If you browse through the team pages on the British Baseball Federation website, it’s hard not to be amazed by the size of the London Mets’ squad. Now that they have finished their regular season, I thought I would count up how many of those faces appeared on the diamond in an NBL game in 2011. The answer to that question is a staggering 37. In contrast, the Herts Falcons have navigated their way to the last weekend of the season using only 14 players (less than 38% of the Mets’ squad size).

But how does the Mets’ seam-bursting 2011 roster compare with other gargantuan lists from the NBL’ s modern history. Well, they match the second largest squad, nestling up to the Croydon Pirates’ pack of 37 in 2008. That was a record, until the Pirates beat their own mark by getting 41 different players onto the field in 2009. (Both those Pirates’ teams featured yours truly at some point in the season, and there’s no better indication than that that they were scrambling to put a nine on the field some weeks.) Before 2008, the largest roster that had been put on display was the 33-strong squad that Bracknell/Richmond Wildfire boasted in 2002.