Still, the practice is common enough that there’s a defined and describable tanking strategy. A team’s owners and managers purposefully put out a roster of subpar players knowing that a worse record means a better pick in that year’s draft. And that in turn means a better chance of choosing a player who could become a superstar a few years down the line. The team trades proven veterans for more draft picks or, in MLB—unique among American leagues for its robust player-development system—for prospects currently part of other teams in the minor leagues. In a few years, those no-longer youngsters will be ready to vault their organization into championship contention.

At least that’s how tanking works in theory. In practice, there are a few problems. The first, David Berri, a sports economist and professor at Southern Utah University, told me, is that building a championship-caliber roster via tanking is actually quite hard. “The draft in baseball is the least reliable way to build,” he said, “because you frankly have no idea when you’re looking at a college player—or, especially, a high-school player—whether they really are going to be able to handle major-league talent.” That’s particularly true in baseball, in which it may take several years of practice and learning for even the best prospects to reach the big leagues, compared with basketball or football, in which a top draft pick could begin contributing in mere months. Though tanking arguably worked for the past two World Series winners, Berri noted that those successful teams relied on more than just good drafting: The 2016 Chicago Cubs and 2017 Houston Astros both needed veteran players acquired in free agency or via trades made during their championship season to push them over the top.

But building the conventional way, by trading for and signing veterans, can be risky as well, especially for the person who oversees roster decisions: the general manager. As Berri pointed out, good players don’t typically become available until several years into their careers, at which point they may be on the verge of, or already in, physical decline. Overspending on just one such player (as the Padres did in February, by signing the 28-year-old first baseman Eric Hosmer to an exorbitant eight-year contract) can quickly jeopardize a team’s short-term viability.

The second problem with tanking is that it risks turning off fans who don’t want to watch a terrible team on TV, let alone pay to do so in person. Berri noted that this type of audience dissatisfaction used to be more of a pressing challenge, but that modern leagues have largely stamped out the financial incentives for middling organizations to avoid bottoming out. “If you go back to baseball or any sport 50 years ago or so, the revenue that the team brought in was based on your gate receipts, and gate receipts were based on whether you won or not,” Berri said. “But today, there’s a big chunk of what we call ‘fixed revenues’ that are not related to winning. The national-broadcasting deal [that MLB reached in 2012 with ESPN, Fox, and Turner Broadcasting] is a great example of this: You collect that money whether you win or you don’t win. Because that revenue exists, you don’t have to field a winning team, because you already have revenue coming in regardless.”