The Orioles won yesterday, snapping a flabbergasting 19-game losing streak, which was within a few games of being the worst losing streak in modern baseball history. It was their second double-digit losing streak of the year, a cozy little 14-gamer to end May being their first brush with the opposite of greatness. And yet, this was their plan. Be bad, get high draft picks, get good. It has worked before, quite famously.
In 2012, the Cubs were miserable, losing 101 games. In 2013, they finished 5 games better, at 96 losses, and in 2014 they rebounded all the way to being just an 89-loss team. But they used those awful seasons to get good draft position, selected some future stars, and created a team built for lasting success, starting in 2015. A year later, they won the World Series.
In 2011, the Astros were hopeless, an absolute joke of a team, losing 106 games. In 2012, they were worse. And in 2013, oh boy, the bottom really fell out. But they used their awful seasons to get good draft position, selected some future stars, and created a team built for lasting success, starting in 2015. Two years later, with the help of their friendly neighborhood trash cans, they won the World Series.
In 2017, the Giants were a shell of a baseball team. While they were better in 2018 and 2019, they never got anywhere that you’d consider “good.” In 2020, they were 2 games under .500 in the shortened season, missing the postseason by a game. But they never tore it down like the Astros and Cubs did, never really committed to the rebuild by destroying fan trust in the team for several years. As the many brilliant Giants fans in comment sections everywhere complained, they didn’t trade every player worth watching for prospects from 2017 through 2019, and where did that get them?
Oh, right. Here. The place where they have the best record in the league.
No, the Giants never tore it down, never declared to the fanbase that sure, there wasn’t anything worth watching now, but if you come back in 3-5 years, we’ll sure have some good players. They kept Madison Bumgarner through the end of three uncompetitive seasons, kept Brandon Belt around, didn’t even trade Will Smith when he was heading into free agency. Ownership dictated that the team buy for 2018, which was not the right move (as fun as it was having Andrew McCutchen around for 5 months), but they were probably also very uninterested in selling. They like making money every year, and good players who fans like help them make money.
Of course, the plan only worked because Farhan Zaidi made it work. Well, first he made up the plan, and then he made it work. Well, I guess he didn’t do either thing alone, since he had a whole front office to work with and disregarding that is just falling into some ridiculous Great Men of Baseball trap that is wholly unconnected to how anything works in reality, and focusing on one man because I don’t know how to divide up the credit among Zaidi, Jeremy Shelley, Scott Harris, and everyone else in the front office is clearly overly reductive.
Anyway, Zaidi didn’t want to tank. All the Savvy Baseball Knowers thought that meant the Giants would, at best, languish in mediocrity, and yet the Giants have done far more than that. Instead of losing lots of games to get high draft picks, they have instead scoured the Earth for minor league free agents, and invested in improvements to biomechanics, and dug up a coaching staff that can find every tiny edge to exploit. You don’t have to lose now to win later, it turns out.
And yet, there are still teams following that model. Maybe, like the Astros and the Cubs, it will work for them. The Orioles are certainly one of them, as are the Cubs (again!), the Pirates, and the Rangers. Only the Cubs came into the season not fully planning to be awful, and even they traded their best starter to the Padres before the year started, presumably knowing that they would wind up tearing it all down in July. The others never even pretended like they were going to compete, and then they didn’t compete, and so everything is going according to plan.
But the plan doesn’t always work. The Mariners haven’t made the playoffs since 2001, and have netted several high draft picks along the way, with nothing to show for it. Just last year, the Marlins made the playoffs for the first time since 2003, which they wouldn’t have done in a real season. The Pirates and Royals were both briefly relevant in the early-mid 2010s after decades of haplessness, but then after 2015, they faded and haven’t been back since. The Royals won a World Series, so they’re probably fine with that. The Pirates didn’t, so they aren’t.
There are no sure things, no guarantees. Incompetence now doesn’t guarantee competence later, and even when it arrives, it’s not necessarily going to last. The only things tanking accomplishes are saving owners some money and producing shitty baseball. If you’re the type of fan who likes to think you know everything and have all the answers (I am, uh, occasionally guilty of this), then it’s a thing you can point to that your team would just be doing if they were smart.
But it’s not that smart. Tanking is just triple distilled cowardice. “I’ll stop trying now, but I’ll tell everyone it was the plan!” There’s nothing impressive or admirable about it. Baseball exists to be entertaining, and the 2021 Orioles have done everything in their power to not be entertaining. They don’t deserve a high draft pick. They deserve to be relegated. The Giants have shown that there is a better way. More teams should take it. They won’t, but they should.