Sunday, September 29, 2019

Unbuild it, and they will lose


 Sport rarely comes up here, but this contribution is about a moral problem. I am referring to the business tactic of  “tanking.”  Looking ahead, the managers see a so-so season, and say to themselves, “If it is going to be bad anyway, let’s get rid of everybody who can pay this game, save a ton of money on salaries, and then in a few years we can be good again.”
 I am acutely aware of this, having two local teams in the tank. I haven’t found many good articles on the subject, but here is one about the Miami Marlins (baseball) last year when its tanking had begun. That it succeeded is shown by the Marlins’ record this year: 56 wins, 104 losses. Baltimore and Detroit, also in the tank, were even more pathetic. One of Marlin owners, promising things will get better, says fans should “turn out.” “Throw up” would be more likely. Attendance has been thin, but what can you expect when a team keeps finding new ways to lose?
  A Marlins spokesbabbler said earlier in the year that they would improve the fans’ “parking experience” as compensation.
 The Dolphins (football) opened the year by being blown out twice so badly that the color announcer at the second game had to admit that “everyone” knew they were going to be the worst team in football. The management thought behind the stinko perfomances is clearer than it is in baseball. The Dolphins traded for early picks in the college draft next spring, and now they desperately want the worst record in the league so they can draft first. A University of Alabama quarterback improbably named Tua Tagovailoa is the cause of their lust for loss. So this year, Alabama plays great, and the Dolphins play dead.
 Understand: Losing is management policy.
 And it is considered brilliant. There would be more comment about tanking if sports writers weren’t dazzled by brilliant management.
 In 1919, Deacon Jim may remember, the Chicago White Sox were the best team in baseball. But they lost the World Series because some gamblers paid them (more than their owner did for a whole season) to “throw” some games. One of the players was so good, he couldn’t play badly even when he tried to, a fact that later gave us the movie Field of Dreams.
 When their dastardly deeds became known, they were banned from baseball for life.
  Today, when sports managers do the same thing, they are called geniuses. The Black Sox should have told the judge they were simply getting ready to be good in 1920.

1 comment:

  1. The Chicago Cubs, who have been the toast of baseball in this town for the last four or five years, became good by tanking. Their team president, Theo Epstein, was hired for precisely this reason; it seems that he had already pulled off the trick for the Boston Red Sox. For the Cubs, it worked: in 2016 they won their first World Series in more than a century.

    My team, the White Sox (I always root for the underdog, and the White Sox are the perennial Lady Ediths of Chicago baseball) are in the midst of a tank strategy - if I'm keeping track of it, this is Year 3 of their tank. The Cubs, by this point in their tank, were showing definite signs of being good the following year. The White Sox aren't on that schedule - they have some goodish young players but so far not enough to allow them to even play .500 ball. A number of their prospects have been beset by injury problems, including a disconcerting number of promising pitchers who have been sent for Tommy John surgery in the last year or so.

    I see tanking as a high-risk strategy. It only works if your talent evaluators are good at evaluating young talent, and if your talent developers can develop them into good major league players. My guess is that half (at least) of the teams trying to tank, don't have the requisite management talent to be able to pull that off.

    Another aspect of tanking is that it probably has become popular in part because of the revolution in advanced metrics, the so-called Sabermetrics. Among the challenges to conventional wisdom that Sabermetrics has put forth is that players' contributions to winning tail off considerably past the age of 30. That means that the strategy to build a winning team that has prevailed during most of my lifetime - spending loads of money on high-priced free agents with proven major league track records - is now thought to be a bad approach. By contrast, when a team pursues the tank strategy, it drafts and develops young players who are ready for the major leagues by their mid 20s - sometimes even their early 20s. It turns out those are a player's prime years. This move away from shelling out big bucks for older, established players is having labor relations repercussions - players and their agents are livid that owners aren't outbidding one another for top-flight free agents anymore. It's very possible this will lead to labor strife.

    ReplyDelete