Baseball has a long tradition in the United States. The most popular baseball league in the U.S. is Major League Baseball (MLB). Due to its 162-game schedule, it attracts more ticket sales than any other professional sports league in the world. Teams play almost every day from April to October. The World Series is the championship series of Major League Baseball, the culmination of the sport's postseason each October. It is played between the winner of each of the two leagues, the American League and the National League, and the winner is determined through a best-of-seven playoff.
Notable American baseball players in history include Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Roberto Clemente, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Al Kaline, Stan Musial, Pete Rose, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, Mike Schmidt, Honus Wagner, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, and Jackie Robinson, who was instrumental in dissolving the color line and allowing African-Americans into the major leagues. Today, some of the notable American players include Derek Jeter, Josh Hamilton, Ryan Braun, Chase Utley, Joe Mauer, Roy Halladay, Alex Rodriguez, Carl Crawford, Tim Lincecum.
Baseball and the variant, softball, are also popular participatory sports in the U.S. However, unlike American football, baseball is also popular in many other countries, notably Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Latin American countries such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Venezuela.
These countries are represented well in Major League Baseball today by players such as Hideki Matsui, Magglio Ordóñez, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols (born in the Dominican Republic, but developed in the U.S. and a naturalized American), Iván Rodríguez, Johan Santana, and Ichiro Suzuki. Canada, where baseball developed in tandem with the U.S., is also well represented in MLB with players such as past greats Ferguson Jenkins and Larry Walker and current stars Jason Bay, Russell Martin, Justin Morneau, and Joey Votto.
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