Baseball Roster Template

The roster below arrives already seeded. Nine rows carry the defensive positions in scorebook order, then a designated hitter line, two spare pitcher rows, and two utility rows for the players who move around. Click any cell and type. You can add rows up to 25 if your program carries a deeper squad, delete the ones you do not need, and rename a column header if your league asks for a field we left out.

Those seeded positions are scaffolding you type over. Nobody knows their nine in February. Enter your players in whatever sequence the league registration list gives you and sort the diamond out at tryouts.

The Pos column follows one rule throughout this page. Start every cell with the position number, then add any other spot the player covers after a slash, so a shortstop who also pitches reads 6/1. The long labels sitting in the seeded cells are memory aids for February. Type the number over them once you know who plays where.

Reading the Seeded Rows

• Rows 1 through 9: the standard defensive numbering, from pitcher out to right field. These are the same numbers your scorekeeper writes when recording a 6-4-3 double play. Our guide to baseball position numbers explains where the sequence came from and why shortstop ended up as 6.
• DH: the designated hitter, which has no fielding number because the spot plays no defense. Delete this row if your league does not use one.
• Two extra P rows: in baseball, pitching depth becomes a roster problem long before it becomes a game-day one. Overwrite the P label with a 1 like any other position. Three pitching rows is where the template starts, and the two-game week worked out below lands on four.
• Two UTIL rows: the bench players who cover several spots. Write the position they play most often first, then the others after a slash, so 4/6/9 tells you at a glance who can move during a Saturday doubleheader.

Some things belong on paper. This sheet holds 18 lines. Each one carries a jersey number, player name, position, bats and throws, league age, and grade. Tape it inside the equipment shed and anyone on your staff can read it without a phone. The header block captures your team, season, head coach, and league.

League age gets its own column because it is the number that decides things. It sets which division a player belongs to and which pitch limit applies to them, and it does not always match the grade they are in. Grade stays on the sheet for high school programs and for the league forms that ask for it.

The Contact Sheet That Goes With It

Keep parent details off the roster itself. The season roster travels. It goes to league registration, onto the shed wall, into every assistant's binder, and to the table at tournament check-in, and it gets photocopied somewhere along the way every year.

Phone numbers and medical notes should not ride along on any of those trips. Put them on this second sheet and keep it in your bag. One document circulates, the other stays with you.

If you also score games by hand, the position numbers on this roster feed straight into your baseball scorecard, where the same digits record putouts and assists.

B/T is the roster field baseball coaches use constantly. It records which side a player bats from and which arm they throw with, so a right-handed hitter who throws right-handed is R/R and a switch hitter with a left arm is S/L.

Those two letters shape defensive assignments before a single practice ends. A left-handed thrower has to rotate their whole body to make the throw across the infield, which is why catcher, second base, shortstop, and third base are almost always filled by right-handed throwers. Left-handed arms concentrate at first base, pitcher, and the outfield. Recording the field on the roster means you notice the constraint in March instead of discovering it in the fourth inning of a June game.

How Coaches Use the Column

• Defensive fit: four of the nine spots effectively require a right-handed throw. Count your left-handed arms early and plan around the ceiling.
• Platoon planning: facing a left-handed starter, coaches often move right-handed bats up. With B/T on the roster, you can build that order in two minutes.
• Equipment orders: gloves are handed. A roster that records throwing hand tells you exactly how many left-handed gloves the program needs before the season budget closes.
• Development notes: young switch hitters often abandon one side under pressure. The letter you write in March is a snapshot, so look at it again at midseason before you plan around it.

For a visual reference that maps each number to its spot on the diamond, along with the skills each position demands, see our baseball position chart.

Take an 11-12 team playing Tuesday and Saturday. Your Tuesday starter throws 70 pitches, so four days of rest put them back in play on Sunday. Saturday belongs to somebody else. No other line on a baseball roster carries a constraint like that, and the rules put it in writing: a pitcher who works a real outing is unavailable for days, and how many days depends on the count.

Read the middle rows, because that is where most of your decisions live. A 12-year-old who finishes at 58 pitches owes three days of rest, and a kid pulled at 34 owes one. At 14 and under, only an outing of 20 pitches or fewer costs you nothing. The last column is arithmetic worked off a Saturday game, so shift it to whatever day you actually play.

These numbers come from Little League's pitch count regulation(opens in new tab). Little League also states that it supports the Pitch Smart campaign(opens in new tab) run by MLB and USA Baseball. Little League adds one absolute rule on top of the counts: no player may pitch on three consecutive days, whatever the numbers say.

