The NFL announced today that come Dec. 1 teams could expand their rosters from 53 to as many as 68 players for games. However, it is at the clubs’ discretion how many they add. So, in theory, one team could play with 68 players against a team with 53.
Before anyone changes their fantasy league strategy, I just made that up that rule. Even in a league that has Roger Goodell as commissioner, that change would be ridiculous.
In a related item: Major League Baseball teams were allowed to expand their rosters to as many as 40 players on Sept. 1. Or keep them at 25. Or have 29 and play against a team with 36.
Here is the simplest way to know a rule is ludicrous: If it didn’t exist and you proposed it, you would get laughed out of the room. Yet this is an actual MLB rule, a rule that pretty much everyone in the game thinks defines stupidity, a rule executives discuss fixing annually and a rule that never changes. The sides negotiated the subject in 2011 for the last Collective Bargaining Agreement, tried to do a deal on just this issue in 2012-13 and now promise it will be part of the next round of CBA talks. But the current CBA does not expire until after next season.
That means two more Septembers – which contain the most meaningful regular-season games on the schedule — are going to be played under different rules than used in the previous five months.
A 25-man roster does not have room for a pure speed guy to impact late-game situations for 130-ish games. No problem. The Mets (Eric Young Jr.) and Yankees (Rico Noel) are among those using the expanded roster for players whose sole job will be to run from the sixth inning on. Can’t do it in June, but you can do it now.
For five-sixths of a season, the best managers work to exploit late-game matchups. Good luck with that now when just about every team will have oodles of lefties and righties — on the bench and in the bullpen — to defy the matchups. And let’s see what that does to speed-up-the-pace dictates when relievers are on a conveyor belt in and out of games. You don’t think Joe Girardi is already working on his nine-inning, nine-reliever game?
For five months, if you have an injury and don’t want to use the DL – as the Yankees have been doing with Mark Teixeira – you play short-handed. And then in September, you play (to coin a phrase) long-handed. Neither situation makes sense. The DL rules should be changed, and so should the expanded roster rules.
I think the sport should do something radical: You can use anyone in your system to play anytime from Game 1 to Game 162, you just have to announce your 25-man roster six hours before first pitch.
Can you imagine anyone telling Microsoft an employee it pays in a European office could not be brought to help a struggling situation in New York? Yet baseball organizations employ 200-plus players and are forbidden from using someone they pay however and wherever they want. That is crazy to me.
I understand nothing so radical will occur. MLB will take baby steps if there are any changes. Fine. But whatever alteration is made, keeping the roster for every game at 25 is a must. You can’t have 25 players available to play April-through-August and a different number for September.
So in September make it so teams can change their rosters daily, but still get to 25. If a player has a minor injury, he is deactivated. If you don’t want to have the pitchers who started the four previous games on the roster, you can add the speed guy or situational lefty. You are out of it and want to play prospects? No problem. Just deactivate a few veterans and play the kids. There will be hard feelings, but not unfairness.
Would service time issues have to be remedied? Of course. But better to fix those rules than to have games begin for which teams have different numbers of players. Better that than have stretch-run games played by different strategies than in the first 130 games.
Better that than have a rule that is even too dumb for Roger Goodell.