Whether it's the tyranny of a hard salary cap or a need to turn over a roster that had been stocked with players past their primes, those teams and others like them had logical reasons for implementing those measures. (Keeping a closer such as Ken Giles, for instance, didn't make sense for a team that won't often have a lead after eight innings.) But that logic creates the conflict, because it runs counter to the very principles that give sports its legitimacy: that every team should be trying to win every contest and chasing every championship at all times, that sports derives its entertainment value and intrinsic worth from that pursuit of victory, and that compromising the pursuit even for something possibly greater in the future is both dishonorable (i.e. "tanking," however one defines it) and bad for business.