Rosters

Photo: Tdorante10, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source file

Each franchise slot by slot, across all three sports. The lines follow the league’s own roster sheet: starters first in the order the format lists them, then the bench, then the injured list.

A team carries 49 drafted players — 13 in football, 25 in baseball, 11 in basketball — and the sheet shows more lines than that because the injured list is unlimited and positions such as flex, middle infield and utility take whoever qualifies. Player entries are printed as filed, which means they carry their professional team abbreviation and, where the source marked one, a status letter.

Blank lines are blank in the source and are left that way here. That is deliberate: a roster sheet with a hole in it is information — usually a slot that went unfilled after a drop — and filling it by inference would turn a record into a guess. For the same reason no line has been moved between teams to balance the columns, and no player has been assigned a position the sheet did not give him.

The sheet is also the clearest illustration of what a 49-slot roster does to a draft. Baseball takes half of it on its own, which is why 350 of the 700 picks on the board were baseball players and why the middle rounds read as one long infield. Football, with 13 slots, is decided in the first handful of rounds and then barely appears again; basketball, at 11, sits between the two.