The Myth of the Perpetual Empire
"Look on my collection of top 100 prospects, ye Mighty, and despair!"
It is ill-advised to trade your car in for a handful of lottery tickets but there are something in the neighborhood of 24 men who make a living this way. Whether or not any of those scratch-offs reveal themselves to be jackpot winners is largely irrelevant, at least for now. The runway on this racket usually lasts about the length of a presidential term and the approval rates upon departure tend to hover around that gig's too. Grifter isn't so much incorrect as it is incorrectly aimed; that title would more aptly be assigned to their employers: sons of sons of fathers who were industrious fellows—that is, men who had railroad monopolies, or factory empires, or media moguls, or what have you. Pioneers in the field of racism. Past, present, and future clients of lobbying firms that employ a roster of Pete Buttigieg clones, to put it another way. This is the fraternity at the helm of baseball’s summer blockbuster: the MLB trade deadline.
Let's get back to the car. The car is usually, in truth, a man in his 30s, sorry to say. He is changing workplaces with a handful of boys in their teens or early 20s. The deal with being a professional baseball player is that you are near-definitionally a slave and though you've probably heard about how handsomely paid these men are the truth is that more than 99% of people who have played professional baseball made or make a pittance and most have to find work in the offseason just to make ends meet. But anyway the guys you see on TV playing for the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, and even the A's, Rays, and Marlins are all collecting paychecks that would absolutely rock our worlds. These are the guys who make the headlines when they're exchanged for the guys who'll hopefully be headline-makers some day. Future anecdotes for braggadocious boys who'll get to tell the other dads at the t-ball game that their high school baseball coach made it to The Show. Miracle makers incapable of fulfilling baseball's great Myth.
The used car salesmen work 20 hour days but somehow don't show their work until there's 20 minutes left until close. It's all very chaotic at the end there and even if you are obsessively wolfing down every last morsel of news you're bound to miss a trade or five. Dust settles and it's time to take inventory. Who did they buy? Who did they sell? And most importantly, what are they selling you?
There are three types of sales pitch:
We're Sellers!
Hey fans, here's the bad news: our team sucks. And you know the three good players on the team? The only guys that get you to turn on the TV and come to the stadium and shell out hundreds of dollars on merchandise? Well we just traded them for a bunch of guys you've never heard of. The good news: some of those guys you've never heard of might develop into being guys you'll one day love watching on the TV and at the ballpark and spending hundreds of dollars on their jerseys. But just give us some time. We're probably a couple years away from that and in the meantime we will keep trading all your favorite guys away but please continue watching us on TV and coming to the ballpark and spending hundreds of dollars on merchandise. You're not like those fair-weather fans are you? No, we didn't think so—we can see that the Fangraphs Top Prospects List has been burned into your monitor.
We're Sellers! Yes, We're Seriously Selling and You Are Going to Like It.
Hi Mariners fans, it's your friend Jerry Dipoto, President of Baseball Operations. Last year was so much fun wasn't it? Our first playoff appearance in over 20 years! Wow, memories that will last a lifetime. Seriously, make them last a lifetime. Never forget that season because I have no interest in doing that shit again. Do you know how exhausting it is to try that hard to win baseball games? It sucks dude. Sure, we're three games out of the playoffs but it's way easier to trade your beloved closer to teams that actually try—doesn't matter who we get in return. You'll love Josh Rojas! He's like if Abraham Toro was a little bit better and a lot bit older. And aren't you glad we didn't trade Logan Gilbert? Well, hold onto that feeling because we're shipping his ass out at the Winter Meetings. Keep coming out to the ballpark; keep eating the bugs.
We're Buyers!
Hey, look at us! We're pretty good and we just got even better!! A new starting pitcher, a couple relievers and a platoon bat will surely fill in our roster's gaps and send us to the World Series. Those AA guys we traded away weren't gonna be good anyway and the only reason you knew one of their names is because their older brother is really good. Smooth sailing from here—the playoffs are just around the corner.
Are any of these sales pitches convincing? Absolutely not—at least not from the outside looking in. But of course outsiders aren't the target audience. All these moves are almost entirely for an audience of one: the owner, "Please don't fire me sir. I need more time." Most teams have given up even making a formal sales pitch to the fans, comfortably certain that no matter what personnel changes they make, the money will keep coming in. This calculus has proven correct thus far and though it seems like a bad long-term strategy, there aren't really any businesses that operate with a good long-term strategy and all the money involved means the machine will keep spinning because how could something this gargantuan actually fail? We'll have to wait and see.
