The MLB's reserve clause gave owners rights to players after their contracts expired

In 1975, a Major League Baseball clause that kept players legally tied to their teams after retirement was dismantled, creating the modern concept of free agency.

Major League Baseball, explained

Major League Baseball is America’s oldest professional sports league. Alongside triumphs, the league has faced scandals, including drug abuse and steroid use, shaping its path over the decades. Today, MLB embraces new rules, international talent, and a growing connection to legalized sports betting.

MLB 2023 rules changes were the most dramatic alterations in decades, drastically speeding up the game.

The MLB consist of 30 teams

The league is home to the National and American leagues, which include 780 active players. The MLB season is the longest in professional sports, with 162 games played during the regular season, typically from April through September, ending with the World Series championship in October.

MLB pitchers were charged with benefiting from sports betting

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians were charged with coordinating with sports bettors to enrich themselves and others. In many instances, they shared the kinds of pitches they would throw at specific points in the game. Bettors then placed money on those actions.

The 2026 MLB season is the first to allow players to challenge umpires' calls on balls and strikes.

Each July 1, six-time Major League Baseball All-Star Bobby Bonilla gets $1.19M from the New York Mets, thanks to a 25-year-long deferred payment agreement.

Minor leaguers once unionized for better pay, housing, and medical care

For decades, Minor League baseball players endured overcrowded housing, indifferent medical care, and all-night bus rides for a chance to make it to “The Show.” And they did it for as little as $4,800 a year.

Before 1920, during the Deadball Era, a single baseball was used throughout a Major League game, leading to a notoriously dirty style of play.

Every baseball used by the MLB only lasts about 7 pitches before it's discarded.

Some say baseball's drug problem goes back to the late 1800s

At age 32, pitcher James “Pud” Galvin was feeling tired and decided to take "the Brown-Séquard elixir," which contained a testicular fluid from dogs and guinea pigs, believed to invigorate tired bodies. It might've worked: Galvin pitched a two-hit shutout the next day.

How baseball shaped Black America during Reconstruction

A cornerstone of the budding Black culture following the Civil War was baseball, with several clubs springing up in Black neighborhoods and leaders like Frederick Douglass cheering on the players, including his son, who played for a team in Washington. This detailed history of the early Black leagues unpacks how the game enhanced the upwardly mobile community—and why that fact led to the segregation of what would become Major League Baseball.

A 1930s card game birthed modern fantasy sports

"National Pastime" used the statistics of real Major League Baseball players to determine a winner, creating the template for the modern fantasy sports model.

The 13th Amendment's criminal exception enabled new forms of forced labor

Southern states exploited the amendment's clause allowing slavery "as punishment for crime" to arrest thousands of Black Americans on minor charges, leasing them to private employers through convict labor systems that persisted for decades.

In 2024, the league signed a 11-year deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBC Universal

The $2.2B deal was widely applauded in the media, but the Players Association questioned how the NBA arrived at the valuation and why the deal gives players less than 10% of total revenue compared to the NBA’s 50%.

Jackie Robinson's iconic 42 is the only number that's been retired leaguewide, meaning no current players can wear it except in his honor.

A history of the rare, chaotic moments when MLB batters charge the pitcher on the mound

They typically occur when a pitcher has slung a pitch a little too close to the batter—though the exact causes vary, from quick tempers to longstanding grudges. No definitive account of these infrequent but highly visible incidents has existed, so sportswriter Jon Bois compiled data on 264 such moments between 1950 and 2025. The resulting 23-minute video explores the rich narratives leading to these charged events.

The Ninth Amendment clarifies that people hold additional rights, not granted by the Constitution

The Founders worried that listing specific rights might imply that others didn't exist. The Ninth clarifies that unenumerated rights are retained by the people, making it one of the most philosophical and least litigated amendments.

For most of human history, property rights were in the elite’s hands

Humans learned to domesticate dogs long before they formed the concept of private property. But by the era of the ancient Greeks and Romans, property law and ownership became more sophisticated.

How pitcher Pedro Martinez helped reverse the curse of the Red Sox

The team had not won a World Series for nearly 100 years—while their rivals, the Yankees, had won 26. The Dominican pitcher joined the club in 1997 and helped lead the team to reverse the curse.

The first MLB All-Star Game was designed by a sports journalist who believed the spectacle would boost baseball's reputation during the Great Depression.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

An 1873 Supreme Court case about slaughterhouses weakened parts of the 14th Amendment

In 1873, the Supreme Court's Slaughterhouse Cases ruled that the 14th Amendment's "privileges or immunities" clause protected only federal—not state—citizenship rights, greatly limiting the amendment's power to safeguard enslaved people from state discrimination.

Statcast, MLB's sophisticated real-time data analytics system, runs machine learning models in the 23-second gap between every pitch.

