Baseball: Rules, Innings, Positions, Statistics and the 2026 MLB Season

BOSTON – On the morning of 28 August 2026 the Houston Astros were in first place in the American League West with a record of 66 wins and 67 losses. Seven hundred miles north-east, the Boston Red Sox were 73 and 60 and in third place. Nothing about that is a mistake. It is what happens when thirty teams are sorted into six groups of five and the group, not the record, decides who gets the title. Baseball is full of arrangements like this, rules that look arbitrary until you find the argument that produced them, and most of them are older than anyone reading about them. This page is a reference for the whole sport: the rules, the nine positions, how runs are scored, what the statistics mean, where the season starts and stops, and what the 2026 Major League Baseball season looks like as it enters its final month. The current-season material is dated and sits in its own sections. Everything else is evergreen and does not move.

What is baseball?

Baseball is a bat-and-ball game between two teams of nine, played on a field with four bases arranged in a ninety-foot square. One team bats and tries to score runs by sending hitters around all four bases. The other team fields and tries to record three outs. Then they swap. That exchange happens nine times in a full game, and the team with more runs when it ends wins. What makes the sport unusual among team games is that the defence holds the ball. In football, hockey and basketball the team in possession attacks. In baseball the pitcher, a defender, starts every single play by throwing the ball, and nothing happens until he does. There is also no clock deciding the outcome. A game ends when the outs run out, not when time does.

How many innings in baseball?

Nine. A standard professional baseball game is nine innings long, and each inning has two halves. The visiting team bats in the top half, the home team bats in the bottom half, and each half ends when the fielding side records three outs. There are exceptions worth knowing. If the home team is already ahead after the top of the ninth, the bottom half is not played, so the home side often bats only eight times in a win. If the score is level after nine, the game goes to extra innings and continues until one team leads at the end of a completed inning. High school games are usually seven innings, and Major League Baseball plays seven-inning games in some scheduled doubleheaders. A game called early for weather is official once five innings have been completed, or four and a half if the home team leads.

Extra innings and the runner on second

Since the practice was made permanent, every half-inning after the ninth in Major League Baseball begins with a runner already standing on second base. The runner is the player who made the last out of the previous inning, and he did nothing to earn the base. The rule exists to end games faster, and it works, but it means a run scored in the tenth inning is not produced the same way a run in the second inning is. Purists dislike it for exactly that reason.

How long is a baseball game?

Somewhere between two and a half and three hours, and the answer is much tighter now than it was five years ago. To put a real number on it rather than a remembered one, this page took every completed regular-season game in Major League Baseball from 1 to 27 August 2026 that was scheduled for nine innings, 354 games in all, and read the official duration off each box score. The mean was 2:46. The median was 2:44. Four games in five finished inside three hours. The shortest took 1:54 and the longest, an extra-inning game, took 4:23. Separating the games that actually ended in nine innings from the ones that did not sharpens it further. The 319 games that finished in regulation averaged 2:43, and 85 per cent of them were under three hours. The 34 that went to extra innings averaged 3:15. Extra innings accounted for under one game in ten but for most of the long ones.

Why the games got shorter

A pitch timer. Before 2023 a pitcher could take as long as he wanted between pitches, and over two decades he gradually took more. The league imposed a clock, and Major League Baseball sets out the limits on its own rule page: fifteen seconds with the bases empty, eighteen with runners on, an automatic ball charged against a pitcher who lets it expire and an automatic strike against a batter who is not ready by the eight-second mark. There are thirty seconds between batters. The effect was immediate and it has held.

The nine positions and what each one actually does

Every defensive position carries a number, one through nine, and those numbers are the shorthand the entire sport is scored in. A ground ball to the shortstop who throws to first is written 6-3. A double play from second to short to first is 4-6-3. Learn the nine numbers and a scorecard stops being a code.

A tenth player, the designated hitter, bats in place of the pitcher without taking a fielding position. The American League adopted it in 1973 and the National League held out until 2022. Both leagues now use it, which ended one of the longest-running arguments in the sport and disappointed a great many people who enjoyed having it.

How scoring works

A run scores when one player touches first, second, third and home in that order without being put out. That is the whole of it. Everything else in the sport is a method of getting a player around those four bases or a method of stopping him. The batter can reach base by hitting the ball into fair territory and beating the throw, by drawing four balls, by being hit by a pitch, or through a fielder’s error. Once on base he advances on hits by teammates, on stolen bases, on walks that force him along, or on a sacrifice. A home run, a ball hit over the outfield fence in fair territory, scores the batter and everyone already on base at once, which is why a grand slam with the bases loaded is worth four runs and why the phrase has escaped the sport entirely. There is no partial credit. A runner stranded on third base when the third out is recorded is worth exactly as much as a batter who struck out to open the inning, which is nothing. Baseball keeps a statistic for this, left on base, and it is the most quietly brutal number on a scorecard.

