A Reminder That Playing Major League Baseball Is Really, Really Hard

Major League Baseball is rumbling toward Opening Day, now only 15 days away. By March 30, each team must whittle its active roster down to 26 players and its 40-man roster to, well, 40 players. Players on the active roster are eligible to play in any MLB game. Generally speaking, the 14 additional players on the 40-man roster are either assigned to a team’s minor league affiliate or injured.

Yesterday morning, I came across the below tweet by FanGraphs writer Jason R.R. Martinez and it got me thinking about how difficult it is to make an MLB Opening Day roster.

The link in Jason’s tweet is to FanGraph’s roster resource—a detailed database of every player invited to a major league Spring Training camp. There’s a drop down menu under the title Projected Opening Day Status where you can see the list of 2,056 players who started in a major league camp (Full Spring Training Roster). That’s a significant percentage of the best baseball players in the world. By comparison, there are approximately 14,000 players on NCAA Division I Men’s Baseball teams.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, if you’d clicked the drop down menu to No Longer In Camp, it showed 486 players who have been optioned or reassigned to a minor league team, released outright, placed on the 60-day injured list or opted to retire. (If you need a refresher on what all these terms mean, check out this glossary of minor league transaction terms).

Even with those cuts, that still leaves 1,570 players in major league camp (which includes those players who are away from their teams to participate in the World Baseball Classic). So more cuts are coming in the next 15 days. Big cuts. More than half the players remaining in a major league camp will not be one of the 780 players to make an MLB Opening Day roster, although 420 additional players will find a slot on a 40-man roster.

Ted William famously said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. Science seems to back that up. Deion Sanders, who played in both the NFL and MLB, told a radio show in 2022 that playing professional baseball was harder than playing professional football.

The skill set and good health needed to pitch in the major leagues is almost unfathomable. The pressure on pitchers to ramp up the velocity on their fastball is intense. The average four-seam fastball velocity in MLB last season was 93.9 mph; by some accounts, that speed increased to 95 mph in the postseason. The strain that kind of velocity puts on the arm and shoulder is immense, and one reason for the rapid rise in pitcher injuries, as detailed in Jeff Passan’s book The Arm.

We all get frustrated when the players on the team we root for don’t perform to the level we expect them to, even though, rationally, we understand how difficult it is to make a major league roster, much less succeed at the major league level. As we get ready for Opening Day, let’s practice showing grace to the players, who perform near impossible tasks on a daily basis.