MLB 2026 (M)

The National League was founded in 1876 and the American League in 1901. In 1903 they met for the first time in what they called the World Series, and the name stuck even though that world ended at the Canadian border for decades. The New York Yankees have won 27, more than twice any other franchise.

The sport carries two scars people still name. In 1919, eight Chicago White Sox players threw the World Series for money; the courts acquitted them and baseball banned them for life anyway. And on 15 April 1947, Jackie Robinson debuted at Ebbets Field in front of 26,623 people and broke the colour line the league had held for half a century.

The third scar explains the present best. The strike that began on 12 August 1994 wiped out more than 900 games and the entire postseason: 1994 is, along with 1904, the only year without a World Series in more than a century.

The 2025 World Series ran seven games and no two looked alike. Game 3 went eighteen innings and six hours thirty-nine minutes, until Freddie Freeman ended it with a home run. Game 7 went eleven: the Dodgers trailed 4-2, Miguel Rojas tied it in the ninth and Will Smith won the ring in the eleventh.

Across from them were the Toronto Blue Jays, who had opened the series with an 11-4 win featuring the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, from Addison Barger. They lost it 4-3 after taking the series to the brink twice.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto took the MVP with three wins and a 1.02 ERA. And the title came with a rare label: it was Los Angeles's second in a row, something no franchise had managed since 2000 and no National League team since 1976. Their ninth overall.

The season opens on 26 March, the earliest date in the league's history, with a single night game on the 25th as a warm-up. The calendar no longer fits at the back end, so it stretches at the front.

What changes on the field is who decides a ball and a strike. The automated system arrives — not as the umpire, but as an appeal. The batter, pitcher or catcher can ask for a review by tapping their helmet or cap; each team starts with two, keeps the ones it gets right, and receives more if the game goes to extra innings. It does not replace the man in black, it subjects him to a second opinion settled by a machine.

And hanging over all of it is something any veteran fan recognises instantly: the owners have put a salary cap on the table — a hard ceiling of $245.3 million, a floor of $171.2 million and a 50/50 revenue split — the first proposed since 1994. That time, the proposal ended in the strike that left baseball without a champion.

The regular season ends on 27 September and the postseason starts two days later, on the 29th. There is no transition and no rest: you go from six months of near-daily games to a knockout tournament where each series fits inside a week.

Six teams from each league go through, playing a four-round bracket that ends in the World Series, best of seven, which in 2026 begins on 23 October. The rest of the thirty franchises go home the same day, regardless of what they had done until then.

That is why 27 September is a border rather than an ending. It separates what can be measured patiently — six months of consistency, with its streaks and its injuries — from what gets settled in October, where three good nights in a row are worth more than half a season of reliability, and where a team's best pitcher can appear in four games out of seven.