At the time the World Series was named, baseball was pretty much exclusively an American sport. So it was a reasonable assumption that whatever professional major league American team won the championship was the best team in the world. The same is now true about the Superbowl - it’s very unlikely that there’s an team playing the sport outside of the NFL that could have beaten the Steelers and contested their title.
Now if the United States were to stage a national soccer championship and declare the winner of that event to be the “world” champion, that would be hubris.
2a) a majority to vote for it in Congress and 2b) a majority to vote for it in the Senate.
OR
2a’) a majority to vote for it in the Autonomous Parliament
OR
2a’’) a majority to vote for it in the Central Government and 2b’’) the King to sign it
followed by
every Lawyers College in the country to keep its mouth shut.
and the Constitutional Tribunal to keep its mouth shut and/or say it’s kosher.
It’s not something one person can change on its own. I’ll give you a real example: because of this rule of “legal consistency”, any new law or regulation must indicate how it relates to any other law and regulation on the same subject. Does it supersede them, or complete them? Can a more-local regulation be more strict, or not?
A couple years ago (Jan '04 if I recall correctly), there was a new national law regarding some detail of agricultural watering. Normally, such a law would have been of interest only to specialized publications like the Bulletin Of The Association Of Farmers, but this one made front page in every paper (getting even more space than the soccer results) because… the central government had forgotten the clause indicating how it related to a local law from Extremadura! Every Lawyers College was up in arms. By the time the papers were printing it, there had already been an emergency cabinet meeting (during Christmas vacation!) that had created the necessary addendum - but of course it didn’t get printed in the Boletín Oficial del Estado until a couple weeks later (which is the Bulletin’s normal speed thank you muchas and they, unlike the ministers, are functionnaries and don’t speed up for nobody but, maybe, God in person; maybe).
You’re quite right, I wouldn’t say it’s hubris either -certainly not on the part of the American public. But it’s certainly a very shallow piece of marketing on the part of the sporting body responsible.
> The thing about “The American Dream” that I’ve always been taught was
> remarkable is that in the U.S. there is no idea of immutable class. IOW, there is
> no caste system, no ideal that any one person is inherently “better” from birth
> by being born to certain parents, or having lighter skin, or being a particular
> gender, or whatever. I think we Americans think we share this with, say,
> Canadians and Australians and other relatively recent mostly immigrat
> countries, but not with a lot of European countries built on a history of “class”
> and certainly not with countries like India that have a caste system. This is the
> shiny dream, of course, that is pretty badly dented by racism and economic
> exclusion and what have you, but on a societal, meta level, we are taught
> that “all men are created equal” and those who believe differently (either
> secretly or openly) know that theirs is the opinion that is not consistent with
> American aspirational ethos. I know that issues of class are not a big deal on a
> daily basis in Britain, but it has been really important historically to Americans
> that you have Lord Whatsisname and Lady Whosit (and the Queen, God save
> her) and we don’t.
Whatever the official dogma is in the U.S. about the greater amount of opportunity available here than in other countries, it’s far from clear that it’s true. I’ve even read claims that there is less class mobility in the U.S. than in most other first-world (i.e., industrialized or well-off) countries, although there’s more class mobility in the U.S. than in third-world counties. Does anyone have any good statistics about the amount of class mobility in the various countries of the world? I’m not talking about the chances that you’ll move from poor to fantastically wealthy. I’m talking about the chances that if you grow up in a family making less than average income that eventually you’ll be making more than an average income.
No, not preposterous, but part of a venerable commercial tradition known as “mere puffery.” It’s a product being sold and the proprietor calls it the “best in the world.” Not only is it acceptable, but it’s routine.
It does not purport to be a “world competition.” It calls itself the “World Series” as in This is the best series in the world!" – a statement that no one with any sense would take to be meant literally.
While I believe it’s not worth getting worked up over the name “World Series” (merely a name of a commercial product, like “Best Buy”) there is an underlying cultural issue here.
American culture has historically been fed by a strain of isolationism and exceptionalism. There is an underlying assumption that (1) No one else exists, and (2) Even if anyone else did exist, we are so much better than them, it’s as if they didn’t exist anyway.
I’m engaging in a little bit of hyperbole, but there are some concrete results, the main one being that, in the case of athletics, being the best in the U.S.A. is assumed to be equivalent to being the best in the world.
Did I say it didn’t bother me? It does. But “World Series” doesn’t, any more than any commercial product that is advertised as being the best in the world.
Let me modify that. It bothers me in areas other than athletics, which is, like religion, merely an opiate for the masses. I don’t care if the St. Louis club or its fans purport to be the world’s champions based on a series played against the Detroit club. It’s like one five-year-old child telling another “I have the best toy car in the world!”
So in your mind, the Cards would have to beat the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters to be called “World Champions,” despite the Central and Pacific Leagues being considered somewhere between AAA and MLB in terms of quality?
That’s a series I would watch, but I don’t think it would really prove anything.
Perhaps my comments were unclear. St. