I've always liked that Doug Melvin guy. Smart guy, seems to be good at what he does. And he may be the only current baseball insider who's on the right side of this debate:

Whenever Brewers general manager Doug Melvin has suggested to his peers that Major League Baseball needs to amend the usage of September's expanded rosters, he has felt like a man on his own island.
...
"You play 80 percent of your season with even rosters," Melvin said, "and then all of a sudden, you throw that out. It's like playing three-on-six in basketball or 11-on-18 in football. I don't know of any sport in the world that does it like ours, with this kind of imbalance of rosters.
...
his focus rests primarily on the belief that clubs should be working with an equal deck before the start of every game played throughout the entire season.
"It's the most ludicrous thing I see in sports," he said.
"I'm pretty adamant on this. I don't get too excited, but this is one thing that I just think gets completely overlooked every year. It's brought up at GM meetings every year, and the large-market teams don't want to touch it.
"Really, it's the large-market teams. I'd like to see a large-market team lose the pennant once because the team that's chasing them wins an extra-inning game with all of their extra players."

Preach it, brother. See, Doug Melvin and I know something about the frustrations of expanded rosters. We were both at this game, along with lar and The Common Man, to root (uncharacteristically, in mine and TCM's case, but passionately) the Crew on to a 7-2 win over the Astros. At least, I presume Doug Melvin was there. I didn't see him or anything.

Anyway, it was really a pretty fun game. Closely contested until the end, when the home team broke out the bats and won it. Lar wrote lots of stuff about it. It was good. Except for this part: we're in the 7th, and the 'Stros have a 2-1 lead. Brian Moehler, who I didn't know was still in baseball, has been pitching like it's 1998 up to this point. But he gives up a single to Jason Kendall (so maybe it really was 1998?), and when a lefty pinch hitter is announced, manager Cecil Cooper goes out to call on his lefty specialist, Tim Byrdak.

Fine, good move. Ken Macha counters by pulling his lefty PH for a righty PH, someone named Jason Bourgeois, who singles, and then Felipe Lopez walks. Cooper goes out to get Byrdak, replacing him with a rookie named Samuel Gervacio.

Fine. Bases loaded and nobody out, Byrdak struggling, two righties coming up. But two batters, two more singles (and three runs) later, and Prince Fielder is coming up, so Cooper goes out again to bring in another lefty, Wesley Wright.

A little annoying, but it is Prince, one of the toughest lefties around. Understandable, I guess; I mean, not really, but that might happen in a real baseball game (though more likely, any of the other five months out of the season, Wright is in the minors and Byrdak is held back to pitch to Fielder). Prince singles, and in comes another rookie, Jeff Fulchino.

So here we are: no outs in the inning. There have been six batters, all have reached, and three have scored. And there have been five pitchers used in the inning. Five pitchers have thrown a grand total of 22 pitches and recorded zero outs. Cooper has made four pitching changes. In one inning.

Incidentally, Cecil Cooper was fired as Astros manager yesterday. There was no indication at press time that the cause was that he made TCM, lar and Bill sit through five different pitchers in one inning, but you know, karma has smacked bitches down for far less.

Anyway, a quick look at the current Astros roster reveals that they're carrying 30 players -- ten less than the maximum -- and fifteen pitchers. Can you imagine what Cooper would've done if they'd given him, say, twenty pitchers to play with? Or twenty five? Yikes.

Look, I don't know if Melvin's fears are well founded. I suppose if you have a whole bunch of big-league quality pitchers lying around -- and who does? -- you could do what the Astros did and take huge advantage of it, getting the platoon advantage in just about every at-bat. Mostly, though, every team can expand its roster equally, so I doubt it makes that much of a difference, competitively, unless a team decides not to take advantage of it.

But it's not baseball. Part of baseball is roster management. Five months out of the year, most teams can't afford to carry a 13th or 14th or 15th pitcher, or a full-time pinch runner, or a third or fourth catcher, or a late-inning defensive whiz at every position. And then the last month rolls around -- the one where people really start paying attention to the pennant races and the one in which some people believe the most important games are being played -- and we completely turn everything on its head. It's not really much different than if, on September 1st, they suddenly added a fifth base. It might not give one team an advantage over another, but it's a different game.

Listen to Doug Melvin, guys. It's a game where each team gets 25 players, and has to work within that limit...80% of the time. Seems to me it ought to be 100%.