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Baseball Roster Expansions

When the season rolls to and end you have to make sure you are factoring baseball roster expansions when doing your handicapping.  This is often overlooked but can be a valuable tool for the expert MLB handicapper.

With six weeks left in baseball’s regular season, we’ve still got some exciting pennant races ahead of us. But one of the most recent debates in baseball has to do with the custom of expanding the roster to 40 players at September 1. 

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It makes things difficult if you’re trying to handicap a game, as well. The reasons it can be tougher are as follows:

Expansion changes the strategy used by managers late in games, as managers are no longer as concerned with using the final lefthander in their bullpen, or removing a slower player for a faster runner. It causes teams to make decisions they ordinarily wouldn’t make; it also allows players who might not be in the major leagues, but have one “tool” that they can bring to the table, to make an impact late in the season.

Managers love to make a ton of decisions during the games; look at how Cardinals manager Tony La Russa manages. With the young players in the mix, and an expanded roster, you can see more pitchers than you ever thought possible, as managers bring in new players for every imaginable matchup.

It doesn’t do a whole lot for the length of the games, either, as with mid-inning pitching changes a part of the game, the game sure doesn’t get any shorter. But that doesn’t affect us from a handicapping standpoint.

Where it can is in a variety of ways. With pitchers, if a team has a huge lead in the standings, a pitcher might come out earlier than ordinary. He will then give way to a less experienced pitcher, one who might allow runs and either blow a lead or contribute to the total being obliterated. Other more experienced position players may also leave games earlier than ordinary, meaning that if a solid pitcher is left in, we suddenly have a salty vet taking on a kid with no experience.

As you can see, it can affect both sides of the handicapping equation. There are a few things you can do to get solid information about these roster changes, one of which is to see how much late-season call-ups typically play for a manager. Of course, we also need to check and see if teams are in a close race or if they have been eliminated. It requires a little more research than ordinary, but it can be a big help to get inside the mind of a manager.

I’m not saying I am not in favor of roster expansion, because I love the fact that it can make the dreams of marginal major league prospects come true. But it can complicate the way a line is set, whether a team will win or lose, and what happens to the total. But another thing that can complicate the line is teams that have been eliminated from contention and are playing for nothing – next week’s topic.