This afternoon, MLB and the Players Association agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement to keep the 162-game regular season. The shutdown dragged on long enough to deal a pretty significant blow to spring training, which will be shorter in 2022 than a normal year.
With only four weeks left until Opening Day, there are some concerns about the workload players will have to take on at the start of the season. One possible solution would be to slightly expand the active lineups at the start of the season, and this seems to be under discussion. Joel Sherman of the New York Post marked this afternoon that although expanding the lists was not part of the CBA, the parties could return to this possibility. Kevin Acey of the San Diego Union-Tribune tweets that some in the industry are expecting an expansion of the active roster at the start of the regular season.
This move would not be unprecedented. Squads have been increased to 28 players for the entire 2020 shortened season. This followed a three-week Summer Camp expo and also raised a lot of concern about teams losing players due to COVID-19. However, it does suggest that the league and union don’t mind adding a little more depth to the team rosters if they’re concerned about a reduced buildup.
Further complicating matters is the return to limiting the number of pitchers teams can have. During the 2019-20 offseason, MLB introduced a rule limiting the number of teams to 13 pitchers at any given time. Under pandemic protocols, this rule was suspended in both 2020 and 2021. However, USA Today’s Bob Nightingale reported last May that MLB plans to reinstate the 13 pitcher limit this season. This appears to have come to fruition as Cardinals president of baseball operations John Moseliac acknowledged that this was the case in a conversation with reporters tonight (via Derrick Gould of St. Louis Post Dispatch).
If active rosters expanded during the first few weeks of the season, this cap on the number of pitchers would likely be loosened. However, whenever teams face a permanent 13 hurler limit, managers face bigger challenges when dealing with their staff. The CBA also restricts teams from being able to select minor league players more than five times per season, so management won’t be as simple as turning new players on and off daily. This may force teams to rely more on their starting pitchers than in recent years (especially with the introduction of the universal DH removing the need for a pinch hit for pitchers depending on the game situation).