Visualize how changes to lineups, driven by modern analytics, could have changed one of MLB's most iconic moments.

From 1989 to 2022, Anheuser-Busch had exclusive alcohol ad rights to the Super Bowl

That meant if an alcohol company was not owned by Anheuser-Busch (and later after the merger, AB InBev), it could not advertise during the Super Bowl. This monopoly was part of how Budweiser became known for its Clydesdale Super Bowl ads.

Inside MLB's robo-umping experiment

Human umpires call roughly 94% of pitches right overall, but performance reduces on borderline pitches in high-leverage moments, the calls that shape game outcomes most. A professor and historian analyze early experiments with the full "robot ump" system that helped shape MLB's decision to implement a compromise "challenge" system.

100 moments that shaped baseball history

Published in 2018 by baseball historian Jacob Kornhauser, this list examines the defining moments throughout more than a century of play on the field, from Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis purportedly throwing a no-hitter while on acid to Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier.

Fantasy sports' roots go back to an 1860s parlor game that simulated real-world baseball.

Fenway Park is the oldest professional baseball stadium in use

The legendary park was built in 1912 and is considered hallowed ground for baseball fans, along with iconic venues like Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Wrigley Field in Chicago.

Every MLB baseball needs to be rubbed with a special kind of mud, provided by one New Jersey family.

Explore the data behind every Major League Baseball player's success rate with ABS, its new tech-assisted challenge system.

Integration of Latino players in MLB

The Senators’ spectacular losing record obscures one of the most important stories in baseball history: the club’s role in integrating Latino players into the major leagues

The 1919 Chicago White Sox, later known as the 'Black Sox,' were banned from baseball for fixing that year's World Series despite being acquitted in court.

For years, Black players were tacitly banned from professional football leagues

In 1902, Charles Follis was the first Black player to play in a professional football game, and Black players were allowed in years after other leagues banned them. A "gentleman’s agreement” led to the league banning Black players in 1933, until four Black men reintegrated pro football in 1946.

Leagues like the Premier League differ from the World Cup.

The Premier League and other similar club leagues are professional organizations like the NFL or the NBA, where owners purchase player contracts. World Cup teams, on the other hand, are organized by citizenship.

'Out in left field' is an idiom used to describe an eccentric person, and some researchers believe it likely originated at a minor league baseball park in Massachusetts that had an unusual outfield.

The 22nd Amendment was a reaction to Roosevelt's four terms

After Franklin D. Roosevelt won four elections, Congress moved to prevent future presidents from holding power indefinitely. Ratified in 1951, the 22nd Amendment set a firm two-term limit as a safeguard against extended presidencies.

Fourteen ways to make baseball cool again

Baseball, while commonly known as America's pastime, gets a bit of a bad rap for being long, slow, and boring. Here are fourteen fun ideas to make the sport more interesting to combat dwindling attendance.

Unlike other franchises, the McDonald's Corporation owns the land and the buildings of individual stores, and franchise owners lease those assets—resulting in McDonald's often being called a real-estate company.

A Bay Area lab was supplying MLB players with steroids

The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, also known as BALCO, began as a modest vitamin shop, but by the 1990s it was at the center of a doping scheme that rocked Major League Baseball and other professional sports.

Explaining the rise in adult sports leagues

Community sports leagues shifted from publicly supported entities to privatized ones in the 1990s, as tech advances streamlined registration processes. Millennial interest drove significant growth in social sports leagues for adults, growing much faster than other kinds of sports. A few industry leaders have benefited from this shift.

Sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball statistics made famous by 'Moneyball,' redefined how people evaluate baseball players, overturning a century of assumptions about which metrics matter most.

The Founders were split on term limits during the Constitutional Convention

At the Constitutional Convention, delegates debated whether to mandate term limits. In letters, Jefferson warned that indefinite service could entrench power, while Madison argued that regular elections—not forced turnover—were the best safeguard against abuse.

How Shohei Ohtani made baseball fun again

To rise to the level of Major League Baseball in recent decades, a player needs to become a specialist in at least one of the sport's many skills: hitting, pitching, throwing, running, fielding. For decades, this specialization has made a so-called...

The necessary and proper clause of the Constitution allows Congress flexibility in governing

The Constitution authorizes Congress to pass laws needed to carry out its enumerated powers, which, over time, have become one of the Constitution's most powerful sources of federal authority.

Check out a list of the top 100 players in baseball history, from Barry Larkin to Babe Ruth.

Tommy John surgery, which can save a pitcher's career, reconstructs a torn ligament in the inner side of the elbow that would otherwise stabilize the elbow during throws.

Henry Chadwick invented the box score in 1859—and wrote off walks as a pitcher's failure

The long history of alcohol and sports

Spectators have long enjoyed alcohol at sporting events, dating back at least to ancient Rome. This article unpacks how companies leveraged this history to make beer a central part of sporting events and masculine culture.