Major League Baseball is in a lockout, a strategy team owners think will give them leverage since their collective bargaining agreement with the players expired at the beginning of December.
Many concerns expressed by the MLB Players Association are about players getting paid what they’re worth. They want the league to raise its soft salary cap, prevent service time manipulation that keeps MLB-caliber players in the minor leagues, and address its tanking problem.
The players union has many valid concerns, but the tanking concern might be the most important of all. The league has perverse, socialist incentives in place that harm its competitive balance. It’s something Major League Baseball needs to fix to have a watchable product in some parts of the country.
In sports, tanking happens when an organization purposely fields a noncompetitive team so it can benefit from league rules that help struggling teams. In Major League Baseball, there are two main places where it helps.
For starters, the worst MLB team gets the first overall pick in the league’s draft the following season, the second-worst team gets the second overall pick, and so on. The World Series champion gets the last pick in the first round.
Additionally, MLB has a revenue-sharing program, which creates some parity in the amount of money that each team receives. About 48% of the local revenue generated by teams is distributed evenly among the 30 teams. They also get a share of the league’s national revenue. In 2018, for example, each team got $118 million in revenue-sharing from local revenue and $91 million from national revenue-sharing, according to Baseball Reference. That’s more than $200 million per team.
A lot of the money generated comes from bigger market teams such as the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, and Chicago Cubs, among others. It’s why former New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner complained that the revenue-sharing system is socialism back in 2011.
The Baltimore Orioles are a perfect example of what tanking looks like. They’re an awful team in an otherwise great division: the American League East. The Tampa Bay Rays won the division outright this year, but the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and Toronto Blue Jays were all in playoff contention up until the final day of the regular season. The fourth-place Blue Jays were one game away from making the playoffs (91-71). The fifth-place Orioles went 52-110.
The Orioles haven’t had a winning record since 2016; they’ve lost more than 105 games in each of the past three full-length regular seasons (2020 excluded). The Orioles also don’t spend much money; their $42.4 million payroll was by far the lowest in the big leagues in 2021.
The Orioles will get revenue-sharing and great picks in MLB drafts. The league allows them to be awful and not spend money and make money as a franchise. They’re allowing wealthy owners to hurt the game’s integrity while getting even richer with no incentive to improve their teams.
It also hurts the free agency market to have teams like the Orioles. They’re not going to sign any talented veterans. That means there is less competition for those players’ services. Therefore, they will command a lower salary.
The league should randomize its draft order and cut teams such as the Orioles out of its revenue-sharing program since they have no intention of being serious organizations. It’s not fair to the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs that they have to subsidize lousy teams. It’s also not fair to the players that teams such as the Orioles depress their wages.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
