Major League Baseball counted 247 players born outside the 50 United States on its 2026 Opening Day rosters, and published the tally country by country. It did not publish the figure that makes the tally interesting: how many people each of those countries had to draw on. Curaçao, with about 156,000 residents, put four players in the majors. That is one for every 39,000 people.
The raw counts are familiar enough to anyone who follows the sport. The Dominican Republic leads with 93 players, as it has every year since MLB began releasing this annual data in 1995. Venezuela is second with 60. Cuba has 20, Canada 17, Japan and Puerto Rico 14 each. Read as a ranking, the list mostly tracks which countries are large and which are small.
