Just Mets

Every team in baseball, whether it’s the Mets or otherwise, is tasked with strategizing with a 25-man active roster and a 40-man expanded roster.

Sometimes during doubleheaders, teams can play with a 26th man on the active roster, but that 26th player, whether its the same person or somebody else, must be removed from the active roster at the immediate conclusion of that doubleheader.

Still, these rosters come with limitations and inflexibility at certain times. Take the Mets as an example, who felt it necessary to carry an eighth reliever to protect and continue to stretch out their five starting pitchers over the first ten games of the year. That came with a price, as they were forced to only play with four players on the bench. In essence, it really was a three-man bench because Anthony Recker, the backup catcher, is excluding from most standard substitution scenarios when he’s not playing.

That was until last Tuesday, of course, when the Mets were forced to remove Michael Cuddyer, Wilmer Flores, and David Wright due to injury, forcing Recker to enter the game at third base, a position he’s never played before – in his entire life.

With the way rosters are constructed, it’s often difficult for a manager to maneuver, whether he has six, seven, or eight relievers in a game. In the case of a standard bullpen size of seven, there are four pitchers who are unquestionably unavailable to the team on any given day, and sometimes one or two relievers aren’t available either. That’s up to and just under 25 percent of the players on the roster who simply cannot play on any given day.

“That’s a legitimate question and a legitimate thing that has to be addressed,” Terry Collins recently told Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal.

Because of the way rosters are constructed today and the limitations they present, Collins supports the idea that rosters be expanded to 28 or 30 players in a permanent basis.

“If you had a couple extra players every night, it saves you, You don’t have to panic to get somebody in,” Collins said. “It’s been talked about and talked about.”
It’s not the worst idea in the world, and last Tuesday’s game serves as just one example as to why. 

The game is evolving. In-game strategy, teams are always playing matchups late in game, and playing with 25 guys when nearly 25 percent (under normal circumstances) of them simply are not available makes it difficult to deal with adverse or unusual circumstances.

But perhaps the most underrated problem with the 25-man roster is all of these problems rolled into the fact there are not nearly the number off days there once was. Players don’t get as many opportunities to recuperate as they once did, which could be leading to more in-game injuries than in the past as well.

An idea I heard last year was the manager could designate a given number of extra players per game as injury replacements only, meaning they could only play if there was an injury during the game. That injury replacement list could fluctuate on a daily basis. Their roster status could be dependent upon whether or not the injured player could be available the following day. Conceptually, this could work, but organizations can’t have players operating on a live taxi squad day after day.

Collins agrees any kind of expansion of the roster creates a different set of problems.

“There’s one huge factor, and that’s what the cost would be to maintain at the level of what these guys make, to keep those five extra guys not doing anything,” Collins explained to Diamond.

It’s not an easy solution to solve. But there has to be a happy medium between the players and the league, as any kind of roster expansion could be mutually beneficial. For the players, more of them would be in the big leagues and making big league money, many of which would eventually see salary escalation through the arbitration and free agency process that wouldn’t have before. And, there’s that obvious benefit for managers to deal with long games, injuries and the lack of off days.

At the same time,  adding more players to the active roster waters down the talent pool throughout the league too. People who otherwise shouldn’t be here suddenly are, and that can reduce the day-to-day quality of play.
Again, there’s no easy solution. None the less, as Collins said, it needs to continue to be talked about and some kind of evolved roster is necessary.

After all, the game is evolving potentially more than ever now, and therefore at least some of the rules have to follow suit.

To read more from Collins and thoughts from the MLBPA on roster expansion, check out Jared Diamond’s report in the Wall Street Journal.