Ivy League

Baseball is played in the Ivy League in two divisions, the Gehrig Division, named after Ivy League alumnus Lou Gehrig, and the Rolfe Division, named after Ivy League alumnus Red Rolfe. The member teams of the Ivy League are Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Cornell University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, and the University of Pennsylvania (not to be confused with Pennsylvania State University).

Sponsoring conference championships in 33 men's and women's sports, and averaging more than 35 varsity teams at each school, the Ivy League provides intercollegiate athletic opportunities for more men and women than any other conference in the country. All eight Ivy schools are among the "top 20" of NCAA Division I schools in number of sports offered for both men and women.

All of the Ivy League institutions share some general characteristics: they consistently place within the top twenty in the U. S. News college and university rankings; they rank within the top one percent of the world's academic institutions in terms of financial endowment; they attract top-tier students and faculty; and they are perceived as socially elite. Seven of the eight schools were founded during America's colonial period; the exception is Cornell, which was founded in 1865. Ivy League institutions, therefore, account for seven of the nine colleges chartered before the American Revolution.

Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune first used the phrase "Ivy colleges" in print to describe the eight current Ivy schools (plus Army). On February 8, 1935, AP Sports editor Alan Gould first uses the exact term "Ivy League".

Baseball has a long history for the teams of the Ivy League. Although the name "Ivy League" came about much later, its college teams were playing inter-collegiate baseball already in the 1860s. The first televised baseball game was an Ivy League match between Princeton and Columbia on May 17, 1939. A major league televised game followed later that same year. The schools of the Ivy League competed in the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League from 1930 to 1992, along with Army and Navy. Since 1993, they have competed as the Ivy League without the two service academies.