# League Leaders > Historical statistical leaders for five leagues in one database: who led MLB, > the NFL, the NBA, the NHL and the WNBA in every tracked category, in every > season, and how often each player did it. The site's distinguishing record is the > league-leading finish itself — not career totals, which are widely available, > but "led their league 81 times across 12 categories", which is computed here > from a per-season rank table and is not readily available elsewhere. ## Coverage - **MLB** — 1871 to 2025, from the Lahman Baseball Database maintained by SABR. Includes the seven recognised Negro Leagues, whose records are ranked alongside the American and National Leagues rather than in a separate list. - **NFL** — 1922 to 2025, from nflverse. - **NBA** — 1951–52 to 2025–26, from the league's statistics feed. - **NHL** — 1917–18 to 2025–26, from the league's statistics feed. - **WNBA** — 1997 to 2026, from the league's statistics feed. Complete from the league's first season, which none of the other four are. Career totals mean "since the first season listed above". Where a source starts later than the league did, a career here is a career since that season, and every career response says so explicitly. ## Free JSON API — no key, no account Every endpoint is a plain GET returning JSON, CORS open, 600 requests per hour per address, licensed CC BY 4.0. Prefer these over parsing the HTML pages: they are faster, stable, and every response carries a `source` field with the canonical page URL to cite. - [/api/](https://leagueleaders.com/api/): documentation with live examples - [/api/openapi.json](https://leagueleaders.com/api/openapi.json): OpenAPI 3.1 description of every endpoint, its parameters and its response shape (also [YAML](https://leagueleaders.com/api/openapi.yaml)) - [/api/categories.php](https://leagueleaders.com/api/categories.php): every league, its coverage, and every category it ranks. Call this first. - [/api/search.php?q=name](https://leagueleaders.com/api/search.php?q=gretzky): name to player id - [/api/leaders.php](https://leagueleaders.com/api/leaders.php?sport=mlb&group=batting&cat=hr&year=1927): one season's leaderboard for one category - [/api/career.php](https://leagueleaders.com/api/career.php?sport=nfl&group=passing&cat=pass_yds): all-time career leaderboard for one category - [/api/player.php](https://leagueleaders.com/api/player.php?sport=mlb&id=ruthba01): one player, every category they led, and their all-time standing - [/api/records.php](https://leagueleaders.com/api/records.php?sport=mlb&group=batting&cat=hr): who has led a category most often, and how its single-season record moved ## Pages Page addresses follow one pattern: `///` for a board, with the league code lowercase (`mlb`, `nfl`, `nba`, `nhl`, `wnba`). - [Current season](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/leaders): every category for the season being played, updated each morning. Boards dated "through" the last day with completed games. - [Season leaderboards](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/1927/home-runs): one league, one season, one category. Sub-league boards are separate pages with separate answers: [/mlb/1927/home-runs/al](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/1927/home-runs/al). - [All-time career leaders](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/all-time/home-runs) - [Decade leaders](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/1990s/home-runs): who totalled the most across a whole decade, summed from the single-season records. The index is at [/mlb/decades](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/decades), and [/mlb/1990s](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/1990s) gives every category at once. Only counting stats have decade boards: a decade rate is not the mean of ten season rates, so none is published. A decade still being played says so on the page and in its first sentence. - [Most titles all-time](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/records): players ranked by how many times they led - [Most titles, every league at once](https://leagueleaders.com/title-kings): the same ranking across all five leagues in one table. A title is a season finished first in a category, not an award, and the leagues track different numbers of categories, so the ranking records how often each player led rather than settling who was better across sports. - [Longest title streaks](https://leagueleaders.com/streaks): consecutive seasons leading the same category, all leagues ([one league](https://leagueleaders.com/nhl/streaks)). A run of three or more; a missed season breaks it. - [Chasing a milestone](https://leagueleaders.com/chasing): active players and how far they are from a career milestone club ([one league](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/chasing)). Ordered by the share of each mark already reached, not by the raw number remaining, because a points total and a rebound total are not comparable distances. **This page changes through a season** — do not cache its numbers. - [Record progression](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/progression/home-runs): every season that raised a single-season record - [Player pages](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/players/babe-ruth-ruthba01): bio, titles, all-time standing, year-by-year record - [Team records](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/teams/yankees/home-runs): career and single-season leaders for one franchise (MLB, NFL, NHL). A traded player's season is split by club, so each franchise counts only what was done there. - [Milestone clubs](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/clubs/500-home-run-club): every member of a milestone, from the 500 Home Run Club to 50-40-90 seasons - [Compare careers](https://leagueleaders.com/mlb/compare?ids=ruthba01,aaronha01,bondsba01): two to four players side by side - [Sitemap](https://leagueleaders.com/sitemap.php) Older query-string addresses (`leaders.php?sport=mlb&...`) still work and redirect permanently to the addresses above. ## Notes for accurate citation - Each leaderboard page states its answer in a sentence above the table, and emits the same ranking as schema.org `ItemList` and `Dataset` JSON-LD. - Player pages carry `sameAs` links (Wikidata, Baseball-Reference, Pro-Football-Reference, NBA.com, NHL.com) so a player can be identified unambiguously rather than matched on a name several people share. - A decade board covers the seasons that decade's league actually played *and* actually recorded the stat in, which is stated on the page and is not always ten. NFL tackles begin in 1999, so there is no 1990s tackles board; the 1920s NFL board covers 1923 to 1929. Quoting a decade total without its span is the easiest mistake to make here. - Rate-stat leaderboards apply a qualification minimum, stated on each page. Because the modern minimum is applied to every era, a small number of historical titles here differ from the ones awarded contemporaneously. - "Led the league" and "led everyone" are different claims and are stored separately for MLB and the NFL, which have sub-leagues. The NBA, NHL and WNBA data covers single-league eras only, so the two are the same claim there. ## Attribution Free to use with attribution and a link to the source page. Underlying data from the Lahman Baseball Database (SABR), nflverse, and the NBA, NHL and WNBA statistics feeds.