When the players and the owners talk about tanking, what do they really mean? Teams that tank are trying to win, just not this year. In fact, we used to call tanking rebuilding. For example in a seven season stretch between 1977 and 1983, the New York Mets posted a losing record every year. The finished with a .404 winning percentage, 25 out of the 26 teams, between the 24th place Blue Jays and the 26th place Mariners. Both those teams came into existence in 1977.
The next seven years saw the Mets post a .588 winning percentage, the best in the majors. The Blue Jays were second at .558. Both teams used those down years to draft well and build long-term winners.
Other teams really do try to win every year. The Yankees are probably the best example of that. Even the Yankees had a down period leading into the resurgence in the 1990s, and that down period, while not tanking led to the core four and their run of World Championships.
What we have is a league that looks like this. The Season Simulator is set to assign a random intrinsic winning percentage to each team. If you keep clicking on the enter button, you’ll see that often the seasons produce 100 win and 100 loss teams. You’ll also notice that the the standings are related to the intrinsic winning percentage, but often the standings follow a different order. Like the 1984 Mets some times you see a team with an intrinsic winning percentage below .500 do very well.
What the players seem to want is something more akin to this. That’s the season simulator set so that every has the same intrinsic winning percentage of .500. This doesn’t mean that every team is mediocre, it means that every team is evenly matched. If you keep hitting the enter button, you’ll see fewer 100 win/loss seasons, but there is still a very good spread between the best and worst teams. So teams compete for talent to the point that the talent is evenly distributed, but there are still great and awful years due to the randomness of the game.
My question is, what do fans want? Do you want teams to ebb and flow, going through down periods to build long team winners, or do you want each team to be evenly matched every year, and the winning or losing of divisions, pennants, and championships is all rather random? I think the game benefits when lots of different teams win. I also think front offices should matter. So how do we take away the benefit of tanking so that teams are trying to get to the evenly matched level? That may be the exact question the two sides in the lockout end up debating.