MLB seasons, leaders and awards

Five awards are carried in this database. They start in different years, and the gaps before those years are gaps in the calendar rather than in anybody's career — a player in 1930 has no Gold Glove because the award did not exist until 1957. The Negro Leagues had none of these awards at all.

Two lists, one for hitters and one for pitchers, adding up the leagues baseball counts as major. Rate statistics need a minimum, and that minimum is ours rather than an official rule — each page says what it is and how many players clear it, so you can judge the list for yourself.

One page for each of the 30 clubs still playing: every season it has ever had, won and lost, where it finished, what it won, who its career leaders are and every name it has played under. A club that moved city or changed its name is one page, because the franchise is the thing that continued — Brooklyn and Los Angeles are the same club here, and so are the St. Louis Browns and the Baltimore Orioles.

Nobody picked these twenty. They are the ten highest career WAR among hitters and the ten highest among pitchers, read straight off the two lists above, with the figure beside each name so you can check the order rather than take it on trust. WAR is our arithmetic, so the order is ours too — a published list will not put them in exactly this sequence. Everyone who has ever played has a page; these are simply where the arithmetic starts.

One page per season, 1871 to 2026. Each one ranks inside every league that played that year — the American and National Leagues, the Negro Leagues where they existed, and the nineteenth-century associations — because leading a league and leading baseball are different claims. The qualifying line moves with the schedule, so a shortened season is judged by its own length rather than by 162 games.