Pittsburgh Pirates: MLBPA tells tanking Bucs, tanks but no tanks... again

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The MLBPA grievance against the Pittsburgh Pirates tanking becomes an annual event. As if they weren’t already coming off a nightmare 2019.

Baseball and its lovers cherish or at least tend to live by annual traditions as much as anything else. The ones they cherish include spring training, the All-Star Game, the World Series. The ones they’re not so wild about include off-season free agency hagglings, award snubs, and Hall of Fame snubs, among others.

Now we may have to add one to the latter category: the Major League Baseball Players Association filing an anti-tanking grievance against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

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The union did it the previous two years, according to The Athletic‘s Rob Biertempfel, and they’ve done it again. Plain and simple, the union says the Pittsburgh Slumber Company violates the Show’s revenue-sharing rules requiring teams to improve the product on the field, no matter what their revenue shares let them do off it.

“After reaching a franchise-record $99 million [single-season payroll] in 2016, the payroll has steadily dropped,” Biertempfel writes. “Starling Marté would have been the team’s highest-paid player at $11.5 million this year, but the was traded in January for two minor leaguers. The Pirates are left with a $51 million payroll, which is third-lowest in the majors this year and roughly the same as it was in 2012.”

To think that the team’s new general manager, Ben Cherington—whom Pirates fans have every reason to gaze upon with hope considering his previous such service with the Boston Red Sox—is pondering the route of the dashing Chicago White Sox. Cherington’s thinking about tendering contract extension offers to pitcher Joe Musgrove, first baseman Josh Bell, shortstop Kevin Newman, and third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, among other young players.

To think, too, that the MLBPA wants to ding the Pirates for two or three years’ worth of tanking on the same day that ESPN’s Sam Miller, perhaps audaciously, wrote an essay headlined, “Remember when tanking ruled MLB? Those days might be over.” Not quite? Emphasis on “might?”

(Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images) /

From Tanking to World Series Champs

Miller observes a three-year run in which the World Series was won by teams coming off “steep, stark rebuilds,” as fancy a three-word phrase for tanking as might exist. The teams: the 2015 Kansas City Royals, the 2016 Chicago Cubs, and the 2017 Houston Astros. The third, Miller continues, “made losing now to win later look so predictable that Sports Illustrated predicted their title three seasons in advance, to the year.

Set aside for the moment the Astrogate taint and read on. Miller notes five other teams in 2017 (the White Sox, the Cincinnati Reds, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the San Diego Padres) with payrolls cut 25% down from their peaks who seemed “punting” (Miller’s word) 2017 but expecting to get good in each of the following two seasons.

The results of that were mixed, of course. The Phillies’ best-of-prospects “have mostly busted spectacularly,” Miller writes, while the Padres rebuilt a splendid farm system behind a none-too-splendid Show product, and the White Sox—lately hogging the headlines with the Yoan Moncada extension and a group of young players about whom boring is something you can’t say about them— “nothing close to inevitable.”

The most successful of the Miller quintet, of course, is the Brewers, who went all the way to a seventh National League Championship Series in 2018 and got bumped to one side by the eventual world champion Washington Nationals in last year’s National League wild-card game. But they may not be so much another tank success as “more about the benefits of cannily acquiring and developing a bunch of really good overachievers.”

Why Tanking Is Just Fan Abuse

Last July, the redoubtable Washington Post essayist Thomas Boswell put it flatter than the Miami Marlins—tanking is fan abuse:

The idea of trying to lose 100 to 115 games, while claiming it’s a long-term plan for glory, always has been a long-shot notion, seldom born out in actual baseball experience. Of the current 30 teams, 20 have never in the past 50 years lost more than 200 games in consecutive seasons, at least not after you exclude their early expansion-team days. Yet those 20 teams have won 33 of the past 50 World Series, exactly the ratio you’d expect if there was no difference between having a Horror Era and never being truly awful at all.

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In other words, the 2016 Cubs and the 2017 Astros were outliers at best. (And, in the case of the Astros, cheaters at worst.) Boswell then believed six teams were fighting to the last breath to see . . . who would lose 98 or more games. How far down the well did they end up? Let’s see.

The Marlins lost 105
The Royals lost 103
The Baltimore Orioles lost 108
The Detroit Tigers lost 114.

But two actually lost under 98: the Seattle Mariners (94) and the Toronto Blue Jays (95). Whoopee.

Of course, they weren’t tanking but “just” jockeying to get that yummy number one overall draft choice. And of course, the unsinkable Titanic had no damn business sinking because that naughty iceberg had no damn business being there. “[W]e’re watching a bull market in stupidity,” Boswell wrote, knowing damn well the keyword was stupidity. “And cupidity, too, since all those teams think they can still make a safe cynical profit, thanks to revenue sharing, no matter how bad they are.”

As long as we’re talking tanking in 2019, be reminded that the Pirates lost a mere 93 games. Be reminded, concurrently, that the Titanic on the ocean floor doesn’t look like half the wreck.

Most of last year’s tankers at least tried to play with brains. The Pittsburgh Slumber Company played on the field as though their brains sank faster into the Allegheny River than one of Derek Dietrich‘s more notorious home runs. Their injury-riddled pitching staff didn’t let the aches and pains stop them from developing a well-earned headhunting reputation and an apparent indifference to the brawls their beanballs broke open.

Off the field? There’s no rule written or unwritten saying a tanking team has to become a clubhouse carpeted by rubber wall-to-wall eggshells, either, but the 2019 Pirates managed to do just that. Lighting a match risked blowing the joint to smithereens. That’s how toxic the Pirate clubhouse was reported to have become.

And that’s without even thinking about the sordid case of the best pitcher on the 2019 Pirates, Felipe Vasquez, arrested on charges in Florida and Pennsylvania involving his dalliance with a girl who may have been under sixteen when his involvement with her began. The Vasquez case (he goes on trial this month on the Pennsylvania charges) sent the Pirates’ 2019 from disaster to A Nightmare on Federal Street.

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The Pirates finally executed longtime general manager Neal Huntington and manager Clint Hurdle after the season. They hired Cherington to bring in the hazmat team and begin remaking and remodeling things, hopefully before franchise icon Roberto Clemente stops imitating the spin cycle in his grave. Cherington might take a moment to try convincing his overseers that making money has only so many virtues compared to actually trying to put even a minimally decent team on the field.

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Maybe the Pirates’ story will convince the other tankers to say tanks but no tanks, we’ve abused what’s left of our fans long enough. And maybe I’ll be named commissioner of baseball.

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