Arizona Diamondbacks Offseason: 40-Man Roster and The Rule 5 Draft

If you are not familiar with the baseball offseason calendar, don’t panic because it can be a little confusing at first. Fear not friends, we have a list of important dates all in one place for you.

If you take a look at our list, you will see that one of the first deadlines that the Arizona Diamondbacks’ front office has to deal with is the 40-man roster, specifically weeding it out in order to prepare for the upcoming Rule 5 Draft at the Winter Meetings on December 10th.

Prospects that are eligible for the Major-League phase of the Rule 5 Draft can be protected by their current employer if the team adds them to the 40-man roster. The deadline to get this done is November 20th; that is only 15 days from now!

Decisions regarding this subject take time because it will require General Manager Dave Stewart, Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa, and the rest of the staff to decide which players the team can afford to lose that are currently on the 40-man roster in order to save room for prospects that need to be protected.

This year, the Diamondbacks will have to add the following players to the 40-man roster if they don’t want another club to take them in the Rule 5 draft:

• Gabriel Arias
• Jake Barrett
• Zach Borenstein
• J.R. Bradley
• Miller Diaz
• Kaleb Fleck
• Todd Glaesmann
• Alex Glenn
• Gabriel Guerrero
• Sean Jamieson
• Matt Koch
• Evan Marzilli
• Kevin Munson
• Peter O’Brien
• Johnny Omahen
• Blayne Weller

Just because a player is on this list doesn’t mean the team will decide to protect them. With only a certain number of spots on the 40-man roster, teams can’t protect every single one of their eligible prospects. That is why drafting and creating a deep farm system is so important.

Out of the 16 players that are listed above, several names do stand out to me and need to be protected if I were in the front office.

Next: A true piece for the future