MLB should threaten tanking teams with relegation

Here’s a quick recap of the last week for the Orioles, a group of kindergarteners masquerading as a baseball team.

• Their first baseman, who’s being paid $23 million this season and has nearly twice as many strikeouts as total bases, had to be restrained from fighting their manager.

• They gave up 32 runs and 16 homers (!) in three games to the Yankees.


• They gave up 23 runs in a single game to the Astros, who hit five homers against them—the 18th time a team has hit five or more home runs in one game against Baltimore pitching.

• They gave up 19 runs in a doubleheader on Monday to the Yankees, including three homers to Gleyber Torres, who’s hit 13 against them this year.

• In that doubleheader, they set a new franchise and American League record for most homers allowed in a single season and are now just 10 away from the all-time MLB record of 258 in the second week of August.

• One of their outfielders had a flyball clank off his head as he tried to catch it.

• Another outfielder threw a ball roughly four feet and in the wrong direction as he tried to get it back into the infield.

• And they’re now 39–80 with a run differential of -237 and on pace to lose 109 games—and that would be a six-game improvement on last year’s results.

There aren’t enough bad words to describe the Orioles, and yet they’re somehow not even the worst team in baseball: The Tigers are 35–80 and have won a grand total of 13 games since the end of May. Nor are those two alone in their awfulness. The Blue Jays are flirting with their first 100-loss season in 40 years. The Royals are on pace to lose 102 games. The White Sox will miss the playoffs for the 11th straight season. The Mariners player with the most Wins Above Replacement in 2019 is Edwin Encarnacion, and he was traded two months ago. The Marlins are en route to a 10th consecutive losing season. And the Pirates are a staggering 5–24 in the second half.

It’s flat-out embarrassing that there are this many bad teams in baseball, and worse, the majority of those squads came into the year with no hope of contending and no chance of being anything other than terrible. That’s a disservice to the fans of those teams and of MLB as a whole. Things go wrong and bad seasons happen, but franchises intentionally coming into the year with Triple A-caliber rosters and racking up loss after loss is actively detrimental to the game.

How do you fix that, though? Simple: You make losing as painful as possible, and in that vein, there’s no better way to stop tanking in baseball than to borrow a page from the Premier League’s book and institute relegation. At the end of the season, the six worst teams in the majors—three from each league—are sent down to Triple A. If the Orioles aren’t capable of contending at the major league level, then they shouldn’t be here. Nor should the Tigers or the Marlins or the half-dozen other teams seemingly content to waste everyone’s time.

This won’t happen. There are too many logistical issues and holes, and neither the league nor the Players Association would ever agree to it. But when the other alternative is letting the Orioles make a mockery of the sport day in and day out, it’s clear that MLB has to do something—anything—to force those teams to be better.