In this post, there's some other discussion of one player in baseball
Posted on December 15th 2019, 3:20 am
A more general discussion of what's happening with the league as a whole could be found in a previous post. The game began in 1878. Before then, baseball teams played a "round robin" competition, i.e., they each won a competition within a single league each year, and the championship went to the club with the best record. There were minor differences in the rulebooks over the years, but at the end of the 1878 season, the round robin rule was adopted in three of the four largest leagues. Some baseball historians think this made it easier to create a championship game. I suspect it makes less sense. The original three major leagues, in particular, had some of the more bizarre structures in the history of the game. The National Association was subdivided into the Eastern, Western, and Central A, with the three divisions splitting evenly between the two national leagues. Each division had 12 teams, with the lowest-ranked clubs facing an eight-game series. The winners of each series played each other in a four-game set. The top teams had to play in the championship game, but they would play a more manageable road schedule during the regular season. The A's were in the Western division, and the Western-leading Chicago White Sox and Kansas City Monarchs were in the Western A.
In 1882, the National Association established an All-Star Game. Both the Eastern (Baltimore) and Western (New York) teams had played in the first division championship series. The All-Stars were to be based in New York, but in order to have enough players to field an official team, one team had to be from each division. This wasn't a bad decision -- most of the top players were from the Easterns.
Baseball at its core is a game of individual skill. Many teams compete for championships -- in today's terms, an "MVP" -- through the season. As with every other game, however, the championship games are decided by a group of a small number of very, very good players. The team with the best team of the playoffs wins everything. The game is decided in the playoffs. The following are the standings for the American League this season -- all the teams have made the playoffs and the top two teams are in a playoff for the World Series.