|
Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization that is the oldest of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. A total of 30 teams now play in the American League (AL) and National League (NL), with 15 teams in each league. The AL and NL operated as separate legal entities from 1901 and 1876 respectively. After cooperating but remaining legally separate entities since 1903, in 2000 the leagues merged into a single organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Year In Review: 2000 National League )〕 The organization also oversees minor league baseball leagues, which comprise about 240 teams affiliated with the major-league clubs. With the World Baseball Softball Confederation, MLB manages the international World Baseball Classic tournament. Baseball's first professional team was founded in Cincinnati in 1869. The first few decades of professional baseball were characterized by rivalries between leagues and by players who often jumped from one team or league to another. The period before 1920 in baseball was known as the dead-ball era; players rarely hit home runs during this time. Baseball survived a conspiracy to fix the 1919 World Series, which came to be known as the Black Sox Scandal. The sport rose in popularity in the 1920s, and survived potential downturns during the Great Depression and World War II. Shortly after the war, baseball's color barrier was broken by Jackie Robinson. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of expansion for the AL and NL, then new stadiums and artificial turf surfaces began to change the game in the 1970s and 1980s. Home runs dominated the game during the 1990s, and media reports began to discuss the use of anabolic steroids among Major League players in the mid-2000s. In 2006, an investigation produced the Mitchell Report, which implicated many players in the use of performance-enhancing substances, including at least one player from each team. Today, MLB is composed of thirty teams: twenty-nine in the United States and one in Canada. Teams play 162 games each season and five teams in each league advance to a four-round postseason tournament that culminates in the World Series, a best-of-seven championship series between the two league champions that dates to 1903. Baseball broadcasts are aired throughout North America and in several other countries throughout the world. Games are aired on television, radio, and the Internet. MLB has the highest season attendance of any sports league in the world with more than 74 million spectators in 2013. ==Organizational structure== MLB is governed by the Major League Baseball Constitution. This document has undergone several incarnations since 1875, with the most recent revisions being made in 2012.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=MLB Constitution )〕 Under the direction of the Commissioner of Baseball, MLB hires and maintains the sport's umpiring crews, and negotiates marketing, labor, and television contracts. MLB maintains a unique, controlling relationship over the sport, including most aspects of minor league baseball. This is due in large part to the 1922 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in ''Federal Baseball Club v. National League'', which held that baseball is not interstate commerce and therefore not subject to federal antitrust law. This ruling has been weakened only slightly in subsequent years.〔 The weakened ruling granted more stability to the owners of teams and has resulted in values increasing at double-digit rates.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Policy Debate: Should the antitrust exemption for baseball be eliminated? )〕 There were several challenges to MLB's primacy in the sport between the 1870s and the Federal League in 1916; the last attempt at a new major league was the aborted Continental League in 1960.〔 The chief executive of MLB is the commissioner, Rob Manfred. The chief operating officer is Tony Petitti. There are six executive vice-presidents in charge of the following areas: baseball development, business, labor relations and human resources, finance, administration (whose vice-president is MLB's Chief Information Officer), and baseball operations.〔 As of November 19, 2013, the MLB website lists only ''five'' executive VPs; the office of executive VP for labor relations and human resources is not listed. The multimedia branch of MLB, which is based in Manhattan, is MLB Advanced Media. This branch oversees MLB.com and each of the 30 teams' websites. Its charter states that MLB Advanced Media holds editorial independence from the league, but it is under the same ownership group and revenue-sharing plan. MLB Productions is a similarly structured wing of the league, focusing on video and traditional broadcast media. MLB also owns 67 percent of MLB Network, with the other 33 percent split between several cable operators and satellite provider DirecTV.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=MLB Network )〕 It operates out of studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, and also has editorial independence from the league.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=About MLB Network )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Major League Baseball」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|