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From the Archives
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Forty-Man FraudSeptember 1, 2000 September means many things to the baseball crank: pennant races, cold late nights, the promise of the play-offs, and the sad sight of teams well out of contention winding down their seasons like a toy bunny with the wrong batteries. The baseball on the field is strangely affected by that phenomenon unique among professional sports: September roster expansion. Baseball is the only sport that actually expands the available roster of players the last 15% of its season. There are different rules to allow clubs to do this with impunity. For example, minor leaguers brought up during this time don't have the games and days on the roster count towards their major league service time (and thus accelerate them towards arbitration-eligibility). Some teams only bring up a few players, of course, but most bring up between five and fifteen extra hands for the stretch drive. For teams out of contention, this is practically an early spring training, as the four-A-type ballplayers, the rehab projects, and the youngsters on their way up all get some extra playing time. But for teams in contention, it presents a cornucopia of bench options for little ball and for resting their everyday players. I'll try to put this as bluntly as possible: September expansion is the worst rule on the books for distorting the game of baseball, at a time when it's most critical everybody is playing on the proverbial level playing field. Worse than the DH, worse than the umpires' inconsistent zone (which is at least random), worse than allowing Terminator-style protective armor to the batters. Here's why. 1. Expansion eliminates hard choices about in-game management decisions. if you've got fifteen pitchers and eleventy-two possible pinch-runners and hitters, then there's essentially no real hard decision to be made during the traditional late-and-close games, when the decision about whether to use up your last lefty out of the pen or your last right-handed pinch-hitter can swing the game. As such, expansion removes the "back wall" of the end-game. 2. Expansion leads to an overemphasis on little ball management. If you keep score at a September game, take extra paper. Managers love substitutions and specialists, because it gives them the illusion of control over a game. Check out the box scores this week: you'll find a dizzying array of footnotes indicating pinch-running, pinch-hitting, and pinch-hitting for pinch-hitters, along with pitchers entering the game for a third of an inning at a time. There's a time and a place for this kind of chess match, but an unlimited supply of subs makes it happen a lot more and interrupts the flow of the game without making the confrontations any more interesting. 3. Expansion lengthens games significantly. The two reasons above explain why: with substitutions happening all over the place, games plod on forever in September, at a time when the weather is probably the least amenable to a slow pace, at least for the fans' sake. 4. Expansion distorts the post-season by unfairly benefiting teams with divisional leads. If you've got a team with a significant lead in the division, you can afford to rest up your regulars as much as you want, take them out in mid-game, and so forth, with your pile of September call-ups. Other teams fighting for the lead in their divisions have to run out their regulars, of course, subjecting them to injury risks and wear and tear. One might argue that this should simply be a benefit to teams that have been so good as to clinch early, but good October baseball contests are the ones where the best players go up against the best players. 5. Expansion exacerbates the small market vs. big market gulf While major league service rules don't count for September call-ups, major league pay rules do. This means each September call-up gets his major league salary, which for rookies is at least $33,333 for a whole month. Adding on ten players for $300,000 isn't anything for the Yankees or Dodgers, but you better believe the small-market teams, looking at poor September attendance, pay attention to every nickel. As such, the smaller-market clubs are less inclined to do a large expansion, and this creates an imbalance between roster sizes. That distorts the game. [more] |
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[continued] 6. Expansion creates sub-par competition. Remember Eric Milton's no-hitter last year? It was done against a starting line-up made entirely of players who'd started the year in the minors. While I'm happy for Eric and his mom and the fans who saw this less-than-historic feat, sending up minor league rosters is cheating the fans who've come to see a major-league-caliber team. And of course, there's always the danger that a club out of contention playing a team in contention won't send out their best nine on a given day, which further distorts the pennant races. 7. Expansion distorts minor-league competition. One of my crusades in life is to make minor-league competition actually mean something. As it is, some major league clubs will leave their good minor leaguers down for the first week in September, others bring them up. Some will leave key players down if their minor league clubs are in the post-season, but virtually every major league club would bring up a key minor leaguer in September as at any time if the club were in need of that player's skills. This is particularly true of hot pitchers. As such, it adds even more whimsy to the already tenuous construction of "contending" minor league clubs. Roster expansion isn't all evil, of course. It allows kindly clubs to reward long-time minor league veterans with no real shot at the bigs by an appearance and adding their line in the Baseball Encylopedia. Clubs can pull stunts like adding a Pete Rose, Jr. to the roster. Fans of clubs out of contention can get a preview of the kids coming up from the minors. And you get to see whacky things like Scott Sheldon playing all nine positions in one game. I'd like to preserve these characteristics without ruining the integrity of the game in September, as I think roster expansion does. So, here's a partial solution. Allow roster expansion, as ever. But limit the roster for each game to no more than 25 players, who must be listed when the lineups are submitted. This would allow a club to carry extra players, to allow the veterans and kids to play, but would at least put a cap on in-game maneuvers to level the playing field. That way, Major League Games that Count will look a bit less like the box score from the AA All-Star game.
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| The Baseball Crank may be contacted at crank@thediamondangle.com. (c) 2001 Matthew Wall/The Baseball Crank. |
