Major League Baseball

• 1. Introduction

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  Major League Baseball draws 71.4 million spectators in a single season, more than any other sports league on earth. Thirty teams, split equally between the National League and the American League, play 162 games each before six clubs from each league compete in a four-round postseason. The whole thing ends with the World Series, a best-of-seven series first contested in 1903. What made a 19th-century amateur pastime into the world's most-attended professional sport? Why did the game survive gambling scandals, two world wars, a crippling players' strike, and a steroids crisis that tarnished its biggest stars? And how did a sport rooted in the northeastern United States eventually reach Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and London?

• 2. Chaotic Beginnings

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  On the 22nd of April 1876, at Jefferson Street Grounds in Philadelphia, the National League played its first official game. Before that day, professional baseball was a mess. The Cincinnati Red Stockings, founded in 1869, had been the first fully professional team, triggering a split between amateur and professional players that fractured the existing National Association of Base Ball Players. The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players launched in 1871 but proved ineffective. Players jumped freely between clubs, chasing higher pay. Scheduled games were forfeited when a team was no longer in championship contention. Gambling clouded the legitimacy of results.

  The National League fixed all of this by shifting power from players to clubs. Teams could now enforce contracts, keeping players in place. Clubs were required to complete their schedules. Gambling was actively suppressed. Yet stability was still years away; 1882 was the first season the league's membership matched the preceding year's, and only four franchises survived to see 1900.

  A rival called the American Association launched in 1882, nicknamed the "beer and whiskey league" for permitting alcohol sales to fans. For several years, the two leagues' champions met in a postseason series that was an early attempt at a World Series. The two merged into a single 12-team NL in 1892, but the NL shed four teams after the 1899 season. That created the opening for Ban Johnson to launch the American League in 1901. The resulting bidding war for players triggered contract-breaking and legal disputes. It took the National Agreement of 1903 to end the conflict, compelling both leagues to respect each other's player contracts, including the reserve clause that bound players to their teams. That agreement also created a formal classification system for minor leagues refined by Branch Rickey.

• 3. The Dead-Ball Game

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  A baseball in the dead-ball era cost $3, and owners were furious about spending the money. Balls stayed in play until they were soft, lopsided, and stained brown with tobacco juice, grass, mud, and sometimes the juice of licorice that players chewed specifically to discolor the leather. Fans were expected to throw foul balls back. Pitchers could doctor the ball further using the spitball, a pitch not restricted until 1921.

  The ballparks themselves discouraged home runs. The West Side Grounds of the Chicago Cubs extended a vast distance to center field, as did the Huntington Avenue Grounds of the Boston Red Sox. With those dimensions, pitchers like Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Mordecai Brown, and Grover Cleveland Alexander dominated. The tactic known as the Baltimore chop, where a batter hammered the ball into the ground to produce a bounce too high to field in time, was a common way to manufacture a single. In 1901 the NL adopted the foul-strike rule, and the AL followed two years later. Before that rule, a batter could foul off unlimited pitches without accumulating strikes. Once foul balls counted, run-scoring became a genuine struggle.

  The era ended violently. After the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, eight White Sox players were accused of intentionally losing in exchange for $100,000. Despite being acquitted in court, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Claude Williams, George Weaver, Arnold Gandil, Fred McMullin, Charles Risberg, and Oscar Felsch were all permanently banned. Baseball replaced its weak governing National Commission with a commissioner of baseball holding near-unlimited authority over the sport.

• 4. Depression, War, and Jackie Robinson

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  By 1932, only two MLB teams were turning a profit. Attendance had fallen, partly because of a 10 percent federal amusement tax applied to ticket prices. Rosters shrank from 25 players to 23, and even star players took pay cuts. Team executives responded by inventing night games, broadcasting games by radio, and offering free admission for women. Not one MLB team folded during the Great Depression.

  World War II pulled more than 500 players off MLB rosters for military service. Teams filled out lineups with young men, older veterans, and players classified 4F by the military as unfit for service. Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder, reached the majors in this period. Black players, despite serving in the same war, were still barred from MLB entirely. On the 14th of January 1942, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt asking for permission to keep baseball running. Roosevelt replied that he honestly felt it would be best for the country to keep the game going, citing the need for recreation during wartime.

  Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, chose Jackie Robinson from a list of promising Negro league players in the mid-1940s. He asked Robinson to commit to absorbing racial hostility without responding in kind. The agreed salary was $600 a month. Robinson joined the Dodgers' farm club, the Montreal Royals, for the 1946 season, becoming the first black player in the International League since the 1880s. On the 15th of April 1947, Robinson debuted at Ebbets Field before 26,623 spectators, more than 14,000 of whom were Black fans. Manager Leo Durocher told his roster he didn't care if Robinson was yellow, black, or striped like a zebra: Robinson was playing. Less than three months later, Larry Doby broke the American League's color barrier with the Cleveland Indians.

• 5. Coast to Coast

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  From 1903 to 1952, all 16 MLB teams sat in ten cities, none farther south than St. Louis and none west of it. The longest road trip, from Boston to St. Louis, took about 24 hours by rail. Walter O'Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and described by one source as perhaps the most influential owner of baseball's early expansion era, changed everything by moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles before the 1958 season. O'Malley persuaded rival New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who had been considering a move to Minnesota amid slumping attendance at the aging Polo Grounds, to instead meet San Francisco mayor George Christopher. Stoneham agreed. Time magazine put O'Malley on its cover. The Dodgers set a single-game MLB attendance record in their first home appearance, drawing 78,672 fans.

  Expansion followed rapidly. Two AL teams joined in 1961, two NL teams in 1962. Four more arrived in 1969. The NL added its first Canadian franchise, the Montreal Expos, alongside the San Diego Padres that year. The 1962 Houston Colt .45s, later the Astros, were the first southern major league franchise since the Louisville Colonels folded in 1899. The New York Mets went 40-120 in their first season but won the World Series in 1969, just their eighth year of existence, over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. Toronto and Seattle joined in 1977. The expansion era did not end cleanly: after the 2001 season, owners voted to consider contraction, with the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins coming closest to being eliminated. The Twins survived only because their landlord won a court injunction requiring the team to honor its 2002 stadium lease. The Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, returning baseball to Washington after a 33-year absence.

• 6. Steroids and Reckoning

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  In 1998, both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit more home runs than the record of 61 set by Roger Maris in 1961. Barry Bonds topped that in 2001 with 73 home runs. Routinely in the late 1990s and early 2000s, players were hitting 40 or 50 home runs in a season, a feat that was considered rare even in the 1980s. The power surge later traced in significant part to steroids and other performance-enhancing substances.

  Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell was appointed on the 30th of March 2006 to investigate. The resulting Mitchell Report, released in 2007, found that many players had used steroids and other performance-enhancing substances, including at least one player from each team. HGH had become especially popular after mandatory random testing began in 2004, because HGH was not detectable by existing tests. The report concluded that HGH was likely a placebo with no real performance-enhancing effect. A 2006 book by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada documented alleged steroid use by Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, and Jason Giambi.

  MLB's current drug policy provides for an 80-game suspension on a first positive test, a 162-game suspension on a second, and a lifetime suspension on a third. The sign-stealing scandal that came next was different in character. In January 2020, the Houston Astros were found guilty of using technology to steal opposing catchers' signs during the 2017 and 2018 seasons. General manager Jeff Luhnow and field manager A.J. Hinch were both suspended for the entire 2020 season. The Astros were fined the maximum allowable $5 million and forfeited first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts. The Boston Red Sox were also found guilty of sign-stealing during those same seasons, costing manager Alex Cora a year-long suspension.

• 7. The Modern Game

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  By 2020, a nine-inning MLB game took an average of three hours and six minutes, a number that had been climbing for years. The culprits were an increasing number of strikeouts, more walks, and pitchers taking longer between deliveries. The rate of teams using a defensive shift jumped from 13.7 percent in 2016 to 33.6 percent in 2022. In September 2022, MLB announced that extreme infield shifts would be banned starting in 2023, requiring two fielders on each side of second base with both feet on the infield dirt when the pitch is thrown.

  A pitch clock introduced for the 2023 season set a 15-second countdown between pitches. The catcher must be in position by the time the clock reaches 10 seconds. The batter must be alert in the box by 8 seconds. Pickoffs and step-offs, which reset the clock, are limited to two per plate appearance; a third failed pickoff attempt results in an automatic ball.

  Technology has reshaped how teams assess players. Hawk-Eye tracking, adopted by MLB's Statcast system starting in 2020, records the precise movements of pitchers and batters, tracks the path and exit velocity of batted balls, and enables defensive analytics that were impossible before player tracking. In December 2020, MLB officially recognized seven Negro leagues as major leagues, including the first and second Negro National Leagues, the Eastern Colored League, and the Negro American League. In May 2024, MLB announced it was absorbing available Negro Leagues statistics into its official historical record, a reclassification that reframes which players and performances now count in the record books.