Batting statistics, and which ones matter

Batting average was the number the sport was read by for most of its history. It is hits divided by at-bats, it treats a single and a home run as the same event, and it ignores walks entirely. A player who walks a hundred times in a season is penalised by it for having been too dangerous to pitch to. That is a strange way to measure a hitter, and the sport eventually noticed.

What is OPS in baseball?

OPS stands for on-base plus slugging. It is on-base percentage added to slugging percentage, and Major League Baseball defines it exactly that way. On-base percentage measures how often a hitter avoids making an out. Slugging percentage measures how much damage he does when he hits the ball, counting a double as two bases and a home run as four. Added together they capture both halves of hitting in one number. The scale is worth memorising because it is not intuitive. An OPS of .700 is a below-average regular. .800 is a good hitter. .900 is an All-Star. Anything over 1.000 across a full season is one of the best hitters alive that year. Babe Ruth finished his career at 1.164, which remains the highest of anyone who has played, with Ted Williams second at 1.116. Through 27 August 2026, Yordan Alvarez of the Houston Astros led the major leagues at 1.051. Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers was second at .934. The gap between first and second is larger than the gap between second and tenth, which is the sort of season Alvarez is having.

Pitching

The pitcher controls the tempo of the game and, on most nights, its outcome. A modern starting pitcher throws five or six innings and is measured on earned run average, the number of earned runs he allows per nine innings, and on strikeouts. Anything under 3.00 is good. Under 2.50 is a candidate for the award. The starter hands the game to a bullpen of relievers, each of whom throws an inning or less at maximum effort. The last of them, the closer, protects a narrow lead in the ninth. That division of labour is recent by the sport’s standards. Complete games, once ordinary, have almost disappeared, and the reason is a mixture of velocity, workload science and the fact that a hitter facing the same pitcher a fourth time gets much better results. Arm injury is the constant cost of the modern approach, and the operation named after the pitcher who first underwent it in 1974 is now so routine that it is unusual for a pitching staff not to contain someone who has had it.

Fielding

Fielding was measured for a century by errors, a statistic that counts only the plays a fielder reached and then botched. It therefore rewarded a slow fielder who never got close to a difficult ball. Tracking systems now measure how much ground a fielder actually covers and how his range compares with the average at his position, which is a far better question, and the answers have changed how teams value defence. The most visible fielding change of the past decade was the restriction on the shift. Teams had been stationing three infielders on one side of second base against pull hitters, and it worked. The rule now requires two infielders on each side of the bag, both with feet on the infield dirt when the pitch is thrown. Batting averages on ground balls went up. Whether the game is better for it is still argued.

What is a balk in baseball?

A balk is an illegal motion by the pitcher that an umpire judges to be deceptive to the baserunners. When one is called the ball is dead, the pitch does not count, and every runner on base advances one base without doing anything. There is no appeal and no discretion about the penalty. The rule exists because of an obvious asymmetry. A pitcher must start his delivery from a fixed position, and a runner leading off a base has to decide, from the pitcher’s first movement, whether the ball is going to the plate or to the base behind him. If the pitcher were allowed to fake the start of a pitch and then throw to first, the runner could never leave the bag at all. The league’s own rule glossary dates the specific rules to 1898, introduced for exactly that reason, and the language has been elaborated ever since without changing the principle.

The motions that get called

In practice the common calls are these. The pitcher starts his delivery to the plate and does not complete it. He fails to come to a complete stop in the set position with runners on. He steps toward a base without throwing there. He drops the ball while on the rubber. He fakes a throw to first or third without stepping off. He pitches while not facing the batter, or while the catcher is outside the catcher’s box, or before the batter is set. There is now one further way to commit a balk that has nothing to do with deception. A pitcher is limited to two disengagements per plate appearance, a disengagement being a pickoff attempt or a step off the rubber. He may attempt a third, but if it does not retire the runner, it is a balk and the runner advances. The limit resets if a runner advances during the plate appearance. This was added with the pitch timer and it deliberately shifted the balance of the running game toward the runner, which was the point.

When does baseball season start?

The Major League Baseball regular season began on 25 March 2026 and runs to 27 September. Spring training preceded it, opening on 20 February and running through 24 March. The postseason starts on 28 September and the World Series must finish by 31 October. The rhythm is the same every year even when the dates shift by a few days. Pitchers and catchers report in mid-February. Exhibition games fill five weeks in Arizona and Florida. Opening Day lands in the last week of March or the first week of April. The All-Star Game splits the season in July, and this year it fell on 14 July, with the 2026 game played in Philadelphia. The trade deadline at the end of July divides the teams that think they can win from the ones that have decided to sell.

