1876 Major League Baseball season

The 1876 major league baseball season was contested from April 22 through October 21, 1876, and saw the Chicago White Stockings as the pennant winner of the inaugural season of the National League and of Major League baseball. There was no postseason.

The National League was established on February 2, 1876 as a successor to the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP or National Association (NA)), as a means to concentrate quality of talent and reduce the number of poor-drawing games played against low-quality competition in small towns (such as the 1875 Keokuk Westerns, located in the small Iowan town of Keokuk, which only had about 12,500 people). The NA also suffered from lack of strong authority over clubs, unsupervised scheduling, unstable membership of cities, dominance by one team (the Boston Red Stockings), and an extremely low entry fee ($10, equivalent to $286 in 2024) that gave clubs no incentive to abide by league rules when it was inconvenient to them.

Six teams from the NA would be established as charter members of the National League, including the Boston Red Stockings (renamed as the Red Caps, surviving today as the Atlanta Braves), Chicago White Stockings (surviving today as the Chicago Cubs), Hartford Dark Blues, New York Mutuals, Philadelphia Athletics, and St. Louis Brown Stockings. Two non-NA teams would join as charter members, including the Cincinnati Reds (unrelated to the modern team) and Louisville Grays.