This topic comes from way out in right field, among other
places, but it may have significant sociological implications. Some of the
major league baseball teams now in spring training do not plan to win the pennant
this year. Some even hope to finish last.
What they will
be doing has several names. Locally, “tanking” seems to be preferred. The idea
is, you get rid of everybody who can play the game and use the money you save
by not paying them to develop youngsters you deem have a chance to be stars of
the future. You say you are “rebuilding,” but what you are doing is putting
second-rate teams on the field and, especially in football, hoping to lose a
lot of games so you get earlier choices in the college player draft.
You do not, of
course, cut your ticket prices as you cut the fans’ chances of seeing
victories. It’s about the sport. But mostly it’s about the money. If we can
turn our eyes from the great orange face for a moment, we see
it’s also about our society.
Tanking has
been going on. It has gone on long enough that the Cleveland Browns football
team -- from fourth rate to near great -- is the go-to example of how to stink for
a few years and then give your long-suffering clientele some hope.
I don’t know how much attention tanking gets on sports blogs because I never
read them. I have become aware of it now because both the Miami Marlins
(baseball) and the Miami Dolphins (football) will be tanking this year, and the
sports writers are telling us how patient we all must be.
Or we could
stop watching the games. That
would keep the owners from getting something for the nothing they are
deliberately putting on the field.
Everybody in
town was at the ballpark when mighty Casey stepped up to bat, and nobody was
expecting him to whiff. Frank
Merriwell never quit when his team was behind, not even when the opponent got
ahead by cheating. Plucky Frank manfully won the game, and taught the
bounders a lesson in the process. More historically, when Ernie Banks shouted,
“let’s play three,” he didn’t mean the Cubs should lose a
triple-header. And George Steinbrenner never fired a manager for winning.
Some time
between 1994 -- the year baseball owners cancelled the World Series to save a
few nickels and lost me forever – and now, putting losers on the field became a
smart business move. Some owner, maybe one thriving right now, will enter the
Hall of Fame with a plaque saying, “He lost all his games, but then the team
got better.”
It is well
known that when you want taxpayers to give you a new stadium or upgrades on the
stadium they built you 15 years ago, you buy up the contract of every all-star
player who is available, win the championship, and then go to the voters. After
they approve the bond issue, you gradually shed the all-stars. That is an
established ploy.
But
deliberately losing is new. The 1919 “Black Sox” were never allowed to play the
National Pastime again after deliberately losing World Series games. In the 1950s, when college basketball players found
they could help gamblers make money by keeping their margin of victory less than the
point-spread, it was considered a scandal even though they won their games.
Now, the
Dolphins have hired an interim quarterback, and what they worry about is that he may win too many games in 2019. In which case, they might
not be able to get the quarterback they want -- currently a junior in college -- in the draft for the the 2020 season. Existential
horror in modern sports: a competent quarterback!
Is that kind of
sportsmanship really good for a nation?
I'm a sports dimwit, Tom, but I get what you're saying. Reminds me of the co-owner in the movie "The Natural" wanting the team to bomb for his personal gain.
ReplyDeleteYeah, or Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom producing a sure bomb on Broadway.
DeleteI know nada about sports, but I'm married to a baseball fan. He and our oldest son usually take in some Storm Chaser games in the summer. They are the farm team for the Kansas City Royals. From what they say, players cycle in and out of the farm team pretty often. It sounds like the 'Chaser games are sometimes more entertaining than the televised Royals games.
DeleteTanking is definitely a thing in baseball. One of our local teams, the Chicago Cubs, employs the guru of tanking. His name is Theo Epstein, and he is the club's president. The theory in baseball is that one has no chance to win with the current crop of overpriced bums on the field, and so if one wants to win, one trades away the overpriced bums for promising young minor leaguers who are not major-league-ready. The idea is that, in 3-4 years (up until which time the major league club puts underpriced journeymen on the field to occupy the nine spots on the field), the kids will develop into underpriced young major league stars. That is where the Cubs are today, after going through about four years of tanking during the first part of this decade. They managed to win their first World Series in over 100 years with the cheap kids in the field by following the tanking strategy, so it's a proven approach. The other local team, the White Sox, currently is in the midst of their own tank.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it was planned, but it worked out that way for the local ice hockey team, the Blackhawks. They were really bad 15 years ago, got a bunch of high draft picks which they used to select Duncan Keith, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane (if you are a hockey buff, no need to explain; if not, don't worry about it), and proceeded to win three Stanley Cups in the space of six years.
Our local football club, did basically the same thing: got rid of their aging, injury-prone guys, were bad, got some high draft choices, and became younger, healthier and better. Last year they were 12-4, the best they've done in years.
Financially, the bet is that fans will be sufficiently loyal to stay with the team during the lean years. It seems to work, mostly.
There is biz-school theory behind the tanking approach: it's considered better to pour investment dollars into nascent promising products than into the established "cash cows" that may be past the peak of their product life.
For more on this: https://www.thenation.com/article/mike-trout-mlb-players-union-dave-zirin/
ReplyDeleteThanks, Gene. Zirin being Zirin, he is worried about the short career players that aren't worth tens and now hundreds of millions of dollars and are also not bad enough to be low-balled. But from the fan's perspective, this is all s/he needs to know:
ReplyDelete"The problem is that teams no longer see their financial fortunes tied primarily to putting a good product on the field. Revenue is tied less to ticket sales than to public subsidies for new stadiums, and sweetheart cable-television deals."
There is no do-or-die for Old Siwash. That's for losers. There is no respect for the game. It's just a chunk of machinery used to enrich the owner. There is no love for the sport. That is just something you use to put the rubes' butts on the seats. But even in the business-school terms Jim invokes to explain the owners' rude behavior, isn't there bait-and-switch and consumer fraud involved in the modern sports business plan?