Major League Baseball: 30 teams, six divisions

Thirty clubs are split into the American League and the National League, fifteen each, and each league into East, Central and West divisions of five. The two leagues were separate businesses for most of the twentieth century with different umpires and different rules, and they still keep different identities even though the organisation merged long ago. Twelve teams reach the postseason: the six division winners and three wild cards in each league, being the three best remaining records regardless of division. This is the arrangement that lets a team with a losing record win a division while a better team behind it in another division has to take a wild card. It is also why the standings have to be read twice, once by division and once by wild card, before you know who is actually in trouble.

The 2026 season so far

With about a month to play, Milwaukee has the best record in the sport at 82-51 and a six-and-a-half-game hold on the National League Central. The Los Angeles Dodgers at 80-53 and the Tampa Bay Rays at 79-54 are the only other clubs within striking distance of that mark, and the Atlanta Braves at 78-55 lead a National League East in which the Philadelphia Phillies are four and a half back and still comfortably in the wild-card picture. The American League is the messier half. Tampa Bay leads the East by three and a half over the New York Yankees. The Chicago White Sox lead the Central at 70-63, which would be a fourth-place record in the East. And the West is being contested by three teams that have all spent the season hovering around .500, with Houston in front at 66-67 and Texas half a game behind at 66-68. A division title will be won there by a team that loses more than it wins unless something changes in September. The season’s individual story is Yordan Alvarez, whose 1.051 OPS leads the major leagues by more than a hundred points and who also leads in batting average, on a Houston club that is barely above water. Kyle Schwarber has 40 home runs and won the Home Run Derby in July. Jacob Misiorowski of Milwaukee leads both earned run average at 1.68 and strikeouts at 216, which is a combination that usually ends in an award. The trade deadline in early August reshaped several of these races.

Baseball terminology, decoded

The sport’s vocabulary is the largest barrier to watching it for the first time. Most of the terms are older than television and none of them were designed to be self-explanatory.

A short history of baseball

Baseball descends from English bat-and-ball games, most directly rounders, and was being played in recognisable form in the north-eastern United States by the 1840s. The story that Abner Doubleday invented it in Cooperstown in 1839 is a fabrication produced by a commission in 1907 that wanted an American origin, and it has been known to be one for a century. The Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown anyway. The New York rules of the 1840s established the diamond and the ninety-foot base path. Professional play began with the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869. The National League was founded in 1876 and the American League in 1901, and the two settled their war with the first World Series in 1903. The pitching distance moved to sixty feet six inches in 1893 and has not moved since.

The turning points

Babe Ruth turned a low-scoring tactical sport into a game about home runs in the 1920s. Jackie Robinson broke the colour line in 1947, ending sixty years of segregation that had forced Black players into the Negro Leagues, whose statistics Major League Baseball only recognised as major-league records in 2020. Free agency arrived in 1975 and transferred bargaining power to the players. The 1994 strike cancelled a World Series. A steroid era inflated the record books through the late 1990s and left them contested. And the 2023 rule changes, the pitch timer and the shift restriction among them, altered how the game is played more than anything since the designated hitter.

Baseball beyond Major League Baseball

The sport is not only American. Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball is the strongest league outside the United States and has sent a steady line of players to the majors. The Korea Baseball Organization draws crowds that are louder and more organised than anything in North America. Baseball is the national sport of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and the Dominican Republic supplies more major leaguers per head than anywhere on earth. The World Baseball Classic, held every few years, is the closest the sport comes to a genuine world championship, and the United States does not always win it. Below the majors, a minor-league system of several levels develops players under contract to major-league clubs, and college baseball feeds the annual draft. The 2026 draft opened with the Chicago White Sox taking Roch Cholowsky first overall. Women’s professional baseball, distinct from softball, returned in 2026 with the launch of the Women’s Pro Baseball League.

What this page does not know

The game-length figures are computed here from a single month, 354 games between 1 and 27 August 2026. August is not a random month. It is hot, rosters have expanded in some eras and not others, and pitching staffs are tired. A full-season figure would be the better number and this page does not have one; the monthly figure is offered as what it is, a measured sample with its window stated. The 2027 season dates are listed by the league’s own season service as opening on 25 March 2027, which is exactly the pattern of the 2026 entry. That is consistent with a placeholder rather than a published schedule, so this page treats it as unconfirmed and says so rather than printing a date that may move. Standings, leaders and records here are current through the games of 27 August 2026 and will be wrong within a day. They are kept in their own sections for that reason. Nothing in the rules, positions, statistics or history sections depends on them. For the day’s fixtures and results, the daily MLB games report covers each slate as it is played.

Baseball: frequently asked questions

Last updated

Standings, leaders and the 2026 season section on this page are current through the games of Thursday 27 August 2026 and are updated during the season. The rules, positions, scoring, statistics, terminology and history sections are evergreen and are revised only when the sport changes them.