Thoughts (and Charts!) About Opening Day Rosters 2015

I haven't written any blog posts recently because I've been spending these last few weeks creating content for other corners of the interweb. (Forget for a moment that these corners are both owned by the same giant corporation.) That's right, the ryskmonger42 channel is finally getting some love, at least from its creator - the subscriptions stopped coming in when my Batman Power Hour got blocked (password is batman). And then while I haven't been recording myself playing video games or editing that gameplay footage or messing around with musical mashups, I've been putting the finishing touches on my 40 Man Rosters document.

Now that I've got all the info entered as of opening day, I've started drawing some broad strokes conclusions about the state of MLB's rosters. The first thing I looked at was the distribution of pitchers and position players on each active roster. When I watch games with the uninitiated, one of the most frequent questions I get is about roster construction and the pitcher-to-batter ratio. I say that for the majority of teams it's 12 pitchers and 13 batters, and the research I did into this year's crop of opening day rosters confirms this: 23 teams or 77% follow this model, as you can see in the chart below. The other two permutations we see - one with an extra pitcher, one with an extra batter - are so infrequent that it's worth just listing the outliers. The five teams carrying an eight-man bullpen are the Orioles, Blue Jays, Indians, Mets, and defending World Champion Giants. The two teams with an extra piece of bench depth are the White Sox and Dodgers.

The next factor I examined was the number of rookies each team has on its active roster. I prepared a chart for this too, and if you skip ahead you'll see that there's a big cluster of teams with either one or two rookies, no team had more than six (which comes out to nearly a quarter of the big league roster), and only one team had no rookies in the big league dugout on opening day (the Miami Marlins). Looking at the two teams with six, it's clear that clubs can stockpile rookies for very different strategic reasons: the Braves are in a self-professed rebuilding period and are breaking in some future regulars, while the Blue Jays want to contend and are looking to capture some lightning in a bottle from their talented youngsters. Keep in mind that I'm relying on Baseball-Reference.com's rookie status calculations, as I wouldn't want to determine how many days each 2014 first year player had on his team's active roster.

Usually I would do a tally of how many new acquisitions are on each team's active roster, but I feel like I've done enough showcasing of newly acquiried talent for one offseason. This next list is a little more targeted and less broadly indicative of MLB trends as the previous two, but since I went to all the trouble of including Cot's Baseball Contracts info into my document, I made a list of each team's highest-paid player going into the season. In the notes section, I pointed out which contracts were newly signed for 2015 and whether the initial contract was signed by a different team than a player's current team. I also added an extra player in the notes section for two teams, the Tigers and the Giants, both of whose highest salaried players quickly went on the disabled list to start the season. Not mentioned in the notes section are players whose salaries are being partially paid for by the teams that traded them, such as Matt Kemp, Trevor Cahill, and Prince Fielder starting in 2016.

As a bonus addendum to the above lists and charts, I want to share some observations I had when going through the minor league affiliates for 2015. As you may know, there are six levels of the minor leagues. Every team has an affiliate of the four highest skill levels: AAA (Triple A), AA (Double A), A+ (Class A Advanced), and A (Class A). All but eight teams have an A- (Short Season A) affiliate, and all but two teams have a Rookie level affiliate in either the Gulf Coast League or the Arizona League. Also, 17 teams have affiliates in one of the other two Rookie leagues, and it's one exception to this rule that brings me to my first observation:

- The Royals are the only team to have an affiliate in both of these aforementioned non-Florida-or-Arizona Rookie leagues: the Appalachian League and the Frontier League.

- Minor league teams are often named after their parent club. The teams whose name appears on the most affiliates (not counting GCL and AZL) are as follows: Braves (4), Cardinals, Yankees, and Mets (3), Red Sox, Cubs, and Blue Jays (2).

- There are two affiliates who share the name of a major league team with which they are not affiliated: the Indianapolis Indians (PIT AAA) and the Spokane Indians (TEX A-).

- The Angels are the only team to have two affiliates with the same name that is NOT the name of the parent club: the AAA Salt Lake Bees and the Class A Burlington Bees. I think it's safe to say, AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHH!!! NOT THE BEES!!!