The discussion around tanking in Major League Baseball has been poisoned by apathy and acceptance. That’s not by accident either. MLB, like many other wealthy American institutions, knows that consumers’ attention span is small and their convictions lax. “It’s terrible but there’s nothing we can do” lets Rob Manfred and his cronies off the hook. There are absolutely things they can do. There’s just no incentive to do them, especially for Manfred who works at the behest of the people he’d be sanctioning. He has no intent on taking a knife to the hand that feeds him, because that same blade would immediately find his own throat.
That doesn’t make him a pragmatist; it makes him a coward. There’s no valor in a rich man enabling the exploitative actions of richer men. If Manfred was fired tomorrow, he’d never have to work again in his life. He’s not a hardscrabble member of our society, forced into compromising his beliefs due to an economy that makes its lowest class do so daily. He has power, the ability to wield it while knowing his outcome will be at best inconvenient. Instead he serves at the behest of 30 men who weaponize his cowardice to their benefit and the consumer’s embitterment.
Tanking is an economic discussion above all else. Everything involved ties back to money. Teams keeping their payrolls artificially low? More money in the owner’s pocket. Teams losing to acquire better draft picks? A team owner went on record in public this year to tell us how that was about money:
The entire structure of modern baseball is set up so that teams who don’t spend money are rewarded with premium assets, with built in rationalization rubber stamped from the top down. The biggest reward of all being franchise value maximization so that when the team is eventually sold, the appreciation in value generates more headlines about team ownership’s quality of investment. It rewards billionaires, while victimizing everyone else.
With that framing, the way to solve this issue becomes apparent if not unlikely. Abolishing the draft, arbitration, and the service time system would be wonderful. It’d create a more fair labor system for the players, create new storylines for media coverage, and inject life into a sport that most people are leaving for dead. There’s a better chance the Moon will host the 2023 World Series, so that’s for another day of dreaming.
Breaking Down Payroll
Let’s talk about big league payroll instead. There are three payroll figures worth considering when we judge how much money a team spends: Luxury tax payroll, total cash payroll, and total payroll. These all tell slightly different stories, but the main theme remains: Teams that spend more tend to succeed more. Of the 10 playoff teams in 2021, only two are below league average in all three categories: The Rays and the Brewers. Overall, the teams in the top half are more competitive than the ones in the bottom half.
This isn’t surprising: Better players cost more money. You’re not getting Shohei Ohtani or Mookie Betts for peanuts. Only the hyper efficient development clubs like Tampa Bay are able to straddle the line, but they’re the extreme outlier and not a model to mimic. As has always been the case, a blend of development and free agency acquisition is the way to find sustained success.
In service to that, the solution that would best fit the problems plaguing modern MLB starts with a modified salary floor. Taking the averages of luxury tax payroll, total payroll, and cash payroll gives us a number of $136M. If that was the floor, that leaves just over a third of the league out of compliance. That doesn’t change much if you shift to a percentage model; going from 100% to 85% at best brings one new team into compliance by one metric. Since the intent is encouraging spending, we’ll make the floor 90% of the average which makes our new salary floor $122.4M.
Where this floor will be different from other leagues such as the NHL is that teams won’t be mandated to reach it. Instead, not reaching the floor will trigger consequences. If you’re a team that fails to reach the salary floor by Opening Day, you’re ineligible for the playoffs while forfeiting next year’s first round pick and 20% of your draft pool this year.
This accomplishes a few things, albeit in a harsh manner. It removes the biggest benefit of tanking by removing the high first round pick carrot, while tamping down on the team’s ability to manipulate the salary pool come draft time. For example: the Tigers had a bonus pool in 2021 of $14.3M. Losing 20% would drop them to $11.5M, which is a big loss. That’s just the top bonus pool; the smaller your pool the more pain you’d feel.
The playoff ban may seem arbitrary, but it serves a purpose combined with the other two: it removes hope. Too long teams have sold fan bases hope in place of tangible progress, aspiration in lieu of actuality, and have gotten away with it. With no hopes of a title, no chance for a really good player in a year plus time, and the possibility of losing good players in the immediate future, teams have no hiding place. There’s no facade to put up in defense of voluntary frugality. The choice becomes simple: Put in minimum effort to try, or suffer actual consequences.
That last word is the obstacle. The ghouls that own teams by and large don’t want consequences, because society has insulated them for so long. They’re rich, powerful white men which is America’s most protected class. Their behavior has been canonized as correct by the Manfreds of the world, those who are supposed to serve an actual purpose but instead spend every waking moment carrying their water. There’s no accountability, no progress, no benefits for anyone other than the wealthy cabal. It’s an embarrassingly accurate picture of both American professional sports and America in general.
If MLB wanted to serve fans, they’d take measures like this. For too long the consumer has been shafted by greed enablement. At minimum they deserve their club not lying to them about their intent. Creating accountability and effort should be a top priority, but that’s not how the system functions. Instead it functions as a shield for richness, a vehicle for content, and sometimes a sports team worth the support of its fans. It’s a business that openly shows contempt for its most loyal audience, relying on their fealty and shaming them when it waivers in the face of the team’s own naked baseball barbarism. It’d be embarrassing if the people perpetrating this had any sense of shame.