How many position players will the Braves use in 2019?

When I was putting together the 2019 projections posts for these here Atlanta Braves, I was surprised to find that for the first time in my compilation of them, there weren’t really questions about which position players to feature or exclude. This may not be surprising to you: the roster, on the position player side, seems fairly set. You’ve got your eight starters, a backup catcher, a fourth outfielder, and two roving utility men, both of whom can play most positions on the diamond. If someone gets injured or has to take a breather, the 2019 Atlanta Braves may not need to call up another position player given their positional depth. On top of that, no position spot is really in flux; no live tryouts are expected to proceed. Combine that with a relative dearth of prospects pushing into the lineup from the high minors (most are already here), and it definitely feels like you have the makings of a pretty steady cast of characters.

But, how steady is actually steady? Feels like is never a good substitute for actually knowing. Let’s start with 2018. In 2018, teams used an average of 23 position players; the Braves deployed 24. Six teams were tied for the fewest used with 20. Of course, that Braves team was far more in flux than this one — it featured a bunch of veteran stopgap signings, including Chris Stewart, Peter Bourjos, and Jose Bautista, each of whom barely figured into the team’s current or future plans before being jettisoned. Injuries, roster shuffling, and a midseason trade added new names into the mix. The Braves would have actually used only 21 players last year, but they gave a sum total of 13 plate appearances to Michael Reed, Rene Rivera, and Dustin Peterson. (They were one of only four teams in 2018 to give 10 or fewer PAs to three or more different position players.)

But, 2018 was a different year with a considerably different situation for the Braves. For 2019, the Fangraphs Depth Charts estimate that 16 different position players will appear in an Atlanta Braves uniform. This includes the 12 expected names, plus the other backup outfielder (at this point, Adam Duvall), a third catcher (Raffy Lopez), and two prospects (Austin Riley, Alex Jackson). Here’s the thing about that 16: it’s pretty low! These same Depth Charts estimate that if the Braves will use the second-fewest position players in 2019, tied with the Phillies and just one more than the Cubs.

So, 16 is low, but not even the lowest projected. But, as we saw above, 16 would be much lower than what any team managed to field in 2018. So, is it the depth charts that are overly optimistic about health and stability, or was 2018 just a weird year? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that it was the former. I went back to 2001 and collected the total number of position players used, by year and team. Here are some summary statistics:

• Since that period, the average team used 23 position players.
• The fewest position players used by any team was 17 — the Braves did this in 2003, and then no other team managed this few for over a decade, until the Pirates and Twins both did so in 2017. So, if any team actually managed to use only 16 position players for an entire year, they’d set a record, at least for recent history.
• There’s no real monotonic trend in the average number of position players used per team. It increased from 2001 to 2014, as teams added about 1.5 position players, on average. This can potentially be attributed to more specialized player usage, i.e., for platoons and defensive replacements. But, it then fell back to mid-2000s levels (shedding an entire player) between 2014 and 2017, presumably as teams loaded their rosters with relievers, before a one-year bounceback in 2018. In any case, it’s hard to say that the Braves, or any team, is well-positioned to break the “fewest position players used” record for the last two decades because the number keeps falling, as it doesn’t.
• Just for fun, the 2004 Royals and 2013 Yankees each used 33 position players, which, that’s a lot. I suggest you peek here — does this resemble any Yankees team you can remember?

By comparing the above average of 23 with the average for Fangraphs Depth Charts (19), we can gather that the Depth Charts substantially underestimate the number of players an average team will use over the course of the season. This is not surprising — it’s too hard, when making guesses about playing time preseason, to anticipate every contingency and minor move a club may make. But, if you take that four-player difference and apply it to the Braves, you end up with a fairly uninteresting result: 16 plus four equals 20, and that was just the low among teams for 2018, but hardly a record.

There’s also the sticking point of the Cubs. Those dastardly Cubs. Not only are the Cubs estimated to use fewer position players than the Braves this coming year, but they also haven’t used an above-average number of position players since 2013. (The Braves had the league’s lowest total in 2014 but have been average or above during the rebuild, including a carousel of 25 different faces in 2016.) But, there’s more: remember how the Braves had three players get only a tiny handful of PAs in 2018? The Cubs were even more extreme in this regard, as of their 20 position players last year, five combined for just 24 PAs. If you’re looking for any team to break this meaningless recent-history-record, the 2019 Cubs might be the best bet.

Of course, none of this matters. What’s important is getting good production however it comes, not production from as few names as possible. But, one way to do both is to keep everyone healthy. And who knows? If something happens to the Cubs, the Braves avoid any injuries, and are in too tight of a race in September to give any PAs to call-ups or potentially-dubious performers, maybe they will end at 16. Probably not, but you never know. That’s the fun of baseball.

(And we’re not even going to talk about pitchers, where the Braves have no shot whatsoever.)