A lot of people talk about the quality of the game we all love and sometimes the idea of contraction comes up.  I spent my teen years in those turbulent and very fashion conscious eighties and I fondly remember the MLB having 26 teams (and at least six or seven player from each team with 40+ homeruns…maybe a slight exaggeration.)

However, I am not going to talk about contraction today.  Whilst reading through the little blurbs at mlbtraderumors.com I came across a most interesting selection that stated that 37 major leaguers who had been selected to at least one all-star game still remained free agents.  It got me to thinking, “why not expand the majors to 31 teams.”  I could be the GM of the newest franchise…the Orlando Carlisseans.  Why that name: well, Orlando is in Florida where many people spend their retirement years and a lot of these players are close to 65 years old and the Carlisseans because Lando Carlissean was in the Star Wars movies and I thought it was funny.

So here we go with my 25 man roster.

c    Mike Sweeney

1b   Carlos Delgado

2b   Felipe Lopez

3b   Joe Crede

ss   Rich Aurillia

lf    Johnny Damon

cf   Garrett Anderson

rf    Jermaine Dye

Rotation

1.   Pedro Martinez

2.   John Smoltlz

3.   Paul Byrd

4.   Jason Schmidt

5.   Livan Hernandez

Bullpen

1.   Eric Gagne

2.   Flash Gordon

3.   Shawn Estes

4.   Chan Ho Park

5.   Mike MacDougall

6.   Eric Milton

Bench

1.  Nomah

2.   Brian Giles

3.   Gary Sheffield

4.   Geoff Jenkins

5.   Tony Clark

6.   Aaron Boone

There you have it.  I’m not quite sure if this team is playoff bound but if they got there they wouldn’t have the jitters.  This is a group of guys that have been there and done that.