2023 MLB Draft: Tanking in baseball is over — but not because the draft lottery killed it
SEATTLE — In January 2015, ESPN published one of the first definitive opuses on the Philadelphia 76ers’ controversial and revolutionary strategy to lose if not quite on purpose then certainly with purpose. Earlier that NBA season, the team’s dismal record forced a reckoning around the league about whether the draft needed to be adjusted so as not to reward that kind of behavior. The proposal to do so failed, but ESPN quoted the Lakers’ team owner condemning the practice anyway: "If you're in tanking mode,” Jeanie Buss said, "I think that's unforgivable."
Two-and-a-half years later, when the Houston Astros won the franchise’s first World Series — right on time — FiveThirtyEight linked back to that ESPN article about the NBA team that “trusted the process.”
“The Astros Tanked Their Way To The Top,” FiveThirtyEight declared, and already it was kind of old news. “They Tanked Like the Sixers; Now the Astros Are MLB's Next Big Powerhouse,” Bleacher Report had written earlier that summer. In fact, Sports Illustrated had famously foretold back in 2014 that the Astros would win the 2017 title.
Granted, the 2017 World Series and the Astros’ seemingly predetermined success eventually became known for something else, but initially, they were viewed, especially in conjunction with Chicago Cubs’ hard-won championship in 2016, as an undeniable indication that baseball had embraced tanking. Almost immediately, what had perhaps been for the better for some historically hapless teams was derided as being for the far worse for the sport overall, as baseball’s tanking era gave way to the backlash-to-tanking era even before the Astros danced under the confetti. With the 2017 World Series still underway, Sports Illustrated published a column decrying that tanking was “the norm now, and it will continue to be until baseball makes perverse draft incentives a thing of the past.”
That offseason, super-agent Scott Boras complained that not enough teams were competing to sign the top free agents, and he pretty much hasn’t stopped complaining since.
Boras’ concern was about how tanking limits the market for players’ services and thereby suppresses salaries. He was right to worry that owners would exploit any opportunity to save face while also saving money, and the language around leveraging present failure for future gains is useful to that end. Uncompetitive behavior by large swaths of the league aided by the implicit collusion of homogenous valuations of talent while more competitive teams favor the ferreting out of market inefficiencies (read: cheaper ways to win) has kept players in conflict with ownership in the half-decade since 2017. Insofar as that dynamic ever evolves, this particular concern culminated in the most recent round of collective bargaining between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association.
Among the objectives laid out by the MLBPA at the outset of negotiations was finding a mechanism to encourage competition. And just as SI predicted, they targeted the domestic player draft for doing so. When a new deal was reached after months of painful lockout, the MLBPA touted, among its self-described significant progress, amendments to the draft “designed to deter tanking.” And even the league had to embrace the positive spin of disincentivizing strategic bottoming out by proudly proclaiming that baseball’s new draft lottery “includes anti-tanking measures that go beyond anything we’ve seen in the other major professional sports.”
The result of those new measures meant that at MLB’s annual winter meetings in December, the 107-loss Washington Nationals — who bottomed out three years after winning the World Series when their attempts to retain talent failed or backfired — learned that they would be selecting second overall, instead of first, in Sunday’s MLB Draft. The first pick, instead, went to the 100-loss Pittsburgh Pirates, who have been struggling to rebuild for almost a decade.
Last year, when the Baltimore Orioles took Jackson Holliday with the last guaranteed first overall draft pick, I wrote that they had “tanked just in time to justify doing so.” Built by some of the same people who parlayed strategic losing into sustained success in Houston, the Orioles look poised to cash in a trio of 100-plus-loss seasons for a young, cost-controlled, championship-caliber team. Indeed, a year later, they’re two games back in the AL East and comfortably atop the AL wild-card standings.
A blurry, out-of-focus, 30,000-foot view of the past decade might look like this: The Sixers made tanking explicit, the Cubs half-heartedly brought it to baseball, the Astros embraced it with ruthless verve, the Orioles were born out of that success, and finally, the MLB draft lottery brought an end to the practice. But it’s not that simple.
Before it paid off for the Astros — or even the Cubs — commissioner Rob Manfred offered his assessment of “tanking” seven years ago this week. During the 2016 All-Star availability, Manfred said, “The more people adopt the strategy, the less likely it is to be successful. By definition, only one guy can get the No. 1 pick.”
He has a point. That’s one reason tanking had a short shelf life as a truly innovative strategy: It requires 29 other teams to zig so you can zag. Beyond that, baseball has proven time and time again that a single player can’t change a franchise’s fortunes — and certainly not one who is just beginning his minor-league career. The top pick in the baseball draft is rarely, if ever, a guarantee of anything. Strong player development and savvy player acquisition to bolster an organization's depth do more to build up a team’s future fortunes. The path to cheap contention is paved with waiver claims and successful reclamation projects at least as much as with predictable top prospects.
And finally, let’s return to Manfred’s quote. Only one team can pick first in the draft, but also one team has to pick first. One is the maximum and the minimum. Even in a lottery system, some team will always be rewarded with the top pick to compensate for its failure.
Because even if there were no reward for finishing last, one team would do so every year. Such is sports. And sometimes trying to win — even with impatience and the money to fund it — falls flat. Big-payroll teams run the risk of disappointing themselves and their fans and, in doing so, garner critiques about the perils of trying to rush to the finish line.
The strain of intentionally anti-competitive behavior that afflicts MLB today is so much more complicated than simple tanking. It stems from understanding the probabilities, the risks associated with going all-in on any given year. From being able to see a lost season coming, not bothering to try to change the outcome and instead focusing on a future that might or might not come to fruition. It’s because wins mean less to the bottom line than ever, money can insulate you from caring about whom you hurt, and the carrot was always supposed to be the competitive spirit anyway.
This year’s worst team will be the Oakland A’s, once a counter to the concept of tanking in that they managed to string together frugal contention without ever dipping too low (or soaring too high). Now they’re terrible to a historic degree — and not because they’re on a carefully constructed track to bring Oakland the 2026 championship. Their end goal is far more craven.
“Tanking” has become something like a catch-all term for not trying very hard to win. But not every bad team is tanking; some are just totally shameless.
