As Opening Day approaches, Major League Baseball is battling the perception that it’s suffered from the success of its tanking teams. Both of MLB’s last two title winners, the Cubs and the Astros, topped the 100-win mark during the respective regular seasons that set up their championship runs. Their recent dominance was made possible, in part, by periods during which the two teams focused on the future at the expense of the seasons at hand, dealing away productive major-league players, slashing payroll, and stockpiling prospects through trades and the draft.
A year before the Cubs snapped their string of 108 years without a World Series win, president of baseball operations Theo Epstein, the architect of their eventual victory, said, “Whatever team wins the World Series, their particular style of play will be completely en vogue and trumpeted from the rooftops by the media all offseason—and in front offices—as the way to win.” Because both the Cubs and the Astros are closely associated with what we might charitably label “short-term, intentional non-competitiveness,” their back-to-back post-tanking titles have appeared to encourage other teams to pursue similar strategies, or at least to discuss their competitive priorities more transparently. About a third of baseball’s teams could currently be classified as being mired in some stage of a rebuild, whether as part of a preemptive attempt to fend off prolonged losing, or because they’re depleted after a stretch of success.
Although the Cubs’ and Astros’ recent records make it hard to argue that their strategies weren’t sound, the perceived spread of tanking has given birth to a backlash. Some media members and industry insiders have blamed Major League Baseball for this offseason’s stagnant free-agent market—super-agent Scott Boras, in one of his unnecessary nautical analogies about baseball economics, mentioned the number of teams that are “no longer fishing [for free agents]”—and others have claimed that tanking has made the league a less competitive and less compelling product.
Critics of tanking have taken to derisively quoting former commissioner Bud Selig’s line from 2000 about competitive balance: “Every fan has to have hope and faith. If you remove hope and faith from the mind of a fan, you destroy the fabric of the sport.” Earlier this year, Boras, who called tanking a “non-competitive cancer,” asked, “Where’s that hope and faith now?” while The L.A. Times’ Bill Shaikin wrote, “Spring training opens in two weeks, and hope and faith is dead all across America.” At this point, though, there’s little evidence that the game is as hopeless and faithless as those scathing remarks indicate.
One problem with the tanking critiques is that the term itself has probably been over-applied. Even the Cubs and Astros examples aren’t entirely alike. The Astros hit a nadir of 51 wins and had four sub-71-win seasons, including a three-year span in which the team accrued 324 losses. The Cubs bottomed out at 61 wins and only twice won fewer than 73 games. The Astros landed the no. 1 pick in three consecutive amateur drafts; the Cubs’ lone selection in the top three was the no. 2 pick that netted Kris Bryant in 2013. The Astros’ Opening Day payroll plummeted to $26.1 million in 2013, while the Cubs’ payroll never dipped below $92.7 million. One of those tanks wasn’t exactly like the other. And as tanking creep has progressed, teams in the midst of stages that might once have been classified as “rebuilding” or merely “being bad” have been lumped together in the same non-competitive crew.
What we can say with some confidence is that baseball’s competitive landscape has looked a little anomalous in each of the past two springs. As my colleague Zach Kram documented this month, the teams that composed the 2017 playoff field—almost all of which look likely to be back in the hunt this season—collectively brought back a higher percentage of their positive WAR than any other class of MLB playoff teams since the 1980s, which suggests that those elite clubs’ closest competitors weren’t applying much pressure. The projections for 2018 also paint a picture of a somewhat stratified league. FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan has assembled an archive of preseason projections going back to 2005. Those projections are pulled from a cross section of systems with slightly varying methodologies, which means that year-to-year comparisons aren’t quite apples to apples, but because every projection system has been continually tweaked in that time, we’ll work with what we have.
Based on that 14-year sample, the standard deviation of this year’s projected win totals—a measure of how closely individual teams’ win totals cluster around the mean—is the highest on record, besting 2017’s then-high-water mark. In other words, the league’s distribution of talent does seem less compressed than usual.
Of course, preseason projections don’t always accurately reflect full-season reality, and some supposed “super-teams” don’t deliver. (Cue the crotchety-commentator type intoning, “That’s why they play the games.”) A graph of the annual standard deviations of actual team winning percentage during MLB’s modern era (1901 on) tells a different story.
These recent results don’t look out of line with historical norms. The standard deviation of last year’s win totals was virtually identical to the expansion era (1961 on) baseline, and lower than it was in GM Jeff Luhnow’s first two years with the Astros. As ESPN’s Dan Szymborski tweeted last month in reference to a similar data display, “point out the moment tanking blew up some magical era of competition.”
While the extent to which wins are spread out supplies a useful snapshot of the gulfs between teams, we can quantify “hope and faith” more precisely than that. As always, baseball supplies a specialized stat with an on-the-nose name: In this case, the Hope and Faith Index (HFI).
The HFI was created by Gerald Schifman after the 2016 season for an article in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2017, which was later published online. The metric, which Schifman computed back to 1974 (the first season for which Retrosheet’s record of MLB games is complete), was designed to evaluate how well Selig had succeeded in his stated goal of restoring hope and faith to the game by measuring the average number of wins separating teams from the closest playoff spot.
In the HFI formula, any team leading either a division or wild-card race has a deficit of zero. For any team that’s not currently in playoff position, the HFI notes the number of games to the nearest playoff berth, whether wild-card spot or division supremacy. Combine those deficits, divide the total by the number of teams, and we have the HFI. The lower the HFI figure, the closer the typical team is to an October ticket—and, in theory, the more hope and faith exists in the sport.
