of course, the ones that do will win most of the championships, but that’s of intense interest mainly to people like us. Less focused fans will show up and enjoy themselves anyway.
This is why modeling complex human behavior is so hard.
As a Pirates fan, I am familiar with planned mediocrity. The team ‘Drove for 75 Wins’ every season while Littlefield was the general manager. The team ‘Drove for 85 Wins’ during the Huntington years. The Pirates had three great seasons when the made the playoffs. But the FO never augmented the playoff teams. Bad luck also brought the Pirates. Of course, Huntington’s drive for 85 mania had him trade high ceiling prospects for a washed up starter. The Pirates then collapsed.
If the Pirates were to make it to a WS, tanking would be a necessary step down that path. Two No. 1 picks would help. Three would be better. Whomever wants to complain about this can go to Hell. The goal is to win championships. A low revenue team must tank to win. Luck helps too.
Tanking is an unintended consequence of the draft bonus pool system. Up to 2011, teams were able to spend as much or as little money signing draft picks as they desired. Teams could get a top player to potentially fall to them by offering them a significantly larger signing bonus than the teams in front of them in the draft. Hence, it didn’t matter if you picked 5, 10, or 15. Now, the difference between picks 5 & 10 is a large amount of bonus pool money so it pays to tank.
What role does fan attendance play in real life? Theoretically a team that is mediocre would draw better than a team that is terrible.
I think the % of income from attendance keeps dropping. Attendance is the income stream most impacted by winning. Therefore this has also played into the trend towards tearing things down. It doesn’t reduce income to the same degree that it did before.
I don’t think the difference between mediocre and bad is really all that big. In addition to less revenue coming from attendance than in yesteryear, fans don’t punish teams enough for not even trying.