CLEARWATER, Fla. — Tanking is one of the hot issues in pro sports these days, especially in Philadelphia where the 76ers haven’t exactly been averse to losing games if it means more ping pong balls.
The issue has recently been mentioned in association with baseball as a bad or rebuilding team stands to benefit not only from picking high in the amateur draft but also from being allotted more money to spend on drafted and international players, by virtue of rules that were collectively bargained in November 2011.
The notion of tanking in baseball has come up a couple of times over the last few days in Phillies camp, most recently on Monday when players’ union head Tony Clark made his annual visit.
There is some relevance in Phillies camp not necessarily because the Phillies have been widely accused of tanking last year, but because they did post the worst record in the majors last season, a distinction that earned them the first pick in the June draft, the largest international spending pool ($5.6 million) and the second-largest draft spending pool ($13.4 million). These “spoils” of defeat would come in pretty handy for any rebuilding team. The Phillies are in the second year of theirs.
Rebuilding teams don’t spend big on the free-agent market — indeed the Phils signed just one major-league free agent (pitcher David Hernandez) this winter — and the players’ association surely notices that. Clark said it would be worth the union having “dialogue” in relation to the next collective bargaining agreement (the current one expires in December) if there was something to “suggest that a team was starting a season and not putting the best team on the field that they possibly could.”
But Clark, a former player with the Tigers and Yankees, also said he understands that teams essentially go through cycles.
“We want to have flexibility and understand that there are certain challenges market to market, there are times when windows close where you’ve made a heck of a run and you realize that you may have to reboot it,” he said.
After winning five division titles and a World Series from 2007 to 2011 then missing the playoffs three straight seasons, the Phillies stepped back and anointed themselves a rebuilding club in October 2014.
Though he did not start the Phillies’ rebuild, Andy MacPhail, who joined the organization in June and took over as president in October, is its current overseer.
He bristles at the notion of tanking in relation to the Phillies and baseball as a whole.
“That annoys me beyond belief,” he said. “I don’t know why it’s been annoying me, but it’s a strategy that’s been employed in other sports, not so much in baseball. Teams have been rebuilding in baseball for 100 years.”
The Phillies were the worst team in the majors for much of the 2015 season and ultimately ended that way. But there was a stretch in July and August when they won 16 of 22 games. That run ended when their best player, Maikel Franco, suffered a broken wrist. If Franco hadn’t gotten hurt, maybe the Phillies wouldn’t have the top pick in the June draft and there would be fewer whispers of tanking.
As for this year, MacPhail defended his team’s tack by pointing out that general manager Matt Klentak traded for two veteran starters, Jeremy Hellickson and Charlie Morton. The Phillies took on $15 million in salary for those two pitchers.
“I don’t know that Matt would have gone out and acquired Hellickson and Morton if he wanted to lose 120 games,” MacPhail said. “He went through some effort to put stabilizers in the rotation. Yeah, we’re trying to skew young, accrue as much young talent as we can, but we have zero interest in conceding anything when 7:05 rolls around.”