MLB and the Players Association agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement this afternoon, in time to preserve a 162-game regular season. The work stoppage dragged on long enough to deal a pretty significant blow to Spring Training, though, which will be shorter in 2022 than it is in a typical year.
With only four weeks until Opening Day, there’s some concern about the early-season workload players will have to assume. One possible solution would be to expand the active rosters a bit early in the season, and it seems that’s on the table. Joel Sherman of the New York Post noted this afternoon that while expanding rosters wasn’t part of the CBA, the parties could circle back to that possibility. Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune tweets that some in the industry expect an enlarged active roster early in the regular season.
That move wouldn’t be without precedent. Rosters were bumped to 28 players for the entirety of the shortened 2020 season. That followed a three-week exhibition “Summer Camp” and also came with greater concerns about teams losing players to COVID-19. Still, it suggests the league and union aren’t opposed to adding a little more depth to teams’ rosters if they’re concerned about the shortened ramp-up.
Complicating matters further is the return on the limit of the number of pitchers teams may carry. Over the 2019-20 offseason, MLB passed a rule that capped teams to 13 pitchers at any given time. Under pandemic protocols, that rule was suspended in both 2020 and 2021. However, Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported last May that MLB was planning to reinstitute the 13-pitcher limit this season. That seems to have come to fruition, as Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak acknowledged it was in place when speaking with reporters this evening (via Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
Were active rosters to expand for the season’s first few weeks, that limit on pitchers would probably be relaxed. Whenever teams are faced with a permanent cap of 13 hurlers, though, there figure to be greater challenges for managers in handling their staffs. The CBA also limits teams to optioning players to the minor leagues more than five times in a season, so management won’t be as simple as shuttling fresh arms on and off the roster daily. That could compel teams to lean more heavily on their starting pitchers than they have in recent years (particularly with the introduction of the universal DH removing the need to pinch-hit for pitchers depending on the game situation).
More opportunity for top prospects to get their careers started. Love it.
Hopefully unlike 2020 players started training in anticipation so the injuries don’t spike again. This move makes sense though
They weren’t training as much as they would have if they had started ST three weeks ago. With the season only starting a week later, those two weeks could make a huge difference, especially in pitchers.
Used to upset me when same guys with options were always up and down while 0 options left guys, often not that good would remain on the roster. This 5 option rule to me is still a few too many, but better than it was.
How does this change anything for the player with 0 options?
It doesn’t. The MLBPA COULD have insisted on a larger roster size with some kind of daily deactivation protocol (limited number of pitchers, e.g.), so games wouldn’t take 4 hours.
But that would have been a real change in the compensation structure, and that wasn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, Manfred and Tony Clarke no doubt went to dinner last night and laughed about how moronic most players are; “Give them an extra olive in their salad, they’ll be happy”).
Better not strike over this lol that why no one signed yet ? Kidding
55-man rosters for the first 10 games. 12-man rosters after that.
Any restrictions on hotfoots in the dugouts or fart-lighting in the clubhouses? Hope it aint so Joe, gotta protect integrity of the game.
28 man roster through the end of April should do it. No maximum on pitchers during this time, but roll it back to 26/13 starting on May 1st.
Add 2 bonus pitchers for April, 1 for May and we should be good.
the season is going to start and there will not be joe west. still too many bad umps but the worst is gone.
and i want mlb message boads back!
Players always get it wrong. Now rosters will be made up more of mininum-salary guys and the top stars. Middle class will all but disappear, and non-tenders will be way up. Payrolls probably won’t go up much at all.
As to service time manipulation, figure for it to get worse as well. If teams will have to pay more if a rookie does well in end-of-year voting, they’ll now wait until even later in the season to call them up. Even the top guys can’t win awards in less than half a season. Then, in the subsequent season, they’ll have them on the opening day roster while still rookie-eligible to gain the draft pick.
Exactly.
What really is the solution to the middle class squeeze? Honestly, teams have been moving toward that direction for years. Big ticket guys bring in the advertising revenue and the gate. Low paid players fill out the rosters.
What could the Players Association have done to prevent that trend? They did negotiate the raising of the de-facto salary cap.
And, for that matter, who are these middle class guys who aren’t being signed? (Don’t look to this year, the FA situation is way too chaotic due to the timing.)
Would hope that at a minimum they would allow an extra pitcher for the first month. They have precedent for 28 players so would hope they would go that route and eliminate the 13 pitcher rule while rosters are expanded. After all the haggling with the CBA, even something as easy as this does not look like a slam dunk.
I assume a 26 player active roster, not 25, is status quo under the new CBA — of which at most 13 are pitchers?