The Winningest Baseball Cities

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The 2022 Major League Baseball season is more than halfway over, and a familiar pair of teams have emerged as likely World Series contenders.

In the American League, the New York Yankees have been baseball’s best team through the first half. With a lineup full of sluggers like Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, the Yankees have been consistently outscoring opponents on their way to the league’s best record. Over in the National League, a star-studded roster with four different MVP award winners has the Los Angeles Dodgers poised to make a run at their fourth NL pennant and second championship since 2017.

While other rivals have also delivered strong campaigns this year, the Yankees and Dodgers appear to be the favorites to face off for the 2022 World Series. And looking at MLB history, it is unsurprising to see why.

Over the last ten seasons, the Dodgers and Yankees rank first and second in the MLB in win percentage at .606 and .569, respectively. The Dodgers have earned eight division titles and nine playoff appearances over that span, while the Yankees have had six playoff appearances since 2013. With big-market appeal and resources, the two franchises have gathered elite collections of talent and positioned them as the class of the league in recent years.

But the two teams have been among the MLB’s top franchises for much longer than that. The Yankees have maintained the league’s highest all-time winning percentage at .570 and coupled that with postseason success, winning 27 championships–more than twice as many as any other franchise. The Dodgers rank third all-time in winning percentage at .530.

While the Dodgers’ recent run has been one of the more impressive stretches of winning for any franchise in league history, no franchise will challenge the Yankees’ historic dominance anytime soon. At 2,602 games above .500, the Bronx Bombers could lose every game in a 162-game season for the next 16 years and still have a winning record all-time. The Yankees are more than 1,000 games further above .500 than the team with the next-highest win percentage, the San Francisco Giants.

With the Yankees standing head and shoulders above the rest of the MLB, it is unsurprising that New York tops the list of winningest baseball cities. But other cities have also enjoyed generations of baseball success, with 12 of the MLB’s 30 franchises boasting all-time winning records.

Researchers at HotDog.com ranked U.S. and Canadian cities according to the all-time winning percentage of each location’s active professional baseball franchises. In the event that a city is home to more than one team, each team’s all-time statistics were ranked separately. All professional baseball seasons since the founding of the National League in 1876 through July 4th, 2022 were considered. In the event of a tie, the location with the franchise with more total wins was ranked higher. The data was sourced from baseball-reference.com.

Here are the winningest baseball cities.