2026 Ancillary Tangential Draft Talk

[Lintyfresh85]

Unfortunately, not every BLB franchise is created equally... which I believe, forces the tanking hand of some owners...

Teams like California or Montreal have been to the playoffs a handful of times in their history, I’m guessing they’ve had multiple ownership changes that lead to dumb past decisions, small stadiums, small budgets, fairweather fans, etc.

Who you calling dumb? I owned California from 1983-2013/2014.

[PaulC]

Who you calling dumb? I owned California from 1983-2013/2014.

I didn't say any owners were dumb... just a few generalities about the fact that some franchises have a history of not doing well...

[umd]

Who you calling dumb? I owned California from 1983-2013/2014.

Not dumb, mediocre.

[Pat]

This.

#StopTankingOrGetFiredLikeInRealLife

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Each team plays 162 games. Unless every team goes .500, there has to be some good teams and some bad teams.

Stop tanking or get fired like in “real life?” I’m pretty sure if this was “real life”, the GMs that take their owners $100M into debt would be fired long before a rebuilding team that is turning a profit.

[Sharkn20]

Each team plays 162 games. Unless every team goes .500, there has to be some good teams and some bad teams.

Stop tanking or get fired like in “real life?” I’m pretty sure if this was “real life”, the GMs that take their owners $100M into debt would be fired long before a rebuilding team that is turning a profit.

Teams wouldn't get into $100M debt if the cash influx by the Owner wasn't removed from the books.

[BradZ]

Teams wouldn't get into $100M debt if the cash influx by the Owner wasn't removed from the books.

That's correct. If there was an endless supply of money, team's wouldn't go into debt.

[liquidcrash]

Option 1 looks best to me.

[Guest]

Jeff Luhnow tanked and still has his job, a World Series, and they’re *gasp* using the money they saved those years to reinvest into the players they got from sucking that are now worthy of major financial commitment, AND they’ve used their surplus of minor league talent to acquire the likes of Verlander and Gerrit Cole.

100% getting fired though. Not just a cyclical occurrence or anything.

I’d be for a random drawing of teams 1-5 if that makes anyone feel better

[Matt]

By the way this wasn't directed at anyone or anything I saw in the league history...I just thought it looked cool and would bring some excitement to the draft.

Win or lose how you want to. This isn't real life and no one is getting fired...and if it was tanking works there pretty darn good (see Houston).

[funclown]

I literally can't do anything but add minor league players at this point. That's the price I'm paying for being a little too aggressive financially. We won a couple titles, so it is what it is. I can hold on to players and watch the team steadily decline over the years, and eventually start a rebuild. Or I can speed up the process, and unload now. As we improve financially, hopefully we can start to add some vets in FA to pair up with the picks we are stockpiling.

Agreed. White Sox fought the "good fight" for a decade , won 72-83 games ....and lost its fan base (what little they had) In the real life 1/3 of the NBA is tanking today , in the MLB about 1/3 of the teams tank with another 1/3 deemed as irrelevant. Parity is a thing of the past today its "Super teams" and the rest.

Least in the BLB we've seen parity with the addition or more playoffs teams and due to our semi salary cap less Superpowers. Think what we have today already works.

Truthfully last down time for Pawtucket was just due to poor finances (see Phoenix) and its the cost of winning the Cup a few times , which seem "winning it all " hurts the pocket book far worse then being just a playoff team for 9-12 seasons. Not sure why, but thats the game engine. Maybe $5 million for winning it all isn't enough. Maybe its 10ml??

[Hank]

By the way this wasn't directed at anyone or anything I saw in the league history...I just thought it looked cool and would bring some excitement to the draft.

Win or lose how you want to. This isn't real life and no one is getting fired...and if it was tanking works there pretty darn good (see Houston).

Agreed. It's a cool concept and I can see it making draft day more fun.

But to piggyback on something PaulC brought up, I would like to see punishments for teams that don't bother to export.
As an example, If Team A gets the #1 pick and they didn't export at least 5x during the season, they should be knocked down to 5th overall.

Those years I was 'tanking' (see 2015>present), I still exported and I still tried to field a competitive team.
In fact, I didn't tank well enough. I basically hosed myself out of Pickles because I called up some young kids and put together a pretty decent roster for the last month of the season.
I believe I played over .500 ball in September that season.
My problem is I'm genetically engineered to not suck. I can't explain why my teams do so bad. Thanks Obama!

[Ryan]

I'm cool either way, but option 2 or 3 sounds cool.

It does suck for a new owner taking over a team that's hamstrung by terrible decisions by a prior owner that lost interest. It could take seasons for them to dig out, and we really should just be thankful the new person is sticking around in a hopeless situation, win or lose.

This is a slippery slope, but maybe there's something we can do in a situation where a new owner steps in and there's no way to compete for several seasons. Wipe out some debt, I don't know. Again, slippery slope.

[Z]

The only thing in this thread I took issue with was Delandis's suggestion that we stop annoying Sully.

[PaulC]

We should just make a rule with a lottery and see if it passes...

Bottom four go in a drum with the following percentages...

lowest seed 55%
second lowest 26%
third lowest 12%
fourth lowest 7%

This keeps the worst four teams only with the chance of getting the number one overall pick and keeps a 0.500 team from pulling an Orlando Magic and moving up 14 spots to grab the one pick...

[Z]

We should just make a rule with a lottery and see if it passes...

Bottom four go in a drum with the following percentages...

lowest seed 55%
second lowest 26%
third lowest 12%
fourth lowest 7%

This keeps the worst four teams only with the chance of getting the number one overall pick and keeps a 0.500 team from pulling an Orlando Magic and moving up 14 spots to grab the one pick...

If you just want to make sure it's only bad teams that have a chance, you could push it to the worst seven or eight teams by record. At that point you're still talking about 90+ loss teams. Mathematically there's no way the team with the 7th worst record is going to be near .500 outside of some extreme scenario where the top four clubs each lost like 120 games, in which case we'd want to be lowering those teams chances anyway.