I just simply do not understand the need for a lottery in the MLB draft? One player can’t really turn a franchise around. One player can certainly help speed a rebuild up but this just seems so dumb to me when you have a couple teams that can basically outspend everyone and you don’t have a salary cap. How is tanking to build a bad thing but allowing a team like the Dodgers to have a massive advantage money-wise a good thing? I mean, if you’re going to do a draft lottery just copy the NBAs and be done with it. It’s not even that it’s a lottery it’s just the absurdity of the percentages. Why would the three worst teams all have the same chance if their records are different? The whole concept is stupid. It’s as dumb as the extra innings rule. I’ve never seen a sport do more harm to itself than Baseball over the last 5 or so years.
The problem they're trying to fix isn't that tanking works in baseball - and make no mistake, it does - but that at any given time so many teams were doing it. You had at times 6 or 7 teams trying to be really, really bad. That's bad for the sport overall: it makes those fanbases angry, makes them non-draws when they're on the road, and because they're not spending money in free agency, also lowers salaries and annoys the players.
And back to the point of tanking working: it does, just not on a one-year basis like in basketball. Since 2015, every winner except the Red Sox and Dodgers has had major components that were the result of top-5 picks from tanking. Most of those teams - Nats, Astros, Braves, Cubs - tanked for multiple years intentionally to get to that point.