MLB
ESPN MLB
The White Sox became the first team to follow consecutive 100-loss seasons by reaching the playoffs, clinching at least an AL Wild Card berth with win No. 82 this year.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
Cubs star Pete Crow-Armstrong became the seventh player in MLB history to join the 40/40 club after stealing his 40th base of the season Thursday.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
Paul Skenes said Thursday, after his final start of the regular season, that he doesn't view 2026 as a failure. He finished 10-11 with a 3.82 ERA.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
The Chicago Cubs clinched their second straight postseason berth a 2-1 victory over the Miami Marlins on Thursday.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
Phillies All-Star left-hander Jesús Luzardo said he has recovered enough from left shoulder inflammation that he should be able to pitch next week in the playoffs.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
Yankees slugger Aaron Judge told ESPN on Wednesday that he intends to be ready for Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series at Yankee Stadium next Tuesday.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
Whether your team is headed to October or packing its bags for the offseason, how did 2026 measure up to expectations?
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
The Braves plan to put Martín Pérez on the 15-day IL with lower back inflammation, leaving Atlanta short-handed in its starting rotation for the postseason.
Read article →
MLB
ESPN MLB
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, who had been on the IL since Sept. 8, went 1-for-4 with a walk and two strikeouts in Wednesday's loss to the Padres.
Read article →
About MLB
How the league is built
Major League Baseball comprises thirty clubs across two leagues, the American and the National, each with three divisions, feeding a playoff bracket that ends in the World Series. The regular season is the longest in major North American sport at well over a hundred and fifty games, played nearly daily, which changes how results should be read: single games carry little information and long stretches carry a great deal. Baseball's structure also produces the largest gap between the best and worst teams' win totals being relatively narrow while the standings still separate cleanly, because the schedule is long enough for small edges to accumulate.
The farm system
Uniquely among the major leagues, each club owns or is affiliated with a chain of minor league teams where players develop for years before reaching the top level. Prospects are ranked, traded and tracked publicly, and a club's minor league depth is treated as an asset comparable to its major league roster. Service time, the accumulated period a player spends on a major league roster, governs when a player becomes eligible for arbitration and free agency, and decisions about when to promote a young player are frequently read as service time management as much as baseball judgment.
No salary cap, and what replaces it
Baseball has no salary cap. Instead a competitive balance tax charges clubs that exceed defined payroll thresholds, with penalties escalating for repeat offenders. The practical result is a far wider spread in team payrolls than in capped leagues, and a persistent argument about competitive balance between large and small market clubs. Revenue sharing redistributes some money between clubs, and how recipients spend it is itself contested. Labor relations in this sport have a long and confrontational history, which is why collective bargaining deadlines are covered closely.
The most measured sport there is
Baseball is built from discrete, repeated confrontations between a pitcher and a batter, which makes it far easier to quantify than continuous sports. It has kept detailed records for longer than any other major sport, and an analytical tradition grew up around those records and eventually moved from outside the game into front offices. Tracking technology now measures pitch movement, batted ball speed and fielder positioning directly. The practical effect is that arguments in baseball tend to be conducted with numbers, and that changes in strategy are visible in the data well before they are visible to a casual viewer.