The Rangers will use their 59th player of the season tonight, and soon will use their 60th. That will set a new record for players used in a season. With September call ups, it’s possible the Yankees could come close, as they are at 52 right now, and the Angels at at 50. I suspect the majors will come very close to half the teams having used at least 50 players.
The majors as a whole used 1221 players, well short of the record 1304 used last season. We’ll see how close we get to a record by the end of the regular season. If you compare the two years pre-September, the majors used 1225 players in 2013.
It seems to me that if teams have that much MLB talent in the minors there is a good case to make that the talent pool is deep enough for more teams.
OTOH, the drop in offense and general overall play I have seen this season suggests a dilution of talent, so maybe its there are too many teams, and the talent in the minors is just making the jump to AAAA baseball that is what MLB seems to be at the moment.
So confused. I blame that stupid rule on blocking the plate. Another play tonight in Toronto made my head explode.
I think its the second. I also think the solution will ultimately be reviving the concept of independent minor league teams, who don’t serve as feeder teams for major league teams but who sign contracts on their own and have their own revenue sources.
Then there would be a tier between the farm systems and the majors, consisting of teams based in cities of some size but which will never be able to produce the revenue to compete with big city teams without caps and subsidies. This would consist of a mix of teams now in AAA and now in the majors.