What the 2023 Spring Training Roster Expansion Actually Means for Your Daily Work
In January 2023, Major League Baseball expanded spring training rosters from 40 to 60 players. This was a permanent rule change, not a temporary pandemic adjustment. It affects how general managers build their squads, how beat writers track prospects, and honestly, how annoying it is to keep accurate notes when you are covering camp. If you are looking up a Spring Training Roster 2023 for fantasy baseball research, player development tracking, or just personal curiosity, the way data is organized has shifted since 2022 and earlier years. The official source remains mlb.com. Each team has a dedicated spring training page that lists the expanded roster. You can navigate to any team's page through the standings section, click on the roster tab, and filter by spring training status. The data updates in real time as transactions happen throughout camp. For archived reference, the MLB Gameday archive and the Baseball Almanac both have complete Spring Training Roster 2023 listings organized by team. I also rely on Fangraphs and the MLB transaction tracker for cross-referencing. The problem with single-source lookup is that roster moves happen fast in spring. A player gets optioned, recalled, placed on the 60-day IL, and re-signed within the same morning. My workaround for this has always been to take a screenshot or export a CSV from mlb.com early in the day, then note the timestamp. Without that, you will waste twenty minutes chasing whether Martinez was on the roster at 10 AM or 2 PM.
How the 60-Roster Rule Changes Player Evaluation
Before 2023, teams carried 40 players. The jump to 60 meant organizations could keep significantly more non-40-man prospects in camp without burning a spot on a major league contract. This created a genuine bottleneck for anyone trying to evaluate which prospects were actually competing for jobs versus which ones were just getting extra at-bats against mediocre pitching. One thing most people miss is that the expanded roster does not guarantee playing time. I saw this clearly with several teams in 2023 where the top ten prospects by organizational ranking combined for fewer plate appearances than the eleventh-ranked guy. The coaches rotate through 60 bodies. Some players get three games. Others get nothing meaningful because the manager is working veterans into routine roles. If you are grading prospect performance based on spring stats alone after 2023, you need to factor in opportunity differential. A .400 average in twelve at-bats means something different than a .250 average in forty-five. Another counter-intuitive point: the expanded roster actually made it harder to identify bullpen experimentation. In previous years, teams had roughly twelve pitchers in camp and you could watch them all compete. Now you might have twenty-eight pitchers floating through spring. The real relievers are working against minor leaguers while fringe guys burn innings. You have to pay attention to who is throwing in Grapefruit and Cactus League games versus spring intrasquad sessions. The intrasquad day roster tells you more about depth than the actual exhibition schedule does.
Practical Tips for Using Spring Training Roster 2023 Data Effectively
If you are building spreadsheets or tracking systems, do not assume positional eligibility carries over from the regular season roster. Spring training rosters include players trying out for positions they rarely play during the year. I spent an entire week in 2023 tracking a shortstop who had played zero defensive innings at short all spring because the front office had him listed there on the roster card. He ended up spending the regular season exclusively as a designated hitter. Always verify actual game reps, not just the roster designation. For download purposes, mlb.com does not offer a bulk CSV export of spring training rosters. The closest you can get is manually compiling from individual team pages. I built a simple script that pulls the HTML table from each team's spring training roster page and exports to CSV. It takes about eight minutes to run across all thirty teams. If you do not want to code anything, the MLB app allows you to save rosters to your device, but the data is not easily portable between apps or platforms. The biggest limitation of the current Spring Training Roster 2023 setup is that historical comparison across years is messy. The roster size change means you cannot directly compare the number of players a team carried in camp between 2022 and 2023. A team that had forty-two players in 2022 might have listed fifty-eight in 2023 even though their actual organizational depth did not change meaningfully. When doing year-over-year analysis, normalize by excluding players who were never on a 40-man roster. That gives you a consistent baseline for evaluating organizational prospect movement.
Get the Full Details
Also worth noting: spring training rosters include international signing bonus pool players and invited non-roster minor leaguers who may never appear in an official MLB game. If your research is focused on major league-ready talent, filter by players who have accumulated at least one cup of coffee appearance or who are on the 40-man roster heading into camp. That usually cuts the visible roster down to a manageable number without losing the prospects who actually matter for trade deadline and opening day discussions.
