Timeline
Era Overviews
Follow how baseball changed from one generation to the next.
Origins Era
1786 · 1899
Before modern leagues and the World Series, baseball emerged from local bat-and-ball traditions into a national organized game.
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The Dead-Ball Era
1900 · 1919
Before Babe Ruth changed everything, baseball was a game of strategy, speed, and pitching dominance. The Dead-Ball Era produced some of the sport's most fascinating characters and its most enduring controversies.
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The Live-Ball Era
1920 · 1941
Babe Ruth turned baseball into a power game, attendance exploded, and the sport survived the Great Depression by becoming louder, faster, and harder to ignore.
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The Integration Era
1942 · 1960
Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line in 1947, the sport's greatest stars overlapped in New York, and the game's geography shifted west for the first time.
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The Expansion Era
1961 · 1976
Baseball spread to new cities, survived a pitching crisis, saw its home run record broken twice, and lost the reserve clause that had bound players to teams for nearly a century.
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The Free Agency Era
1977 · 1993
Players won the right to sell their services, salaries exploded, owners colluded to hold them down, and the game survived labor wars that tested fan loyalty to its limits.
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The Modern Era
1994 · present
A strike cancelled the World Series, a home run chase brought fans back, steroids nearly broke the sport's credibility, and analytics remade how teams build rosters and play the game.
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The Statcast Era
2015 · present
MLB-wide tracking systems turned movement, contact quality, and defensive range into measurable inputs for coaching, scouting, and game strategy.
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