11/4/2021

What Is Tanking? What Isn’t Tanking?

If you say “tanking is wrong, it shouldn’t be allowed,” I think you’ll get very little argument from anybody.

The gray area isn’t whether tanking is okay or whether it should be tolerated, but what it actually is. Opinions differ, and these differences can cause problems. I speak from experience; in one of my leagues one GM accused another of tanking. Suffice to say that the accuser and the accusee did not exactly come to a meeting of the minds. It wasn’t fun. I would sure love to avoid that happening again.

A quick aside: just in case there is anybody not already on board, I’ll make it clear why I think tanking is wrong, at least in this league: it’s wrong because it’s not fair. In this league we provide just one concession to bad teams to help them improve: draft seeding. The worse a team is, the higher they get to pick in the next draft.

The way we determine which teams are the worst is by their won-lost records; there’s really no other way to do it. But if some teams are doing everything they can to win games—but still losing—and other teams aren’t trying very hard at all to win, won-lost records might being very misleading. Teams that are in fact much worse than other teams might be winning more games—and are being punished with worse draft seeding. In that case the team that’s reaping the benefit of being the worst team (the only benefit of being the worst team) isn’t actually the worst team. They’re just taking what belongs to the worst team.

So obviously, that’s no good. We could set up a bad-team lottery to discourage tanking like the NBA has, but I’d rather not. I’d rather just trust that teams are not going to try to lose games on purpose.

We do not, technically, have a rule against tanking, and since tanking is nigh-impossible to define, I don’t think we’re ever going to have one.

Things that might look, to some people, like tanking, but in my opinion are not:

• Trading away good players for prospects and/or draft picks. This does make a team worse in the short run, but with the clear intention of trying to make it better in the long run. Not tanking in my book.
• Occasionally benching good players to give the kids a chance to start. The key word here is “occasionally”. Giving young/developing players increased playing time during a hopeless season is sensible and smart. That being said, if you’re just parking the stars on the bench more or less permanently, it will look fishy.
• Shutting down aging and/or fragile players a little early to avoid that 13-month injury occurring at the end of the season. Again, there is a key term here, and that is “a little early”. A week isn’t too early, in my opinion. A month or more definitely is.

Things that do look more like tanking to me:

• Keeping young players in the minors (reserve roster) even after they are clearly ready to play in the bigs
• Benching good, healthy players for long stretches or sending them to the reserve roster
• Playing players out of position. I’m not talking about teaching players new positions that they have the skills but not the experience to play; I’m talking about putting a guy with no arm at third, which I’ve seen more than once in this league, or putting a non-catcher behind the plate, or putting a guy with below-average range in center field, etc. Injuries and a lack of depth may cause GMs to have to do things like this temporarily; it should definitely be a very short-term exception and not the rule. There are always free agents available that can fill in. Putting a poor hitter at shortstop who can actually play shortstop is better than putting an average hitter there who can’t really play the position at all.
  
  I’m kind of hyper-aware of defense, so I may view this more suspiciously than others would.

To be clear, I am not saying “if you’re doing any of the things on the second list, you’re tanking.” What I’m saying is, things on that list give the appearance of tanking. It’s a good idea to avoid giving the appearance of tanking.

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