As if baseball doesn't have enough problems with its intrinsic slow-motion, payroll differences, more strikeouts than hits, and the ruse of steroids not coming around again, there's a new bane on our ballfields:
Serial Tanking.
It's not just unsavory, as was noted with the Heat's playoff loss against the Philadelphia Seventy-tankers. It's also unimaginative, un-American and utterly taking over the baseball world beyond the veneer of any Yankees-Red Sox series that makes the sport look nationally relevant.
Seven teams are advancing toward 100-loss seasons, including the Marlins, whose ownership of Derek Jeter and Bruce Sherman hasn't just embraced tanking but lacks the communication skills to fess up to it.
Jeter inherited a mess. Give him that much. He had to rid himself of Giancarlo Stanton's crazy contract and had no fresh talent in the minors. So it was a slippery slope toward tanking under the guise of being awful today to build champions tomorrow.
Here's the larger problem: Those seven tankers -- the Marlins, Cincinnati, Tampa, Texas, Kansas City, Baltimore and the Chicago White Sox -- aren't even the final tally of the mess. Others, like Atlanta and (soon) Philadelphia in the Marlins division, are finishing years of tanking.
Every team can't win. Every tanker won't be rewarded for losing. The Marlins are so far on the back end of the tanking timeline that they have to hope Atlanta (which is good) and Philadelphia (which isn't) somehow screw up their collected talent.
Tanking, you see, is baseball's new Moneyball. You remember Moneyball. Faced with a small payroll, Oakland's Billy Beane stressed certain stats to value on-base percentage and fielding.
For a few years, he maintained enough strategic advantage to turn Oakland into not just a winner but himself into Brad Pitt in the Hollywood movie. Teams followed, of course, and any analytical advantage was lost. You just had a bunch of teams copy-catting their way through grabbing players.
Houston and the Chicago Cubs tanked when it was a novel idea hatched by three neighbors drinking beer in their backyard. Houston did a tremendous job in averaging 104 losses between 2011 and 2014. Fun, eh? It had a new, publicly financed stadium, too, if you want to draw the parallel to the Marlins.
Chicago went the same route. It wasn't as successful as Houston. It only lost a minimum of 89 games between those same 2011 and 2014 seasons. But out of those drafts and trades and miserable good fortune, they built championship teams.
Easy, right?
Except, again, if a dozen teams are in various levels of tanking, not all of them will win. That's why Commissioner Rob Manfred has a major problem in his desk, though he's taking the Jeter approach of deny, deny, deny.
Plenty are upset by it. The non-tanking owners are in some form, because their revenue-sharing dollars aren't going into building the product. Players and agents are, because there are fewer teams out there spending money.
Fans? Well, it says something when the Tanking Seven are among the lowest nine teams in attendance. Tampa Bay Times sports writer Marc Topkin counted 974 fans at a game between tanking Tampa and the Chicago White Sox.
Jeter said the other day he was disappointed by the Marlins attendance, which is matched by the disappointment of most baseball fans in South Florida with him so far.
All this spills into the other area that draw a sports' interest together: Television ratings. Baseball is increasingly a regional sport. If you're team's good and playing for something important, you watch. If not, you don't. And a lot of people aren't this year.
The sport increasingly sounds like a Hollywood movie. No, not Moneyball. Try the original Major League.
Player Eddie Harris: "What if we don't finish last?"
Manager Lou Brown: "[The owner] will replace you with someone who will."
The good news for the Marlins players is they can coast to last place this season. As will so many of their tanking brethren. That's the easy part, though. Let's see all these tankers try to win in the future.
Sports on 05/25/2018