But a team's Opening Day Roster has an air of somewhat more permanence to it. It serves as a snapshot that encapsulates all the tireless work put in by the front offices of each team during the winter months to get their squads ready for the long-awaited and much-heralded start of the season. These are the rosters that are approximated in videogames, fantasy baseball projections, and pre-season predictions everywhere. Which is why I've spent the better part of the last week analyzing each team's roster, as it appeared on each team's official website as of 4/6/12 (the day after each team had played at least one game).
I offer here an example of all the hard work I did (although I didn't consider it work) in the form of a 40-man roster especially close to my heart, that of the Oakland Athletics. The roster first, then some explanation to follow:
First, let's go through the columns. Rank is from MLB.com's Fantasy Baseball page, also from 4/6. Prospect (the name is cut off to save room) refers to MLB.com's Prospect Watch page, captured slightly earlier than 4/6, but these numbers are less mutable. Player's positions are listed based on their fantasy eligibility according to ESPN.com's system. (In the cases where a batter has eligibility for multiple positions, the one at which the player logged more innings is listed. Any pitcher with starter eligibility is listed as such.)
If the name in the Team column is in italics, the player didn't have enough at bats (100) or innings pitched (20.0) to qualify for relevance. SWP stands for Small World Points, named for the now-defunct site where I first saw this system implemented, nearly 10 years ago. This system of fantasy scoring reduces each player's performance to a single number taking into account a broad range of statistical categories, and then calculates the player's average point output per game (SWP/G).
The next three columns are the same as the previous three except with statistics from the minor leagues (all levels) or foreign leagues (I think Japan and Cuba are the only ones that come into play here). The most informative thing to do with this column is to compare a player's minor league points per game with their major league points per game to see how likely they are to maintain that level of performance in the majors.
Now a word about the color-coding system. Any player whose position column is highlighted green is listed as a rookie. According to MLB's 2012 Prospect Watch,
To qualify for rookie status, a player must not have exceeded 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched in the Major Leagues, or accumulated more than 45 days on the active roster of a Major League club or clubs during the 25-player limit period, excluding time on the disabled list or in military service.This column shows an approximation, because while AB and IP is easy enough to figure out, I don't feel the need to scrub through every young player's game log and transaction history. If a player's name is highlighted in yellow, that player was acquired during the off-season. For a deeper look into these players, please see my previous two posts.
A player's Bat/Throw column indicates his status on the various roster types. No fill means the player is on the active roster, aka 25-man roster. These are the players who suit up every day and who you can expect to see in games. A blue highlight means the player is on the expanded roster and can be called up to the majors at any time. (Each major leaguer has three "option years" during which they can be sent up and down between the minors and the active roster without going through waivers, where they can be claimed by any of the other 30 clubs.)
A red highlight means that the player is on the 15-day disabled list. These players remain on the 40-man roster, but are ineligible to play until they've served their time and gotten all healed. An orange highlight indicates a player on the 60-day disabled list, which means they are not on the 40-man roster. Last but not least, if a player's swp column is shaded gray, that player missed all of 2011 and the stats are from 2010.
The A's have a lot of yellow on their 2012 roster - trading away all your highest profile talent should net a fair amount in return, after all. Add to that a couple uncharacteristic free agent signings (not to mention re-signings, which don't have a color associated with them) and you've got a team that looks very different from its 2011 version. Looking at the blue-highlighted players, it's interesting to see that 2 of the A's top 5 starting pitchers (both included on MLB's list of top 100 prospects) aren't on the active roster. Billy Beane is subsisting on four starters for as long as humanly possible before deciding which top prospect to officially anoint with a rotation spot.
In the What a Difference a Week Makes category, Daric Barton has already been reinstated from the DL and Brandon Allen has been designated for assignment, all but assuring that the main prize in last year's trade of Brad Ziegler will be plucked off the waiver wire by some other team willing to take a shot on a promising slugger whose best seasons came in the minors. Also, get ready to see Joey Devine transferred from the 15-day to the 60-day DL following the recent announcement that he will be undergoing his second Tommy John elbow ligament replacement surgery in four years. This will put the A's in uncontested second place for most uses of the 60-day DL behind only the Boston Red Sox with a whopping five players out for two months or more.
So now you all know what I've been doing with my time during the start of the season. You might see some rosters for select other teams up here, depending on how newsworthy these next few weeks prove. But now that I've learned how to make ESPN's fantasy baseball system compute real-time swp - which is so much easier than keeping track of 20 different statistical categories - there's a whole new world of analytics open to me in 2012.
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