Thinking Through the Roster Expansion Problem

Last night, the Nationals and Braves played an 11-inning game, and because it happened in September, 17 different pitchers were used between the two clubs. Ninety-nine batters, 17 pitchers: that’s a new pitcher every six batters, essentially. Yes, it went extra innings, and Stephen Strasburg had to leave the start with an injury, forcing the Nationals into an unplanned bullpen game, but 15 pitching changes is still just far too many for a Major League game. It’s a problem the league faces every September, when teams are able to carry everyone on their 40-man roster as active players if they so choose; the Nationals currently have 37 active players.

Of course, neither the individual teams nor the players are all that incentivized to change the system. Since the minor-league season ends around Labor Day, the roster expansion gives teams a chance to give their best prospects something to do in September, and gets them some valuable experience in the big leagues. Players like it, of course, because the promotion to the active roster comes with a big improvement in salary, and so guys who have been making minor-league wages are essentially rewarded with a significant end-of-season bonus. It’s hard to imagine either side is going to push hard to limit September roster sizes in the current CBA negotiations, as they both benefit from the current system, and the burden of longer, less enjoyable games are mostly carried by the fans, who don’t have a seat at the bargaining table.

But as the Braves and Nationals showed last night, there has to be a better way than this. Let’s run through a few options.

The solution bandied about the most often is to maintain the 25-man active roster limit in September, but just let teams select which players are going to be active before each game or series. That way, teams could still travel with up to 40 players if they so chose, and could continue to give their prospects experience with the big-league club in September, without giving them the chance to turn every September game into a war of relievers. Of course, this solution might not actually end up doing that much to impact the problem. Consider: if teams could choose to activate different sets of players every day, they could simply keep swapping in fresh relievers who didn’t pitch the day before, and so managers would still have far more pitching depth than they do during the rest of the season, and pitching changes would still be more frequent than they are in April through August.

Simply limiting the number of active players each day would probably help a little bit, but maybe not enough. And then the league and the MLBPA would have to decide what the paycheck would be for a player who’s traveling with the team but deactivated for a given day; is that an active player, paid at the standard rate, even if he’s not eligible to play that day?

So there might be some logistical issues, and the fix might not actually fix much. So there might not need to be some more significant changes.

One idea I still like is something I proposed four years ago: move the minor league season back a month, so that rosters are expanded in April, not September. If we had the month of the MLB season without corresponding minor-league games at the start of the year, teams would be able to manage their pitchers’ workloads early in the year, when everyone is still ramping up to full strength, and teams would be incentivized to carry their best prospects on Opening Day, knowing that the alternative would be to have a guy like Kris Bryant just hanging out in extended spring training otherwise.

Of course, this would just move the too-many-relievers-on-a-roster problem from September to April, and maybe that’s not really an improvement. And this issue doesn’t take into account that the minor leagues do have playoffs that extend into mid-September currently, and if you push the whole minor-league season back, you’re now pushing those into the same time period as the Major League playoffs, and into a colder-weather month. They might not be particularly fond of that change.

So that’s not exactly a perfect solution, either — though I, for one, would rather have the expanded rosters earlier in the year than at the end of the season. But that’s a pretty big structural change to just move the issue from the end of the year to the beginning of the year, and it seems pretty unlikely to be the path MLB actually pursues.

What else is there? Well, they could just get rid of the roster expansion in September entirely, but I can’t imagine either side preferring that option. They could shrink the expanded rosters from 40 down to 30, but that would essentially end the practice of calling up minor-league veterans and fringe prospects, the types of guys who benefit the most from getting a big-league paycheck for a month.

This seems to be a situation where the two parties responsible for finding a solution don’t have incentives that align with really solving the issue. So, despite the fact that no one really wants to watch a game with 15 pitching changes, I don’t know if there’s a change that will solve the issue while actually making either the teams or the players happy. In the end, this might just be a situation where the cures aren’t any better than the disease.