Thursday, January 22, 2009

Commish For A Day #6: 40 Man Roster

I'm going to add another Commish For A Day posting (or two!) this afternoon as I'd like to get everything in this week. The response was greater than I expected and I want to give those who took the time the chance to be heard. This post nicely follows the previous CFAD posting about rules changes.

This comes from Howard from Philadelphia, home of the World Champs. Howard's "too old" to cite his age (his words, not mine!), but he's got a real beef with the roster expansion from 25 to 40 once we hit September:

The dumbest rule in baseball has to be that teams can have as many as 40 players active for September games after having only 25 players active for games from April through August.

If I was commissioner for a day, I would still allow teams to call up as many as 15 players from the minors for games in September and October; however, each team would have to submit a roster of 25 players for each game. This way, the minor leaguers can travel with the team and play - especially in games between two teams that are out of playoff contention - without important pennant-deciding games being won and lost using a different set of rules than were used during the first 5 months of the season.

Also, if they enact this rule, we won't have to sit through 4 hour games where Tony LaRussa uses 10 pitchers to get the last 12 outs.


For previous CFAD entries:

  1. Commish For A Day #1: Territorial Rights
  2. Commish For A Day #2: Best-of-7-LDS
  3. Commish For A Day #3: The All Star Game, Neutral Sites
  4. Commish For A Day #4: Instant Replay
  5. Commish For A Day #5: Playing by the rules

4 comments:

dinologic (Dean D) said...

I couldn't agree with this more. It's a subtle change but one that would make a pretty big impact on potential pennant race games.

Jorge Says No! said...

Love this idea! Send it to Selig!

The Common Man said...

I like it too, but you'd need to make some kind of provision that managers name their starters a couple games early. Otherwise, you'd still have a problem with each manager having four extra relievers, while deactivating four starters.

Anonymous said...

Common Man, you are right. I thought of that, but forgot to include it in my e-mail. However, instead of teams naming their next 4 starters, I thought that each team would have to include their last four starters among the 25.