The Ethics of Tanking
In many leagues, free agents are awarded to teams in reverse order of the standings. This is intended to promote some measure of parity during the season and keep all teams engaged.
The practice is common and helps a league’s bottom-dwellers stay competitive despite encountering bad luck, particularly if an owner has been hard-hit by injuries. But it also rewards poor performance. In fact, there is often a benefit for a team to get off to a slow start in April so it has first shot at the prime early-season free agents. Some teams might under-play their April lineups on purpose.
Similarly, there are some leagues where a team’s spot in the final standings determines future draft picks. A league might pay out to the top five teams but then reward the losers in inverse standings order. The intent is for teams to fight for a money spot. However, if 5th place is out of reach, the bigger benefit is for a team to finish lower in the standings, so some teams tank deliberately.
This is similar to how things used to work in some major sports leagues, where teams routinely lost games in order to improve their draft position. That’s what drove the decision by many to move to a lottery system.
But is any of this ethical?
Well, it’s fantasy baseball. Your league, your rules, your interpretation of ethics, right?
There is the story of the 2012 Olympic semi-final badminton match between China and South Korea. The winner would face a strong Chinese team in the subsequent medal round; the loser would face a weak Danish team. So both teams performed as poorly as they could in order to have the better matchup in the next round. Some argued the behavior was cheating; others proclaimed it was a strategic play to better their chances of a gold medal.
In the end, the Badminton World Federation disqualified eight players from the tournament. Officially, they were found guilty of “not using best efforts” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport” by playing to lose matches in order to manipulate the draw.
Sure, there is the spirit of fair competition, particularly in Olympic play. But can you draw a firm line in the sand?
In competition, especially tournament or seasonal league play, the goal is to win the long game. The Dodgers will be gratified to win the NL West, but unless they bring home a World Series title, they will have fallen short of the true goal. Flags fly forever; nobody remembers who finishes second.
The goal is not to win the battle but to win the war. And strategically losing a few battles for the greater good is not an unknown concept. There are precedents.
• A hitter will be intentionally walked so that the pitcher can face a weaker bat.
• A star pitcher will be held for a more important game and a weaker arm deployed in a game that a team is more likely to lose.
• Heck, we’ve become more accepting of hitter strikeouts as the sacrifice for the potential of a bigger hit.
These are short-term, tactical “tanks.” Does the long-term impact of a particular tactic affect its ethical implications? The above tactics would potentially affect no more than the outcome of an individual at-bat, or an individual game. Does that make them more likely to pass the smell test?
What if the intent is more widespread? When the White Sox traded off Chris Sale, Adam Eaton, Jose Quintana, Todd Frazier and David Robertson for prospects—essentially tanking the 2017 season – was that ethical? It seems like that is an accepted practice as they were playing the long game, hoping to build a better future. Yet a similar “dump deal” pulled off by the team ahead of you in the fantasy standings will generate calls for a commissioner veto. Is there an ethical difference?
How is this any different from a second division team deliberately pulling its better players out of the active lineup to finish lower in the standings and garner a better draft pick for next year?
Those who argue against these practices cite the integrity of the competition, or a team’s moral obligation to its fans. But if the obligation is to win a championship, and the tank is a means to an end, where do we draw the line?
In fantasy, the best approach is to design your league to avoid having to make these value calls. Though flawed, FAAB bidding is better than awarding free agents in reverse order of the standings. Future draft positioning should always award teams for doing their best.
In the XFL experts league, there is a winner, and there is everyone else. Future draft order is always 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-1. Does this discourage the teams at the bottom of the standings? Since when do we need to coddle losers? They just need to try harder next time.
Some might think that this approach creates longer-term separations between the “haves and the “have-nots.” I think there is so much season-to-season volatility in the game today that this assertion is highly overblown.
We auction players in our league, but do penalize the last place team in salary cap (-5%) for next year. We also pay out to the team which has the best improvement in calendar month all season long, so if you’re out of the running, there’s still something to play for.
