MLBTR Chat Transcript

“But a “tank,” in my view, is a team like the A’s who are forced to blow things up for purely financial reasons, not for baseball-related or competitive reasons.”
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I’m phasing out here, and this mentality is one reason why.

Financial reasons are as much of a consideration to a MLB FO as baseball-related and competitive reasons. Always have been. Always will be. The same as any business.

Players have a multi-decade record of abandoning a city and a team – both of which they claimed to love being a part of – for more money elsewhere. They don’t even bother to say things like “I had turn down X tens of millions of dollars over Y years because I have to think of my family” anymore. Even the fans of the cities they leave accept that finances are a part of the equation, and usually the biggest part. Baseball-related and competitive reasons are secondary reasons at best for a player staying with a team. So it’s understandable that MLB FO’s have to work around that…same as with any business.

Over the past 15-20 years the A’s haven’t drawn well even when they’re competitive. The argument is that the A’s need a new park so fans will come. OK. The same thing was said of the Marlins (also small spenders) for decades. The Marlins finally got their park 12 years ago. They’re competitive this year. So far they’re 29th in home attendance, ahead of only the A’s. Pretty much where they (and the A’s) have been in attendance the past 12 years.

Discussing “tanking” would be applicable if all MLB revenues were put into fund and distributed equally between the 30 teams. But until that happens it’s sort of silly to have arbitration and “market salaries” to be the same for players whether the team employing them is in lowest 15% of revenues or the highest 15%.
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“The owner needs to spend more to be competitive” argument got through to the Reds owner 4-5 years ago. He gave multi-year contracts to a number of name players. Don’t get the best FA’s, but got some. The writers and most posters here celebrated the owners actions……

“They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words”
– Bob Dylan

The team didn’t win much more than they had, and revenues didn’t pick up anywhere near enough to offset the increase in salaries. Two years later they had to hold a fire sale to dump contracts before going bankrupt. They were criticized here in the articles and comment sections for doing that – people were aghast at the Reds actions. Yet 3/4’s of the way through the following season it came out that teams that took on those salaries weren’t getting a fraction of the production out of those players that they should have for that amount of money. A couple of people posted the combined WAR’s and salaries for those players. It was ridiculous. (Something like paying $70-plus in salaries that year for 4-7 WAR).