In Buck Showalter's mind, expanded rosters create 'different game'
With ability to use 40 players in September, noncontending clubs can affect playoff races
Perhaps Buck Showalter protests too much, and for once we're not talking about video replay here.
Showalter looked at the big crowd of Cincinnati Reds stretching in front of the visitors dugout at Camden Yards on Wednesday and — for the umpteenth time — made his case against the unrestricted 40-man roster limit in September.
"It's just a different dynamic," he said. "It's like we're playing a whole different game now."
Of course, for those who have watched for the past three years as the Orioles found creative ways to stretch their 25-man roster to the point where it sometimes looked like it contained 40 players, this might seem like a strange complaint.
But Showalter isn't just looking at the pros and cons of roster expansion through orange-tinted glasses. He has played the game with an expanded roster on both sides of the competitive fence, which is why he is so sensitive to the impact of those extra players on the pennant race.
"Boston would have made the playoffs three years ago if we didn't have roster expansion," he said.
The whole idea is a bit outdated, which isn't surprising when you consider that Major League Baseball has been playing under the same basic roster rules since Babe Ruth joined the New York Yankees.
The late-season roster expansion made a lot more sense before the multitiered playoff era, back when there were two leagues and no divisions and lots of teams were way out of the pennant race in September. The ability to add a handful of promising players at the end of the season allowed those teams to evaluate their minor league depth and show off some of their hot prospects to maintain fan interest.
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