Tanking is a con

In the tradition of Charles Finley’s Kansas City A’s, Orioles private equity liquidator Mike Elias decided to move the fences back so that the flameouts and unripened D prospects he almost exclusively uses to pitch give up fewer homers at home. His justification for this is some remarkable cynicism:

We still expect that this will remain somewhat of a hitter’s park, and we like that about Camden Yards. But the conditions here have been very extreme towards the very most extreme in the league. It’s not a secret. It’s been the case for decades. And part of having a winning program is the ability to recruit free-agent pitchers, and that has been a historical challenge for this franchise.

Now that is someone telling you their urine is Dom Perignon. As Thompson observes:

How the hell would Mike Elias know anything about recruiting free-agent pitchers? Seven free-agent pitchers signed contracts this winter that will pay them in annual salary approximately as much as the Baltimore Orioles will spend on their entire 26-man roster. Max Scherzer will earn nearly twice as much this season as Elias will spend on his whole damn baseball team. Elias has shown less than zero interest in associating his team with professional-grade pitching…

If hearing that Elias explained away the desecration of the last non-desecrated piece of the bullcrap baseball operation he’s been running over the last few years by saying that it needed to be done in order to recruit free-agent pitchers makes you feel absolutely insane—if it makes you feel like you can’t possibly be living in a coherent reality—allow me to offer you one possible explanation: Mike Elias is stunting on you. Tearing up the outfield wall like that is his version of a touchdown dance. He’s already demonstrated beyond any doubt that he personally hates every single Orioles fan and wants to do everything in his power to make every summer as miserable as possible for all of them, and now he’s doing the Electric Slide just to demonstrate how much fun he’s having. There is, unfortunately, nothing you can do about it.

Elias comes from the Astros, who are of course the go-to justificaiton for every executive who wants to argue that their team getting their brains beat out year after year is actually a brilliant game of eleven-dimensional chess that is going to pay off with a super team. But even leaving aside the vast majority of championship teams that are built without multi-year tanks and the fact that tanks that completely fail (cf. the two teams that tore themselves down to the studs for Connor McDavid, who are in deep rebuilds and outright tanking again respectively), let’s consider the Astros. Here are the #1 picks that resulted directly from their three years of losing 106+ games:

2012: Carlos Correa

2013: Mark Appel

2014: Bradley Aiken

In other words, what being the worst team in baseball for three years running netted them was a very good shortstop who didn’t quite become a star, and…that’s it. (They did pull actual star Alex Bregman out of the side pocket in 2015 because of bizarre MLB rules that give you a bonus top pick if you screw up the previous one badly enough, but that’s obviously not a deliberate or replicable strategy.) The Tanking-Industrial Complex is largely based on the ridiculous idea that you could not have assembled a collection of prospects like this picking 10th every year instead of first. And Correa is now in Minnesota, and the Astros still project as the best team in the division. Because…they’re really good at evaluating and developing talent! That, and not tanking, is why they’ve won. There’s no reason to believe they would be materially worse had they just had ordinary 92-loss seasons from 2011-3. Ordinary rebuilds like the Braves just pulled off work as well or better as years of deliberate non-competitiveness, without totally ripping off your fans for years in the process.

Elias and Angelos don’t have some secret master plan to build a superteam, they’re just cheap fucks selling a tall tale to gullible people who secretly wish they were working for Bain Capital.