Exhibition Game - Baseball

Baseball

Major League Baseball's preseason is known as spring training. All MLB teams maintain a spring-training base in Arizona or Florida. The teams in Arizona make up the Cactus League, while the teams in Florida play in the Grapefruit League. Each team plays about 30 preseason games against other MLB teams. They may also play exhibitions against a local college team or a minor-league team from their farm system.

Several MLB teams used to play regular exhibition games during the year against nearby teams in the other major league, but regular-season interleague play has made such games unnecessary. The two Canadian MLB teams, the Toronto Blue Jays of the American League and the Montreal Expos of the National League, met annually to play the Pearson Cup exhibition game; this tradition ended when the Expos moved to Washington DC for the 2005 season. It also used to be commonplace to have a team play an exhibition against Minor League affiliates during the regular season, but worries of injuries to players, along with travel issues, have made this very rare. The annual MLB All-Star Game, played in July between players from AL teams and players from NL teams, was long considered an exhibition match, but as of 2003 this status was questioned because the league whose team wins the All-Star game has been awarded home field advantage for the upcoming World Series.

Another exhibition game, the Hall of Fame Game/Classic which was played in Cooperstown, New York on the weekend of inductions to the Baseball Hall of Fame, was also ended in 2008 due to interleague play and teams playing only substitutes.

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