MLBPA: Tanking Pittsburgh Pirates told tanks but no tanks… again

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.

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.

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.