The New CBA — 40-Man Roster
The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between MLB and the Players Association (PA) expires on December 1st. The new CBA will be a hot topic this offseason. Negotiations could delay the 2022 season and potentially cause a lockout or strike. In this series, we will look at a number of changes you might see in the next CBA.
The 40-man roster has been 40 players for so long that it is just called the 40-man. Every player that is on it is represented by the PA. The roster comprises the 26 players on the Major League roster as well as 14 reserves in the minor leagues. The roster can also effectively be slightly larger because it doesn’t count players that are on the 60-day Injured List (IL).
There are three main purposes of the 40-man roster. The first is to provide a reserve of players to use in the Major Leagues in case of injury, to manage workload, or to flexibly deploy players of different abilities or positions.
The second, and more important purpose, is to limit the number of people that are eligible to do this. It makes complete sense. If you let a team take any player from their farm system, you’d have players shuttling back and forth constantly. Any time a pitcher with options threw in a game, you could send them out until they were ready to throw again for a fresh arm. The 40-man roster limits this fairly strictly.
The third reason for the 40-man limit is it provides a small amount of competitive balance. If a team needs to remove a player from their 40-man roster, they have to pass that player through assignment waivers (DFA). Any other team may claim that player for a small fee if they feel that player would improve their roster. This happens regularly throughout the calendar year.
Is 40 still the right size?
The size of the 40-man has stayed consistent since World War I (well from 1921), when it sat at 35. At the same time, the Major League roster has gone from 23 to the current 26 players.
One way to gauge the effectiveness of the size of this roster is to look at the churn at the bottom of each club’s roster, which can effectively be measured by the number of DFAs across the league. Over the last calendar year, teams have designated over 500 players for assignment per the MLB transaction pages.
This number has steadily grown over the last 20 years. At the turn of the century, this number hovered around 200, growing to around 250 in 2010 and 350 in 2015.
Part of this growth is a willingness for teams to claim a player and then send them back through waivers in hopes they go unclaimed. This allows them to outright the player to add depth to their minor league system. It is fairly normal now for a player to get designated 5 or 6 times over the course of a calendar year and hop from team to team. Ildemaro Vargas, Deven Marrero, and Luis Madero have all been DFA’d six times over the last couple seasons.
The growing number could also be an indication that the league is ready for expansion. More transactions suggests there are more players that teams feel are good enough to be on the bottom of their roster.
If the roster size were to grow to 42, there would be a number of effects. First, the player’s union would get 60 extra members as each of these players would sign Major League contracts. That would cost the teams a little extra money, maybe in the realm of $200–250k per player. These new players would spend most of their time in the minors, so they would earn far less than the Major League minimum.
One potential benefit is the additional players, if pitchers, could reduce the wear and tear on the Major League pitching staff. With pitchers throwing harder each year, injuries have continued to rise. The expanded roster would increase the team’s ability to rest their pitchers.
A negative would be a reduction in competitive balance as the better teams would be able to keep additional talented players. These players would typically find themselves on a lesser team’s roster.
The league could offer the PA a move to 42 as a low-cost negotiation tactic with the added benefit of improved league health. They could add a clause to reduce the number back to 40 in the event of league expansion to 32 teams. When you look at the pluses and minuses, there isn’t a clear answer if it makes sense to expand the 40-man roster, but this could be an important negotiating point this offseason.