And that's what it boils down to: waiting and seeing. For about half the league's fans, they have to see a lot of bad baseball while they wait and for half of those teams the waiting never ends. Maybe you'll catch a stray playoff appearance once or twice a decade but those are fleeting, unfulfilling, frustrating accidents that are rarely the result of good process and certainly not indicators of anything other than more waiting in your future. A good chunk of teams have the traditional fruitful harvest/fallow period down to a science and this has been accepted as the normal and correct way to run a baseball franchise. These include teams of all payrolls and prestige as disparate as the Phillies, Rangers, Diamondbacks, Blue Jays, and Giants, all of whom have found periods of success and suck in the past decade plus.
But really there are three baseball teams whose success and process every other fan base envies and covet: Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Atlanta Braves.
The Astros are near solely responsible for the state of modern baseball as they orchestrated a previously unthinkably cynical slash and burn approach to rebuilding the farm, losing 100+ games in three straight seasons (the first of which was five years after their last playoff appearance) and running bordering-on-illegally low payrolls. This is the sort of behavior that not only invalidates a franchise but the sport writ large and of course nothing was done to stop or punish the Astros which in turn gave owners around the league license to do the same thing in the interest of a "sustainable winner" some years down the road. Unfortunately, The Process worked out swimmingly for the Houston Astros who since 2017 have had four 100+ win seasons, six straight league championship appearances, four World Series trips, and two titles. That the latter half of this dynastic run has operated in the shadow of a systemic cheating scandal is a further indictment on the sport as a whole but it's true what they say: winning solves everything.
The Dodgers have sat atop the pyramid much longer with a lot less postseason success. Since 2013, they've won their National League West every year save for 2021 when their 106 wins fell one short of the rival Giants 107. Like the Astros, they've logged four 100+ win seasons, six league championship appearances, but have just three World series trips and a lone title in the pandemic shortened 2020 season to show for it. They've been dumped out in the Divisional Round four times and often embarrassingly so. If you ask a Dodger fan about their past decade watching their favorite team (the team that's won more games than any other in the past 10 years and still in the midst of one of the most impressive runs of sustained success the sport has ever seen) they will regale you with tale after tale of heartbreak. Baseball: it's a brutal sport.
The Atlanta Braves are a publicly traded human trafficking operation. They will more likely than not terrorize the National League for the next decade—it won't be anyone's definition of fun. Through some unknown form of Sun Tzu Machiavellian Art of the Deal Negotiation Tactics™, the Braves have managed to compile a roster of young, extremely talented, and criminally underpaid superstars that are all under contract until you and I are AARP eligible. The most criminal of these indentured servitude arrangements is that of Ozzie Albies who prior to the 2019 season signed a seven year deal worth $35million. In that 2019 season he was worth nearly five wins above replacement meaning that in just the first year of his contract he had already produced $35million of value to his team. In effect, he has been and will continue to play "for free" until he hits free agency in 2028. The team has been rewarded for this in the form of a 2021 World Series title over the aforementioned Astros, breaking a city-wide curse that had plagued its sports franchises with a laundry list of heartbreaking postseason pants shittings. 28-3 is obviously the most famous, but let's not forget game 5 of the 2019 NLDS when the Braves surrendered 10 runs in the top of the first inning. A double digit deficit before some of the home fans had even reached their seats. Incredible.
These are the three factories that the other 27 fanbases envy, but even fans of the three super teams seem miserable most of the time. There's a lot of winning but have you truly won?
It's hard to say what the ideal baseball fan experience is. Would you trade your last ten years of following your favorite team for the Astros or Dodgers or Braves success? I think most would but there is something to be said for the desensitizing effect of not ever having to worry about your favorite team playing in October. The regular season becomes borderline irrelevant, meaning your whole year of fandom can and sometimes will boil down into four days of pure stress, agony, misery, etc. That's no way to treat what is meant to be an entertainment product.
For me, baseball and specifically my favorite baseball team is a summer-long story. They are there most every day to watch or listen to. It is silly to say but the San Diego Padres are my friend; road trip companion, late night hangout, Sunday afternoon hangover buddy. Are they incredibly frustrating at times? So much so that you threaten to do a January 6 to their President of Baseball Operations or imagine a scenario in which Bill Simmons is discussing a post of yours claiming you will take lessons from Mo Atta's flight instructor if Austin Nola gets another plate appearance? Sure, but that's what friends are for. It can be hard to stay sane as a baseball fan, but it gets easier when you realize the astroturf isn't any greener on the other side.