Remember when tanking ruled MLB? Those days might be over

Again, though, we can't say for certain that the Blue Jays (95 losses), Royals (103), Marlins (105), Orioles (108) and Tigers (114) were trying to lose, or aggressively not trying to win. But:

• Those five teams had all cut payroll, by an average of $62 million from the 2017 payrolls -- about 40%.

• Of the 50 largest free-agent contracts signed the previous winter, none was landed by any of these five teams. The Tigers' signing of Tyson Ross -- for a total guarantee of only $5.75 million -- was the biggest expenditure any of these teams made.

• As it stands now, all five teams' payrolls are set to be lower again this year (despite a bit more significant action by the Blue Jays and Marlins this offseason).

Those are telltale signs of teams that are not just bad but uninterested in being even a little bit better.

Coupled with the rise of a handful of superteams, that has given baseball its least competitive balance in decades. At Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur found that the gap between the best and worst teams was already larger in 2018 than in any season since 1954. And then 2019 got even worse.

2. What I wrote then: "Baseball's commissioner, Rob Manfred, has argued that it's a 'self-checked strategy ... the more people adopt the strategy, the less likely it is to be successful ... only one guy can get the No. 1 pick.'"

Where we stand now: Whether Manfred is right about the causal relationship -- that more teams tanking means dividing up the tanking pie into smaller slices of tank -- it is clear the perceived inevitability of future success following full teardowns has taken a huge hit. Back in 2018, we were coming off three consecutive World Series that had been won like clockwork after deep, stark rebuilds: the Royals, Cubs and Astros, who made losing now to win later look so predictable that Sports Illustrated predicted their title three seasons in advance, to the year. The Astros' World Series was (in part due to widespread cheating that was revealed only years later but also) explicitly a bet on the predictability of the whole thing. They welcomed the shame of those losses because they knew, on a longer timeline, that baseball's unpredictability could be tamed.

But since then it has been harder to tame. The same year the Astros won the World Series, there were five teams we might have described as anti-competitive -- not good and not, for that season, trying to get good: the Padres, Reds, White Sox, Brewers and Phillies. They were projected at FanGraphs to win the fewest games entering that season, each had cut payroll at least 25% from peak payroll (without adjusting for inflation), and none had signed significant free agents the previous winter. All of them clearly seemed to be punting 2017, with expectations of consolidating and getting good in 2018 or 2019.

But unlike the Astros and Cubs, who zoomed from the bottom to the top as if it were guaranteed, those five teams have had mixed results in the years since. The Padres are exciting and did build one of the best farm systems ever, but they have finished in last place in each of the past two years, despite having already added Eric Hosmer (before 2018) and Manny Machado (before 2019). The White Sox finished 28 ½ games out of first place last year, and (like the Padres) are interesting for their youth but nothing close to inevitable. The Reds finished last in 2018 and (with a franchise-record payroll) finished fourth in 2019. The Phillies' top prospects from the rebuild era have mostly busted spectacularly, and despite adding Bryce Harper last year they still haven't had a winning season since the rebuild. They, like the Reds and Padres, fired their manager.

And then there are the Brewers, the undeniable victor from this group. They went from a position of apparent tanking entering 2017 to the seventh game of the NLCS in 2018 and another postseason appearance in 2019. They're the team a GM can still point to and claim inspiration from. But even the Brewers aren't nearly the prototypes the Astros and Cubs were: Despite lousy preseason projections in 2017, they turned out to be pretty good that year, just missing the playoffs. That suggests their great post-tank success is less about the benefits of tanking and more about the benefits of cannily acquiring and developing a bunch of really good overachievers. Furthermore, despite this success, the Brewers aren't a superteam with a long window for success, in the model of those 2016 Cubs or 2017 Astros: They were easily the weakest postseason team last year, and they project to be somewhere around .500 this year.

Indeed, of the five teams we just ran down, none projects to be a superteam. The ZiPS projections for 2020, at FanGraphs, have the Padres, Brewers, White Sox, Phillies and Reds averaging 82 wins this year; the PECOTA projections at Baseball Prospectus offer an average of 81. None of the five teams projects at either site to win more than 87 games. Three years after these teams all hit a clear trough, none -- not even the big-market Phillies -- is all that good.

3. What I wrote then: "In fact, this decade there has been no statistical correlation between the standings in one season and the standings three years later; everything gets totally reshuffled as teams swap spots in the Success Cycle. In a league in which economics has so often been destiny, that's an extraordinary achievement, and it has arguably saved competitive baseball in small markets."

Where we stand now: That fact -- that there was no statistical correlation between the standings in one season and the standings three years later -- served two purposes. First, it provided some proof that the tanking strategy was successful. It was evidence that the benefits of being bad really did show up in the future and that teams embracing terribleness were, in fact, using that terribleness effectively, to reset the standings that were otherwise unfavorable to them.

It was also an argument in favor of tanking being, in at least one way, positive for the game. Rather than bad teams sinking into literally decades of losing -- as the Pirates, Royals, Tigers and Rays had done in the 1990s and 2000s -- teams that found themselves at the bottom could now find their way back. Failing franchises are bad for the sport, but failing franchises had become quite rare. (There are, of course, many arguments against tanking being good for the game.)

That trend -- the three-year reshuffle -- held true for the next two years. Last year's standings had no correlation to the 2016 standings, and five no-good 2016 teams -- the Brewers, Twins, Braves, A's and Rays -- made up half the playoff entrants in 2019.

However, 2020 looks poised to thwart that. The correlation between 2017 records and 2020 projected records is substantial, as nearly every good team from 2017 remains good and most bad teams from 2017 remain bad, or at least mediocre. If PECOTA's projections for 2020 were all to come true, the change from 2017 to 2020 would be the smallest three-year turnaround this century. Even with the ascendance and acceptance of tanking, the bad teams over the past three years have stayed stuck in ruts, rather than ascending gloriously from them.

4. What I wrote then: "... a place agent Scott Boras described this winter as 'destructive to our sport.'"

Where we stand now: More fans go to baseball games when they think those games matter. In MLB's ideal world, the standings would show two kinds of balance:

• Parity within seasons, i.e., most teams in the race late into the season, with few outright disasters who are 20 games out by mid-May.

• Parity across seasons, i.e., most teams can offer their fans a few playoff appearances each decade and consistent hope in at least the midterm.

Tanking is the imperfect compromise. As we noted, it costs baseball a lot of in-season parity, creating worse bad teams and more lopsided standings. (Over the past two years, 40% of team games have been played with playoff odds below 5%, a spike from previous seasons.) But as we noted, it has over the past decade coincided with -- and perhaps caused -- across-season parity.