Landmark MLB Seasons at 40-Year Intervals

Major league baseball has had landmark seasons at 40-year intervals, starting with 1901, when the American League began. Here are the next three intervals:

1941: Pearl Harbor. It happened after the season was over, but some players had already joined the military. Baseball, of course, wasn’t the same after the war.

1981: The strike: an unprecedented, lengthy mid-season work stoppage. One of the impacts was establishing the precedent of a division playoff series, though in a different form than the series that began in 1995.

2021, whatever it will be like, probably will be another landmark season.

The point here is not to propose that professional baseball is governed by 40-year cycles. It’s to note these years as food for thought, to consider them and how MLB changed over each 40-year period.