Why tanking for the rest of the season may not matter

In a normal season, the Kansas City Royals would be already looking towards next season. September rosters would have expanded—perhaps giving us glimpses of prospects like Kyle Isbel, Daniel Lynch, and Khalil Lee—and winning baseball games become more of what you would call a guideline than actual rule. After all, draft position and signing bonuses are based on win-loss record, and losing more games gets you better loot in the following draft. In other words, in a normal season, it would be tank time, baby!

Of course, it’s not a normal season. The usual September roster expansion isn’t happening, partially because rosters are at an already expanded 28 players. Teams will only play 60 games total on the year. And because of that, the 2021 draft order is up in the air right now.

While sources believe nothing will change in terms of how the draft order is determined, commissioner Rob Manfred has the right to modify the order in a season shorter than 81 games, as agreed to with the players’ union in March. A final decision on the order will likely not be announced any time soon.

Because of that uncertainty, you can expect the Royals and other teams to back that M1 Abrams up right back to the garage. Without a clear benefit to tanking, you might as well try to win as many games as possible. But what would varying draft scenarios look like? Let’s take a look.

Option 1: Draft Based on 2020 Results

Boooooooring. The first option, which is still on the plate, is for the league to simply hold the draft order based on 2020 standings just like every other year. This is not interesting at all, but it makes sense. The league doesn’t automatically change draft order in a shortened season; it simply can do so if it chooses.

While this is the simplest decision, it does have downsides. It disproportionally penalizes teams that are overperforming their talent level and disproportionally rewards teams that have suffered uncharacteristically bad luck; in a 162-game season those factors tend to balance out, but they are a bigger factor in shorter seasons. This would affect teams like the Washington Nationals, who are the fourth worst team in the league by record but have the 12th worst run differential, as well as the Chicago Cubs, who have the seventh best record but the 12th best run differential.

In this scenario, the Royals would have the seventh pick in the draft. Notable recent seventh overall picks include Andrew Benintendi, Aaron Nola, and Matt Harvey. Clayton Kershaw, Troy Tulowitzki, Nick Markakis, and Prince Fielder were also seventh overall picks.

Option 2: Combined 2019 and 2020 Results

In this rather fascinating potential outcome, Major League Baseball would combine the results of the last two seasons into one big Superseason and then seed the draft from there. The downsides here are rather obvious: the results of 2019 would be more heavily weighted than the results of 2020. However, you could also easily argue that this makes it fairer, as every game is weighted equally individually 2020 is considered in its proper place as a truncated season.

So, what would the draft order look like? This season isn’t over yet, so let’s extrapolate out every team’s current winning percentage to 60 games and then add them to last year’s total.

Though there is some interesting movement in the middle of this draft order, the very top and very bottom of the order is unsurprising. The Royals, who have been consistently bad since 2018, pick third in this scenario, up one from this year’s pick and down one from last year’s.

Option 3: Lottery Time!

If the league decides not to implement either of the previous two options, they could decide to implement a sort of lottery, like the NBA does, in perhaps an attempt to be impartial and let fate decide. There are a lot of different ways to do a draft lottery, and as a result discussing the potential lottery ramifications is an exercise in futility, so I won’t get into it.

Any way you cut it, the 2021 draft is going to be interesting. The Royals will probably pick somewhere between third and eighth. We won’t know for a while what the ramifications are—or if we’ll even have a spring baseball season to sort out draft prospects further—but the Royals are sure to get a very good prospect in the draft when it happens. We’ll just have to wait a little and see.