The 40-Man Roster

MLB teams play most of the regular season using a 25-man active roster, typically comprised of 11 pitchers and 14 position players, or 12/13 for teams preferring a seven-man bullpen. Teams then play with expanded rosters beginning September 1, enabling teams to give their top prospects “cups of coffee” with a little low-pressure big league experience, or to occasionally reward an organizational soldier for an excellent season and lengthy minor league career.

Forecasting a team for an upcoming season typically means, at best, an in-depth look at the projected 25-man roster – the team as it stands “on paper” before a single game has been played. Sometimes it means even less, simply giving a cursory look at a few notable players and taking an educated guess at how the final standings might appear. This strategy for projecting team performance is misguided, however, for the simple reason that it takes many more than 25 players to get through a six-month regular season with any hope for postseason play. In 2010, AL teams used an average of 36 position players (range: 32 – Chicago to 43 – Boston) and 21 pitchers (range: 17 – Tampa Bay to 25 – Boston, Kansas City). NL teams shuffled their rosters even more frequently, using an average of 43 position players (range: 40 – San Diego to 56 – Florida) and an average of 23 pitchers (range: 19 – San Diego, San Francisco to 31 – Florida). In even the best case, where most players on a given team avoid injury or dramatic underperformance, you can expect to see upwards of 50 players donning the team’s uniform.

Why, then, is more attention not given to overall organizational health and depth, and not just the perfect-world 25-man rosters that we all love to dream on before the first pitch of spring training? Frankly, it would be more time-consuming to do this (especially for major media outlets), and would deal with numerous players who will never sniff the big leagues at a time when much of the general public already has little interest in non-star MLB players. As far as televised and print media is concerned, there isn’t interest (and thus money) to gain in taking a deeper look at the sport, and this is just one example of that principle at work.

That said, it is my contention that there is a lot to be gleaned from observing why and how MLB teams make decisions about managing their vital and finite 40-man roster spots. I think that many of us (speaking as an avid baseball fan) often underestimate how vital depth and talent retention is for an MLB team. I also think that in some cases, especially with decisions as relatively minor as whether or not to add a prospect to the 40-man roster, it is easy to overlook the opportunity cost and/or potential upside of a given decision.

And speaking as someone who thinks that the top priority of every MLB organization must be to pour resources into scouting, signing, and developing potential star-level talent should they be concerned with long-term on-field success, I see the nature of roster management as a great and often overlooked argument in favor of principles such as system balance. It is very popular in minor league baseball and prospecting circles to emphasize tools and upside, often discrediting players who may project to top out as something less than a potential all-star player. You’ll find few people, myself included, who would advocate against investing heavily into trying to develop a given team’s next core of young and cost-controlled star players. There is a place for lower-profile players as well, however, and it’s on any team’s roster, especially those of small-market clubs that aren’t going to be able to otherwise spend their way to a capable roster. And sometimes those kinds of players exceed the modest expectations set for them.

A team doesn’t need a star at every position to succeed, much less attempt to meet an impractical and unachievable goal such as worrying about finding 50+ very talented players for a 162-game season. But when, say, Boston lost both their starter (Jacoby Ellsbury) and backup (Mike Cameron) in center field early this past season, it made a tremendous difference in their ability to stay competitive until late September when a capable replacement could be called upon from the lower rungs of the team’s planned depth chart. On top of a slew of other injuries, their Plan C - a minor league journeyman named Darnell McDonald - posted a .766 OPS in 363 plate appearances, contributing about a win more than could be expected from the pool of freely-available talent. Prior to 2010, no one would have foreseen McDonald racking up a remotely notable number of PA, much less contributing in a positive way to an 89-win season.

Key injuries and unexpected underperformance can severely damage a team; it’s the wise use of all means of talent acquisition, depth in both the upper and lower levels of the farm system, and prudent talent retention when possible that can salvage an otherwise lost season. These decisions have tangible benefits not only in the win-loss column, but in attendance and revenue as well. Some lousy teams will draw nice crowds for meaningless games in September, and great teams might have trouble filling Tropicana Field. But doing your best to put a quality product on the field within budgetary constraints certainly can’t hurt.

One of the first roster management concepts I’ll be dealing with is the Rule 5 draft, which serves as a segway into option years, the arbitration process, and free agency. But to talk about that, we need to briefly discuss the amateur draft as well, which occurs each June. Teams draft close to 1500 players (30 teams, 50 rounds) each year, of which fewer than 5% ever appear in a single MLB game. Each MLB team operates 6-7 minor league teams of increasing difficulty for their draftees to play on, with draftees from previous years, players signed from overseas, and so forth. However, unlike years ago in MLB, teams can’t simply retain the rights to these players forever, effectively hoarding talent and restricting them to minor league salaries in the thousands, not millions. If MLB teams don’t offer their prospects a reasonable path to the majors after a reasonable amount of developmental time, they will lose the rights to those players.

Specifically, minor league players become eligible for the Rule 5 Draft. This draft occurs each December, and allows MLB teams to pay $25,000 to draft prospects from the minor league systems of other teams. However, not all players are eligible: only those who have spent four years in the minors (if signed at age 19 or older), or five years in the minors (if signed at age 18 or younger). Teams can still protect prospects they really want to keep if they have exceeded either threshold – however, they must be added to the 40-man roster to do so. Once added to the 40-man roster, those players must be sent through waivers (i.e. all other 29 MLB teams get to be removed from the roster. Therefore, there is considerable risk in making these decisions lightly. Protect too few prospects, and you might lose some talented players. Protect too many, and you may hamstring your flexibility in the short-term at the MLB level, and still be forced to lose some of the players you chose to protect in the long run.

I’ll expand on this in a separate post about the Rule 5 Draft, but as it relates to the 40-man roster, decisions to protect Rule 5 eligible players are challenging for front offices and involve weighing a lot of different factors – the potential short and long-term impacts of prospects being considered, the roster space they need/want to keep vacated for potential trade targets or free agent signings, and the likelihood that teams will not only select a given unprotected player in the Rule 5 Draft, but commit to keeping the player on their MLB roster for a full season. If you’re curious, a rough rule of thumb for use this offseason is that players signed out of high school in 2006 or college in 2007 will become Rule 5 eligible for this December’s draft. Many of the no-name players you will see added to 40-man rosters over the next several weeks will be done so in order to avoid risking the loss of those players to the upcoming draft.