As the longest surviving professional team sports league in the world, MLB’s National League (NL) is one of the two leagues that make up the league’s American and Canadian divisions.
To distinguish it from the American League, which was founded 25 years later and is known as the “Junior Circuit,” the NL was established on February 2, 1876, to replace the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players of 1871–1875 (often referred to as simply the “National Association”).
There are now 15 teams at each conference. Both eight-team leagues agreed in a “peace treaty” to acknowledge each other as “major leagues” during a two-year “baseball war” of 1901–1902.
In order to comply with this agreement, they created laws governing player contracts, forbidding the “raiding” of rosters, and regulating interactions with minor leagues and lower level clubs.
The league champions of 1903 prepared to participate against each other in the new professional baseball championship tournament with the inaugural “World Series” in the fall of 1903, following similar national series in prior decades since the 1880s.
It was only after the 1904 World Series champions failed in their efforts to negotiate a similar agreement that the two leagues formalized the new World Series event in 1905.
All 117 World Series championships from 1903 to 2021 were won by National League teams.
National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP, often referred to as the “National Association”), which was founded four years earlier, was suffering from a lack of strong authority over clubs, unsupervised scheduling, unstable members of cities, dominance by one team (the Boston Red Stockings), and an extremely low entry fee of $10 that gave clubs no incentive to abide by league rules when it was inconvenient to them.
What Is The Oldest Baseball Team Still Playing?
Atlanta Braves is the oldest baseball team still in the MLB. Even though there is considerable controversy as to which MLB franchise is the oldest. The Atlanta Braves was established in 1871.