Baseball truly is a sport like no other. It has no time limit. It’s the only sport in which the defense puts the ball in play. Unlike other sports, wherein the offense scores points while in possession of the ball, in baseball the ball prevents you from scoring. But perhaps the strangest contrast between baseball and other sports is an oddity that we as fans have come to accept: the beast known as September call-ups. No other sport has anything like September call-ups. No sport expands the rosters of its teams in the last month, or has them play under different rules than they did during the rest of the season. Nothing else exists in the world of sports that is quite like September call-ups.
For the first five months of the baseball season (April through August) major league clubs operate with a 25-man roster, also called the active roster. Historically, the active roster is comprised of five starting pitchers, seven relief pitchers, two catchers, six infielders, and five outfielders. But in September, clubs are allowed to expand their roster to 40 players for a variety of reasons. The 40-man roster, also called the extended roster, is comprised of minor league players signed to major league contracts who can be brought up to a major league club in September. The September call-ups are done with the best intentions, and are usually meant to give minor league players big league experience and to allow clubd to evaluate their ability to play in the majors, or simply to provide relief and additional reinforcements to a struggling or injury plagued team during the last games of the season.
While the extended roster seems to be a good idea, the result is the creation of an unfair advantage that produces a pointless oddity in Major League Baseball that should have been amended years ago.
The foremost reason the call-ups should have been revised the time at which they occur. In professional baseball, September is truly the most important month. Teams are racing towards the finish line with October and wild dreams of postseason glory on their minds. Even teams that are behind in the standings can still make late season runs in September. The 1973 New York Mets, for example, were in last place at the end of August and were nine games out of first place. Despite their lowly standing, the Mets finished strong in September with a season record of 82-79, which was good enough for first place that year. The Mets went from worst to first in just one month, signifying just how important and influential the last month of the baseball season is.
And if September truly is the most important month in baseball, it would be the absolute worst possible time to change the rules, because it could create an unfair advantage for teams. For example, it is unfair for a first place team with injuries to bring up 15 fresh players in the last month to gain an advantage and desperately hold on to their lead. In the same regard, it would be unfair for a weaker team with a strong farm system to call up their minor league players in an attempt to gain games on a better team, or for a team whose pitchers have far surpassed their innings limits to call up younger and fresher pitchers in an attempt to rest their tired arms for a possible postseason run. Teams that are postseason-bound (or, for that matter, ones that are not) should not be able to nearly double their roster so late in the season. A team that is destined for October should make it on its own accord, and with the team they’ve constructed for the year. Why change the rules of a sport so late in its season? To put it simply, the September call-ups completely, and unfairly, change the strategy of the game, can greatly affect how a manager manages a ballgame, and could ultimately affect a pennant race.
The extended roster’s ability to affect a pennant race aside, September call-ups can greatly affect new commissioner Rob Manfred’s biggest platform, the game’s pace of play. It’s no stretch of the imagination to think that extending a roster by 15 players per team can lengthen the game. Manfred and Major League Baseball have been very diligent this year in pursuing their goal of shortening the length of games; the new pitch clock is the most obvious example. But as adamant as baseball has been about shortening games, the increase of 30 players per game only works towards nullifying any progress that pitch clocks have made. Expanded rosters allow mangers to change pitchers more freely or pinch hit more often because their bench depth gives them the freedom to do so.
September call-ups are simply an archaic institution in baseball that serves no real purpose today. They have a spring training-like quality that should have been revised by Major League Baseball long ago. Perhaps one of the problems with September call-ups starts with the minor leagues. Since the minor league season ends in September, it makes sense to bring up a team’s best minor league players around that time. But, if the minor league season was extended further into September, it could annul the use of an extended roster. Or, perhaps extending a roster by 15 players is simply too much, and adding a smaller number of players or even a predetermined amount of position players or pitchers to the roster could help even out the imbalance. Whatever the answer is, here is to hoping that MLB has a plan to fix the peculiarity that is known as the September call-ups.
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