The graph below displays the yearly HFI back to 1974, save for the strike-shortened 1981, 1994, and 1995 seasons.
The HFI fluctuates significantly from season to season—another reason not to extrapolate too confidently from a single season’s results—but on the whole, the trend is downward, toward tighter races. Clearly, that’s closely related to the expansion of MLB’s playoff field: With the bump from four playoff teams in 1993 to eight in 1995, followed by the climb to 10 in 2012, the bar for playoff qualification fell, as did the margins by which the also-rans missed making it to October.
If we zoom in to examine the wild-card era alone, we can see that the annual HFI hasn’t increased over the six-season span since the introduction of the second wild card. The post-tanking triumphs of the Cubs and Astros haven’t led to less hope and faith yet.
Admittedly, the HFI at the end of a season may not necessarily reflect how the whole season felt; in some years, the standings are tighter on October 1 than they were throughout most of the summer. But HFI can also be calculated on a game-by-game basis to reflect the state of the standings at any point in the season. The chart below shows that last year’s races spawned more hope and faith than 2012’s for most of the second half of the season.
Hope and faith aren’t dead; they’re as healthy as ever. Granted, not all postseason spots are created equal. These days, a wild-card spot isn’t worth what it once was; prior to 2012, a wild card secured entry to the division series, whereas in the years since the system expanded, a wild card has guaranteed only one extra game.
Even so, proximity to a wild-card spot still inspires hope. The tanking alarmists aren’t merely mourning the difference between a division title and a ticket to the play-in game; they’re lamenting the loss of even a remote shot at contention. And thus far, at least, that perceived problem has been closer to a “nothingburger” (as Szymborski put it) than an existential threat. Even the 2017 regular season, which played out pretty predictably at the top of most divisions, featured several surprises. How many prognosticators anticipated the Twins rebounding from recording the worst record in baseball to qualify for the postseason—the first team ever to do so following a 100-loss season? Or, for that matter, the Rockies and Diamondbacks both winning wild cards while the Giants collapsed, the Yankees (not the typical underdog, but still a surprise team) coming within one win of the World Series, or the Brewers running neck-and-neck with the Cubs for most of the season?
The fact that hope and faith have proved resilient so far doesn’t mean that tanking will never sap some of the thrill from the sport. But being bad at baseball isn’t an innovation. The Astros may have taken tanking to an extreme, but there have always been teams that were far from contention, some of which were more overmatched than even that 2013 Houston team. Browse baseball’s back pages, and you’ll find franchises that functioned as de facto farm clubs for “competing” teams and repeated, unapologetic fire sales that predated the the Marlins’ by decades. Even in more recent times, teams like the Pirates and Royals languished in losing territory year after year, offering scant excitement in the present and even less encouragement for the future. Those teams weren’t tanking. They were worse: incompetent, broke, or both.
Anecdotally, it seems as if teams have grown more willing to make losing part of their plans, or at least to acknowledge that they aren’t always in the hunt. Losing, like the strikeout, has lost at least some of its stigma, as well as some of the financial risk that teams used to run before billion-dollar valuations, revenue sharing, regional sports networks, and Disney deals buoyed their bottom lines. But there’s good reason for that stigma to subside: Just as a strikeout can be better than a double play, a tank for the proverbial “right reasons”—as opposed to one orchestrated purely for financial gain—can keep a team out of a sustained stay in the cellar.
Last year, Szymborski showed why being bad for a brief period is often advantageous: Compared to past teams that continually lingered on the fringes of contention, teams that fell far from .500 got truly good again—and saw their attendance totals bounce back—quickly. A strategic, total teardown is a Band-Aid ripped off rather than peeled painfully, or a field left fallow to restore the soil. Even from a fan-entertainment perspective, the committed rebuilder may be a better show than the team that makes a half-hearted attempt to stay on the playoff periphery. The latter forces fans to watch veterans wither on the vine while their team wins 70-something games for appearances’ sake, while the former offers the foreplay of following the farm system, the thrill of watching future franchise cornerstones display their first flashes of stardom at the big-league level, and the likelihood of legitimate pennant hopes ahead. That’s not hope that the HFI can quantify, but it’s still sustenance for the long-suffering fan’s psyche. The tankbuilding White Sox teams of 2017 and 2018 may win fewer games than the mediocre, quasi-contending White Sox of 2009-16, but they probably won’t be worse for baseball or for their fans.
Even if the current divide between baseball’s best and worst teams was endangering the sport’s hope and faith—which simply isn’t a certainty—the problem would likely resolve itself. Baseball’s standings are cyclical, and the more teams tankbuild at any one time, the less value any one of them can expect to derive from the draft or from selling off stars. In any given year, there’s only one first-overall draft pick, and only one World Series winner. Baseball’s hit-or-miss draft and extended development timelines don’t provide the same incentive to tank as, say, basketball, a sport in which a no. 1 pick can star the next season and single-handedly transform a team. (Small wonder that “reverse analytics” hasn’t yet entered the MLB lexicon.) And even without implementing a salary floor or making revenue-sharing dollars dependent on wins, MLB has already taken slight steps to curtail tanking by reducing the drop-off in draft pools after the top pick.
When baseball has a period of atypical parity, some commentators complain that there are no great teams. When the great teams return, other pundits worry that there are too many terrible ones. The purported crisis varies, but baseball abides. Here’s hoping—and having faith—that it survives tanking, too.
Thanks to Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs and Gerald Schifman of The Hardball Times for research assistance.
