MLB Teams

Major League Baseball is the oldest major professional sports league in North America — thirty clubs, two leagues, one long summer. The National League dates to 1876, the American League to 1901, and the World Series has crowned a champion every fall since 1903. Each club plays 162 regular-season games across six months, a daily rhythm no other sport attempts: three divisions per league, six division winners, six wild cards, and then October — the best-of-three Wild Card Series, the best-of-five Division Series, the best-of-seven League Championship Series, and the World Series. It is a marathon that ends in a sprint, and it produces the most democratic chaos in American sports.

The structure is the story. There is no salary cap in baseball — only a luxury tax — so the sport runs on two competing philosophies at once: the superteam (the Dodgers' $300-million roster chasing a three-peat) and the efficiency machine (the Rays winning 98 games on brains and development). Beneath the majors sits the largest farm system in sports, more than 120 minor-league affiliates, plus the annual amateur draft and a global talent pipeline running through the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Japan, and Korea. Every October contender is really five years of decisions — drafts, trades, extensions, gambles — arriving at once.

The 2026 season was a vintage of that chaos. The Milwaukee Brewers won 103 games, the best record in baseball, and ran away with the NL Central by 14 games. The Tampa Bay Rays won 98 and owned the American League's best record. The Los Angeles Dodgers went 100-62, rested through a first-round bye, and opened their bid for a third straight championship. The Atlanta Braves — 76-86 and out of the playoffs a year ago — roared back to 94-68 and the NL East crown under first-year manager Walt Weiss. The Cleveland Guardians held off the Chicago White Sox by a single game in the AL Central. And the Houston Astros won the AL West at 81-81 — the worst record ever for a first-place team in a full season — which tells you everything about the strange, wonderful parity of the modern game.

October sorted the contenders from the pretenders fast. The Yankees swept the Red Sox in a rivalry Wild Card Series. The White Sox swept the 81-win Astros right out of the bracket. The Padres handled the Cubs in two. And the Braves needed all three games to put away the Phillies — their modern blood feud settled, for now, with Chris Sale closing out the clincher on two days' rest. The Division Series bracket: Rays vs. Yankees and Guardians vs. White Sox in the American League; Brewers vs. Padres and Dodgers vs. Braves — the two-time defending champions against the team of the '90s, Freddie Freeman facing his old club — in the National League. Eight teams, four series, all starting the first Saturday of October.

The season's other stories will linger. The Mets lost twelve straight in April and finished last in the NL East for the first time since 2003 — a collapse for the ages in Queens. The Diamondbacks missed the playoffs for the third straight year, eliminated on the final day at 86-76, two games short. The Orioles missed October again, then traded franchise catcher Adley Rutschman to the division-rival Red Sox at the deadline. The Athletics played their strange second season in a Triple-A ballpark in West Sacramento, finished 64-98, drew the smallest crowds in baseball, and kept counting down to Las Vegas in 2028. And through it all, attendance rose for the fourth straight year to its highest since 2017 — the sport, for all its anxieties, has rarely been healthier at the gate.

The history runs deeper than any of it. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the 1903 first World Series, Babe Ruth inventing the home run, Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947, the expansion waves, free agency in 1975, the wild card in 1994, the second wild card in 2012, the twelve-team October of 2022 — every era has rewritten the record book. Seventy-three home runs. A .406 average. 2,632 consecutive games. A 20-game win streak. The numbers are the sport's scripture, argued over in every bar and barbershop from the Bronx to Boyle Heights.

Then there are the cathedrals. Camden Yards started the retro revolution in 1992 and every park since owes it a debt — the brick warehouses, the intimate sightlines, the city as backdrop. The classics endure: Fenway Park (1912), Wrigley Field (1914), Dodger Stadium. The modern palaces — Truist Park and its Battery district, Globe Life Field — reinvented the ballpark as a year-round destination. The culture is the constant: the seventh-inning stretch, the walk-up music, the organ, the eternal debate over the wave. Baseball's game-day energy is unmatched because baseball's daily-ness makes every park a neighborhood.

This directory is the front door to all of it: thirty clubs, thirty histories, thirty versions of the 2026 season as it actually happened — the dynasties and the rebuilds, the heartbreaks and the parades. Each team page carries the franchise story, the current roster, the season that was, and what's next. Previously's MLB Rewind covers the league every day, all summer, all October. The marathon is over. The sprint is on. Start with your club — or pick a new one. That's the beauty of thirty teams: there's always another story.

Start exploring: Diamondbacks · Athletics · Braves · Orioles · Dodgers · Yankees · MLB Rewind