Working the Math Backward Onto Your Roster

Go back to that Tuesday and Saturday week. Two starters cover the two games. Add one reliever who finishes whichever game runs long, then one more arm for the week somebody gets sick. You are at four pitchers before anyone has thrown a bad inning, on the gentlest schedule your season offers.

Three games in three days compresses it further. At 11-12, anything past 35 pitches costs at least two days of rest, so a Friday starter who works a real outing is not available again until Monday. Two arms only cover a bracket if whoever pitches twice keeps that first outing under 36 pitches, and brackets do not cooperate. Programs that reach Sunday carry more than two players who can throw strikes, even if only two of them look like starters. Those extra P rows in the editable roster are there for exactly this reason.

Marking Pitchers on the Roster

Anyone who might take the mound gets a 1 in their Pos cell, even a shortstop who pitches twice a year, using the slash notation from the top of the page. When Saturday goes long, you scan one column for a 1 and stop trying to remember who threw on Thursday. During games, the running count belongs on a pitch count tracker rather than on the roster itself.

Coaches search for both documents using the same words, which is why so many downloadable "baseball roster templates" turn out to be lineup cards. The two serve opposite purposes. One is stable and covers everyone. The other is disposable and covers today. The table below shows exactly which fields land where.

If what you actually need is the game-day document, with batting slots, substitutes, and a pitcher log, our printable lineup card templates cover both the standard nine-batter format and the continuous batting order that many youth leagues use. For the batting order on its own, including what each slot in the order is traditionally asked to do, see the baseball batting order template.

How the Two Documents Feed Each Other

Build the roster once, in the preseason. Then every lineup card you write for the next four months pulls from it. Numbers, names, and eligible positions are already settled, so filling out a card at the plate meeting becomes copying, not deciding. Coaches who skip the roster step end up rewriting the same nine names from memory before every game, and that is where jersey number mix-ups and ineligible-player mistakes come from.

Most coaches want the roster in a spreadsheet eventually. Every table on this page offers two exits, and they land in different places.

• Copy as Table puts the rows on your clipboard as tab-separated text. Drop the clipboard into Google Sheets, Excel, Numbers, or a Word table, and the columns line up on their own. Nothing downloads.
• Download as Image renders the sheet as a PNG. Drop it into a document and export a PDF yourself, or print the image straight to the binder copy for the equipment shed.

For paper, Ctrl+P works without touching either button. The edit controls drop out of the printout and the tables keep their borders. You will get the whole article, so set a page range in the print dialog and keep only the sheet you came for.

The editable roster higher up the page is the fillable version. Type into it, then move the finished table into whichever tool your league wants. Between them, the two buttons and the print dialog cover a spreadsheet to sort, an image to drop into anything, and a form you can fill in without installing software.

Sorting Once You Are in a Spreadsheet

Sorting by the Pos column is the reason every fielding cell starts with a digit. A text sort reads that leading number, so your pitchers group at the top and your right fielders land at the bottom, and a utility player entered as 4/6/9 still sits with the second basemen. DH has no fielding number, so that row sorts to the end wherever you put it. Write out "Pitcher" and "Catcher" instead and the sort goes alphabetical, which scatters your diamond. Keep the numbers if you plan to sort. Drop them if your league registration form wants position names only.

A printed roster answers one question well: who is on this team. It answers nothing about what happened to them over sixteen weeks. By July, the sheet from March has three crossed-out numbers, a name added in the margin, and no record of the tryout notes that put your shortstop at shortstop in the first place.

The Shed Wall Earns Its Keep

• Checking a jersey number between innings, on a field with no signal and a phone at four percent, where nobody should need a login
• League registration and tournament check-in, where somebody still wants a paper list
• A first-year assistant learning which number belongs to which player

Where the March Printout Runs Out

The gap opens in April, not in March. A player moves from 6 to 4 and the sheet does not remember why. A call-up from the younger division needs a number that was never printed. The tryout notes that justified the move are in a different notebook, in your car. A record that runs the length of the season holds all three together, shows every assistant the same current list, and puts both of your teams side by side when a player moves between them.

Striveon takes a roster in two ways, and both of them move the roster of people rather than the sheet. Save the spreadsheet as CSV or Excel and you map columns to name and birth date, plus a team column that becomes your training groups when you set the season up for the first time. Paste names in instead, one per line, and it skips the mapping step. Positions and jersey numbers you fill in on each athlete afterwards, and B/T stays on the sheet you just built, which is the argument for keeping that sheet. Once you are running more than one squad, Striveon holds a whole program's teams in one view.