MLBPA: Tanking Pittsburgh Pirates told tanks but no tanks… again
By Jeff Kallman
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.”