Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world.[A] As of 2021, a total of 30 teams play in Major League Baseball—15 teams in the National League (NL) and 15 in the American League (AL)—with 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada. The NL and AL were formed in 1876 and 1901, respectively. Beginning in 1903, the two leagues cooperated but remained legally separate entities until 2000 when they merged into a single organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball.[9][10] MLB is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan.

Baseball’s first openly all-professional team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who were founded in 1869. Before that, some teams had secretly paid some players. The first few decades of professional baseball were characterized by rivalries between leagues and by players who often jumped from one team or league to another. The period before 1920 is known as the dead-ball era, during which players would rarely hit home runs. Professional baseball in the United States survived a conspiracy to fix the 1919 World Series, which came to be known as the Black Sox Scandal. The sport rose in popularity in the 1920s and survived potential downturns during the Great Depression and World War II. Shortly after the war, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier.