The Braves’ September roster moves are official, and they do a pretty good job of showing why the current MLB rules leave so little room to maneuver.
Atlanta selected right-hander Blake Burkhalter and infielder Kyle Farmer to the major league roster on September 1, 2026, while transferring right-hander Robert Suarez to the 60-day injured list.
The call-ups weren’t a surprise. Both players were already in the clubhouse Monday, with lockers waiting for them.
Burkhalter has been throwing well out of the Gwinnett bullpen and gives Atlanta another arm to work with. Farmer brings the kind of versatility teams always value in September, and in his case the most important part may be that he can also handle emergency catching duties.
That matters for a club that often has both Drake Baldwin and Sean Murphy in the lineup.
But the bigger story here isn’t just who came up. It’s how little flexibility the Braves actually get from the expanded roster system.
September expansion used to give clubs more freedom. Any player on the 40-man roster could be called up, which opened the door for everyday players to get a breather and for teams to lean on extra depth. The downside was obvious: some clubs stacked their pitching staffs and turned games into a nightly parade of arms.
The current setup was supposed to fix that. Rosters now go from 26 to 28 in September, with teams limited to 14 pitchers.
The idea made sense. The execution, at least from the Braves’ perspective, has stripped away too much of the benefit.
Instead of giving teams room to get creative, it often forces them into the same basic move: one extra reliever and one utility player.
That’s why a name like Patrick Clohisy or the option of adding another starter feels out of reach under these rules. And it’s why the current system can end up making injury situations around the league worse rather than easing them.
The argument for change is simple enough: teams are worn down by the end of the season, and a couple more roster spots would help. The next CBA figures to center on payroll and salary cap concerns, but there’s also a clear case for revisiting September roster size. At minimum, giving clubs a little more room would go a long way.
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What makes the story stand out is how uncertain this path once looked, even after the rehab work began. Getting back from that kind of surgery is never straightforward, and Kerrs climb from the long recovery process to a spot on the active major league picture took far more time and patience than it may have seemed from the outside. For a Braves club always watching for arms it can trust, his return is a reminder that some roster help arrives only after months of quiet uncertainty. [Read more 🡒]