How to Fix Tanking

[Orioles GM (Michael)]

Between the phantom wins thread, adjusting draft pick tiebreakers, the tank police, etc., we've had a lot of discussions about how to fix Base Knock tanking recently, but I'm concerned about where the conversations have led because I don't think they address the root of the problem. While my "tanking team" status may make me biased, I think it also allows me to speak as effectively as anyone (especially given that I've been around for a while) about the motivations of tanking.

It seems like in our discussions, we've focused a lot on creating incentives to win, but I think rebuilding teams already want to win, they just feel this is the best way to ultimately build a winner. Rather than considering how to make teams want to win in the immediate, I suggest that we instead consider why teams don't consider this in the first place.

There are two primary factors in this league that have created a shortage of available quality players that can make more teams competitive: unlimited roster slots (within cap space that can now be easily worked around through excessive cash coverage) and owner inactivity.

Let's start with the first. Some of the best teams in this league have rotations that are 7 or 8 quality starters deep. If their desire is to win, they (understandably) won't be looking to move those players, and realize it's a competitive edge to hang onto them rather than trade them for farm depth or something of the sort. But if one team has 8 of the 150 available spots in one of the 30 five-man rotations out there, the most that some other team can have, at best, is two. A two-starter team will seldom if ever even be in conversation for a late-seed in the playoffs, let alone have championship aspirations. And because we're obviously not going to suddenly force teams with what I'll call "excessive quality depth" at various spots to just relinquish some players into free agency in a sort of "league restart," and owners shouldn't be compelled to make their opponents better, we're stuck in this mess where we watch teams with 8-man rotations win championships while we complain that a team that couldn't fill out their rotation is deciding to rebuild. I have no problem with GMs playing by the rules, so this is not meant to be a dig at anyone who has 3 good 1B, 7 good OF, or an 8-man rotation. Kudos for making the most of the available options. But if we want a league where more guys are in the mix, I believe a better starting point than punishing tankers is creating a player pool that is more accessible to more GMs by enforcing some sort of roster limit (or better, limit on specific positions). And I mean Base Knock roster, not ESPN roster, of course.

The player pool is also limited by the fact that a good chunk of our most inactive owners can be found in the middle of the power rankings. Lots of teams that have toyed with either going for it or rebuilding have opted to rebuild of late, and I can't help but think that a large portion of that has to do with the fact that most of the players they'd reasonably go trade for are sitting on the more inactive owners' rosters. Teams like Texas, St. Louis, Tampa, and Oakland all stood pat or could have done more at the deadline, and here's a list of just some of the players that could've changed a playoff hopeful's fate just off those rosters:

Clayton Kershaw
Anthony Rendon
Hyun-Jin Ryu
Shohei Ohtani
Sean Doolittle
Freddie Freeman
Francisco Lindor
Kyle Gibson
AJ Pollock
Yadier Molina
Zack Greinke
Cole Hamels
Hector Neris

The point of this isn't even to bash those owners, but even if we didn't change the roster limits, this many players were left off the trade market. You might say "Oh, but they would've sold and then we'd have even more sellers." Well what if they bought instead? Here's some of the prospects that could've then been available at the trade deadline had any of the four teams I mentioned above decided to buy instead:

MacKenzie Gore
Justus Sheffield
Kyle Tucker
Luis Garcia
Lazaro Armenteros
Cole Tucker
Nate Pearson
Grayson Rodriguez
Cal Mitchell
Austin Hays
Jazz Chisholm
Triston Casas

We get upset that guys tear down and rebuild in hopes of building a championship contender, but to me it's much more preferable to have a guy like Denver or Tim who is selling and strategically making moves to build for the long haul than teams who sit on their hands but "Hey, they won 5-8 games and put up a fight". Let's draw attention to the fact that the guys we lobby to remove are often guys that are more in the 14-20ish spots in the power rankings, not 25-30.

And when rebuilding teams DO fight for every point, we currently have a system that disincentives them from doing so. I mean, look at recently where I set my lineup, lost to a team that was fairly inactive that week, and lost out on a draft spot that will cost me a guy some are lauding as a generational talent. But because we care more about tanking than inactivity, I walked away with a win rather than us correcting that the Rays very obviously won the matchup. Under our current system, I really should've cut fairly useless guys like Rowan Wick when I saw the Rays lineup wasn't set to make sure I lost, but left them in to be as "competitive" as I could and ended up getting burned. But the conversations in our suggestion boards focus more on tanking than inactivity nonetheless. Again, this isn't a shot at Alex the Rays GM, I'm just using this as an example.

I would suggest a conversation that focuses on roster limits and activity first, see if that changes things over a year or two, and then revisit this whole tanking thing. Right now, you really can't fault guys who do it because it's really their best bet at accumulating the necessary depth to compete in a league with unlimited roster spots and a shortage of available players. Rather than spending our energy punishing guys for getting better by bottoming out, let's focus the conversation on making it more possible to improve through trying to move upward.

[Orioles GM (Michael)]

One thing to add: The two fixes (roster limits, enforcing activity) also improve free agency, because a broader pool of available players makes it so there's less incentive for buyers to be part of sign-and-trade deals with rebuilders who sign players to megadeals, since there are other options to turn for players.

[D'backs GM (Kyle)]

The Rangers traded Gibson at the deadline.

[Blue Jays GM (Stephen)]

Honestly, I love this league where it is at, and wouldn’t change much about it. I don’t think we want to incentivize everyone to win because there is a natural cycle of competition. I think the points of the other rules proposed is to disincentivize not setting your line ups. Not setting a line up starts a chain reaction that effects the entire league. In this large of a league there will always be rebuilders, and there will always be teams where you don’t understand how they got that good. That is just the way fantasy baseball go.

[Royals GM (Bill)]

I think that tanking comes in two flavors...the teams that sell off marketable MLB assets to build a farm that will yield an inexpensive, competitive foundation one day and the teams that sit active players in an effort to lose just to get a higher draft pick.

I don't have a problem with the first scenario. It's really the only way to change a team's ability to truly compete and it's a strategy used in the Majors. In this scenario, I think the team should be looking to fill slots with at the very least, warm, active bodies, but I can say from experience, finishing in the middle every year is a recipe to always finishing in the middle.

The scenario where a team simply doesn't fill an empty slot, )or a slot occupied with an injured player, or one that's been sent down) with an active player on their roster is pretty unacceptable. It's one thing to undertake a strategy to get better by rebuilding, it's another to in essence, to suck worse than the other team on purpose through roster manipulation. I think one solution would be to force any active player into an open roster spot. If the owner fails to do so, then the commissioner should make that move.

In real baseball, teams often put bad, old, flawed, cheap players on the diamond while they rebuild. They don't ever have 4 guys on the field and 5 sitting on the bench.

Just my two cents.