Painting the Black: 40-Man Flexibility by R.J. Anderson

Baseball’s postseason rosters will lock into place at the stroke of midnight tonight, when the roster expansion period begins. Only the players on each team’s 25-man roster at that time will be eligible to play in the postseason. That rule was devised to prevent playoff-bound teams from loading up on rentals during the final two weeks of the season (as the rest of the league is eliminated from contention), as well as calling up their top prospects just for the postseason. However, there is a way to circumvent that rule and essentially add a 26th, 27th, and occasionally a 28th man to the playoff roster pool, and it involves the disabled list. Simply put, a team can substitute another player from the 40-man roster for any player on the team’s major-league 60-day disabled list after August 31. The catch, and it is a minor one, is that only pitchers can replace pitchers and only positional players can replace positional players. This exception came to prominence in 2...