Tanking

Tony Clark is worried about the integrity of the game:

“A record number of talented free agents remain unemployed in an industry where revenues and franchise values are at record highs,” he said in a statement, eight days before the first formal workouts. “Spring training has always been associated with hope for a new season. This year a significant number of teams are engaged in a race to the bottom. This conduct is a fundamental breach of the trust between a team and its fans and threatens the very integrity of our game.”

Later in the article Alex Wood chimes in with:

Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood went further, tweeting: “It appears that there are 12-15 teams that have committed to tanking and or not putting the best team they can on the field. “

I really don’t like the word tanking used here. Jerry Dipoto seems to believe that there are 10 or 12 teams tearing down right now. To me that’s not tanking, that’s thinking long term about winning. When a franchise can only expect to win a league championship every once every 15 years or a World Series once every 30 years, taking a few years to rebuild to that isn’t a big deal. Tanking to me is strictly on the field play. If a manager or front office tried to lose games, then the league should come down as hard on them as they did on the Braves for breaking signing rules. It’s okay to put a poor team on the field as long as they play hard for the fans, and as long as it leads to improvements in the near future.

I suspect we are not going to be able to tell, however, if all these teams are really bad. If 12 teams are trying not to win, by random chance some of those teams are going to do well. Those 12 teams should be evenly matched, so in the games against each other they all should be around .500. It’s going to be tough for any of these teams to be the 1962 Mets, because they will win plenty of games against the large number of poor teams.

I like to pull out the Baseball Musings Season Simulator every so often. The link leads to the simulation in which every team is evenly matched, intrinsically a .500 team. Pretty much every test results in the champion winning at least 90 games. Some years a team wins or loses 100 games. It’s the way the dice roll.

So when a lot of teams are intrinsically bad, they win enough games against each other that overall they don’t look terrible. Of course, that defeats the whole purpose of rebuilding a team winds up doing well due to luck, and they don’t get a high draft pick.

In other words, when too many teams adopt this strategy at the same time, it defeats the whole purpose of the strategy. The team that finishes with the tenth worst record in the league is going to wonder why they bothered tearing down at all.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2GW2fyS