When Raleigh gains an MLB expansion team it will pick its first cohort of players from existing MLB teams, free agents, and the amateur draft. It won’t be entering the fray alone, of course, there will be another team rounding out the 32 total. I’ll make a couple assumptions here about who that team will be: it will be from the western part of the country, and it will be Salt Lake City. Those particulars are irrelevant for this post, but thought I’d make a guess anyway.
We don’t have a ton of history to base the “how” on, but the last time the league expanded was in 1997 with the Tampa Bay Rays (Devil Rays) and the Arizona Diamondbacks. It probably won’t happen in the exact same way this time, but let’s briefly review how that went.
The existing teams had to make lists of ‘protected’ players. These players could not be chosen by the new teams. 15 players for each team were off-limits in addition to a few other categories- 10/5 rights players and players with no trade clauses. The rest of the 40-man rosters were ‘fair-game.’ Just a reminder here that an ‘expansion draft’ would take place in the off-season, so the new teams are free to engage free-agent players like any other team and that would affect how the expansion draft selections get made.
So, in 1997, each team took 15 players in ‘round one.’ The rest of the teams then got to reset and protect 3 further players on their roster, and the same after another round. They ended up with 35 players. There are many more details and wrinkles here we could go into (it’s baseball afterall) but let’s move on.
How did it go last time? Tampa picked first and then Arizona picked 2 in a row (2nd and 3rd). They then went on to alternate. The first pick to the Devil Rays was a left-handed pitcher (Tony Saunders) from the Marlins! I forgot about that. Kind of funny to steal a player away from the in-state sister team. As for the other players, not many jump off the screen. For me, Bobby Abreu was about the biggest name. Part of that is just my memories of him on the Cubs at the end of his career. Plenty of interesting role-players, though, for sure. (Here are the full results of that draft at Baseball Reference)
The process will be different this time around. Nobody knows exactly how yet, but such a process is a result of negotiations with existing owners who don’t have a ton of vested interest in losing ‘their’ players. If I had to guess on what might be different this time around (based on no inside information yet- I have a line out to the commissioners office and I’ll update if anything comes back):
- Caps on how many players can be chosen from any one franchise.
- Allowing injured and/or other 60-man roster players to be chosen.
- Some limited mechanism to override the 10/5 and no-trade pool of players
I’ve gone through each team’s roster and made some assumptions as to who might be off-limits, and who might be available to a Raleigh expansion pick. A reminder, the Raleigh pick would alternate with the SLC pick. Rather than fill out an entire roster, I’ll just list some interesting players that might be available (if the draft took place after the 2026 season).
- Giancarlo Stanton
- Yoan Moncada
- Hunter Renfroe
- Chris Stratton
- Jack Leiter
- Jorge Soler
- TJ Friedl
- Jake Bauers
- Chris Bryant
One reason to run through potential picks is to get a sense of how important scouting is to the process. Once teams take their 15 best players off the table, we’re looking at difficult projections. It might be best to bet on youth and upside. I imagine the analytics employed by contemporary teams will be churning away trying to solve this on both sides: which players to protect and which available players to snatch away.
Two big pieces remain for consideration:
- What free agency looks like at the time of expansion (who is available).
- How the minor league system is put together for the new team(s).