In Fantasy football, once the playoffs (or toilet bowl) begin, we are all playing for picks. So in a 14 team format, with 6 making the playoffs and 8 in the toilet bowl bracket, the team which wins out from the bottom 8 will get first choice of pick, the loser of the toilet bowl title game 2nd pick and so on. We do also reward the league champ with pick choice #7. This eliminates rewarding teams for poor performance. This method could easily be applied to a redraft baseball league.
I am in an 11 team Royo league. 1-3 get paid. 4-8 draft in that order. This provides incentive to finish strong and minimizes the effect tanking would have on individual categories.
We have done a few things over the years:
– 1-5 cash…next year’s draft order is 5-12, then 4-3-2-1…
– If your team dips below 35 points ( you “over-tank” ), you lose keepers the next year
Our biggest problem is still tank trades – we encourage teams to spread the wealth when they tank, and not dump everyone to one team…
While the idea of tanking is reprehensible to me, I do understand the intended goal when an owner bags his season halfway into May once it’s painfully obvious that a combination of a lousy draft and mediocre keepers has doomed his/her chances of competing from Day One. From a competitive aspect, one or more teams’ packing it in hurts the league – especially when they don’t make free agent moves, trades, or (my pet peeve as a commissioner) maintaining a full, 25-man roster.
We do not punish tankers. They draft first from Round 1 through 10, then first from 11 through 20 – all subject to change via offseason deals. I look at it this way – if you want to throw $225 away without trying, God bless you. Me?, I go down swinging from the Opening Day bell.
And as for dump trades, they are prohibited. In our nearly thirty full seasons, I have rejected ridiculously-lopsided deals on a few occasions and forced the owners to come up with one that was more palatable. Our rules strictly outlaw dump trades; nowhere do they prohibit dumping on a team basis however, and therein lies the rub.
Do your league rules provide a definition for what exactly constitutes a dump trade?
In my 12 team snake draft roto league, the top 3 teams get paid. The team that gains the most points from July 1 through the end of the year (but does not finish top 3) gets his choice of draft position the following year (so far it’s been the first pick and Mike Trout). The team with the next highest gain in points (and again, does not finish top 3), gets the first minor league pick (minor leaguers are a secondary draft). I want to reward teams that continue to compete and manage active teams, not the other way around.
I recommended to a League Commish (in the only league I play in which I am not the Commish) to set the next season’s draft order 4-12, then 3-2-1, since only top 3 pay out. Apparently he only thought it was a good enough idea for 3 draft spots. So draft order goes 4-5-6, then 12 through 7, then 3-2-1. Kinda silly, but now I’m in the “ethics” position…stuck between 9th and 11th for the last month or so, I fell into the basement last week, and now have to decide whether or not to “tank” it the rest of the way, to try to get 4th pick. However, consider this: if you could realistically control your own fate to finish between 9th and 12th, to get a 4-7 spot in next year’s draft, is it really beneficial to get #4? Try to figure next year’s top 7 players, figure you won’t get the top 3, do you really need to get the 4th “best” player available? Or is 4 through 7 basically interchangeable, and you could set yourself up for a better 2nd rounder by getting a lower draft spot? If you look at the draft overall, rather than just the first round, would you rather be close to the “wheel”? Is 4th draft spot close enough to the “wheel” to be an effective spot? Or would you rather be closer to the middle, to try to even out how many players go off the board between picks? Just some things to think about if you happen to be in my position right now.
A lot of this is personal preference, but for me…
1. Spots 4-7 are definitely interchangeable. We’re just not good enough to project performance wit that much precision.
2. Given the above, I do prefer to be as close to the wheel as possible. In a 12-teamer, having spots 12-13 potentially gives me a shot at better talent than 1-24 or any other spot in between. See: https://babsbaseball.com/the-best-seed-to-draft-from/