Alex Hassan and the Prisoners of Baseball Limbo

Dreams are silly things, and seem sillier the more specific they are. Plenty of people dream of playing baseball in the big leagues, but we dream of playing, of specific moments. Nobody dreams of sitting on the bench while the walk-off hit wins the World Series, or playing three or four years in the low minors, failing to make it, then going back to school. We dream of being David Ortiz or Clayton Kershaw or Andrew McCutchen. We dream not just about playing, but about greatness.

We can guess that Alex Hassan had that same dream. Unlike the rest of us, he achieved it, at least in a literal way. He is a professional baseball player, even if he isn't David Ortiz or Clayton Kershaw or Andrew McCutchen. He is one of the top 1,200 baseball players in the world, and teams want him to play for them. That is great, but it is not the full fulfillment of that dream, and it comes with a real world problem. Hassan is something like the 1,200th-best player in baseball, which entitles him to spend his off-season—and whole fallow weeks of his regular season—getting jerked around due to a strange subset of baseball rules.

It's relevant, here, that Hassan is the 1,2000th-best player alive, as opposed to the 1037th. There are 30 major league baseball teams; each team has a 40-man roster composed of the players on the major league team and 15 other players in the minors (or on a short term disabled list) that the team is allowed to protect from the poaching of other teams.

There rarely is much turnover at the top of the list. The Pirates aren't going to do anything with Andrew McCutchen, for example, nor the Dodgers with Clayton Kershaw. But spots on the 40-man roster are finite, and picking up a player often requires dropping another. It's down around the 38th, 39th, and especially the 40th spots on the roster where the churn happens.

Being the 40th guy on the 40 man roster means you get paid to play baseball, that baseball is your job. You are living your dreams! Except it also means any time another player is dropped from the 40-man roster of any other team in the league there is a chance your team will like that player better, and then out on your ass you go. This could also happen if your team makes a trade that requires an extra roster spot, or signs a free agent during the off-season. Essentially it means any time anything happens to any team's roster there is a chance you are about to lose your job.

You might say, fine: hit better, or pitch better, or otherwise play baseball better and you won't be the 40th man and you won't be in danger of losing your job. While that is technically correct, it is damn hard to play better baseball when you are getting bounced from one corner of the country to another, sometimes on an almost weekly basis; the game is difficult enough without head-spinning jet lag and a hotel room as home. Add in real world concerns like moving, significant others, children, children's schools, family, finding a place to live, and on and on, you can start to see how difficult it is to be the 40th guy.

Alex Hassan is the 40th guy. He's a professional baseball player who was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in the 20th round of the 2009 draft. He worked his way up the minor league ladder and reached the Red Sox during the 2014 season, when he put nine plate appearances together, six in early June and one in early August. He even got a hit! At the end of the season the Red Sox had younger and more promising players pushing for Hassan's roster spot, and he was was cut loose. The A's grabbed him on November 17, but then three days later they cut him too (likely hoping nobody would grab him so they could put him in their minor league system). The Orioles then snagged him on November 20. That's three organizations in five days. But fine, he's an Oriole. Okay. He went to Spring Training with the team and three days later, guess what? The Orioles signed Evereth Cabrera and Hassan was designated for assignment—DFA means "cut," in this case, with a week of professional limbo built into the deal—again.

All this changing of organizations means Hassan is spending some significant portion of his limited time as a baseball player in bureaucratic limbo. He can't play with the team that just cut him, and doesn't know where his next team is because the DFA process takes days to play out. When he finally finds out who his next team is, there are various arrangements to make; by the time he gets where he's going he's behind and hasn't played baseball in too long. Hassan, you will remember, isn't a millionaire. He's not Andrew McCutchen on a long-term big money deal. He got a $90,000 signing bonus back in 2009, but since then he has been making between $1,000 and $2,000 a month or so as a minor leaguer. He is not set for life. This is both his livelihood and his dream, and he can't do it because teams keep dropping him and shipping him all the way around the damn country.

He's not done yet. Since the Orioles designated him during Spring Training, Hassan has cycled from the Orioles to the A's (again) to the Rangers to the A's (again!). Six days after claiming him for the third time, the A's cut him loose again. It took 12 more days, but the Toronto Blue Jays offered Hassan a minor league deal, and he signed it. This means he's not on the 40-man roster anymore, which means he'll be able to play baseball. He's taken a step away from his dream, in the short term, but he's also stepped away from the chaos of life on the big league margins. For his sake, we might as well hope he's taken a step towards finding a home.