Category: News

The Major Sports League Season Standings begins

Major Sports Leagues (major-leagues.com) has acquired from various sources the standings and statistics of the Big Four Sports beginning from 1857.

We are tracking the beginnings of the four Big Four Sports and their associated Major Sports Leagues. Below we indicate the the Big Four Sports, its associated initial league, and the years the sport spans:

 

Sport Initial Circuit Year Span
Baseball NABBP
National Association of Base Ball Players		 1857 to now
Hockey AHAC
Amatuer Hockey Association of Canada		 1887 to now
Football WPPFC
Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit		 1890 to now
Basketball NBL
National Basketball League		 1898 to now

To begin we will post season standings from 2015 and work backwards, while updating the present when a new season of play has been completed. We will be posting each Major League’s season in order of the championship played within the calendar year. For 2015 and the recent history of standings, we will start each year with the NFL (championship in February), followed by the NHL and NBA (championships in June), and then the MLB (championships in October).

Stay tuned as we add seasonal standings for each of the four major leagues, then track how the leagues and cities fare with each other.

Sports League Season Years and Calendar Years

Definition of a League Season and Championship Year:

There can be some confusion defining what sports league season “year” is and how it relates to our standard twelve month calendar.

Some of the smaller sports leagues will have a season that runs a few months where the season start and championship finale take place within a single calendar year. The WNBA would be an example of this. Their year/season runs within the 12 month calendar year. Their 2006 season ran from May to August and can be easily identified as the “WNBA 2006 Season”. MLB has a longer season but it still begins begins and ends within the same calendar year.

Confusion can arise with those sports leagues that run from the fall, through the winter, into the spring like the NBA and NHL. The NBA and NHL both had games that started in the last quarter of 2005 and ran all the way into April of 2006. This is why they will hyphenate their seasons to be 2005-06.

Since we want to standardize what is an actual season between all of the various sports league. Does the 2005-2006 NBA season belong to the 2005 or 2006 calendar years?

Major-Leagues.com will be operating on the grounds that the calendar year in which a league plays most of its regular season belongs to that year and the championship is also named as that year. So the 2005-06 NBA season can be summarized as the “2006 NBA Season”. The 2010-11 NHL season will be identified as the “2011 NHL Season”.

The NFL plays 99%-100% of its regular season in the same calendar and the Super Bowl playoffs take place in the first two months of the new year’s calendar, it is the old year that we will be identified with. As the sole purpose of the regular season is to determine playoff qualifications and a run for the championship, the “2005 NFL Season” begins in 2005 and ends with the Super Bowl played in 2006.

Here is a the season/champion breakdown:

League Season Champion
MLB 2005 2005
NHL 2004-2005 2005
NFL 2005-2006 2005
NBA 2004-2005 2005

It seems to be a trivial point to get hung up on, but by clearly defining what a seasonal year is we will be able to track cities who win multiple cross-sport league championships.

What is a Major Sports League?

There are hundreds of sports leagues in operation across North America, but the main focus of this website is the four of them that are considered to be a Major Sports League. Here are a list of definitions to help understand how the different leagues relate to each other.

Major Sports League – There are four major sports leagues in North America. These include baseball via Major League Baseball, hockey via the National Hockey League, football via the National Football League, and basketball via the National Basketball Association. These four leagues represent the largest and richest professional sporting teams.

Farm Leagues – These also known as Minor or Development Leagues and are established to develop players to play in the Major Sports Leagues. Teams may be owned by a Major Sports League team or by the league itself but all will have a contract with a Major Sports League team to develop players. The level of play is considered sub-par to what is available in Major Sports Leagues and this will be reflected in the amount of money a player will make and the attendance a teams will attract. Continue reading “What is a Major Sports League?” →

Welcome to Major Sports Leagues Alpha

Welcome to an open alpha of our authority website related to professional sports. This initial version will use placeholder data from Wikipedia until we can implement the cool ideas we have. Stay tuned!

Major Sports Leagues (major-leagues.com) is a statistics and analysis site focusing on insightful statistics as they relate to the four major sporting leagues that involve Baseball, Hockey, Football, and Basketball.

These major leagues are:

Major League Baseball (MLB)
est. 1869

National Hockey League (NHL)
est. 1917

Continue reading “Welcome to Major Sports Leagues Alpha” →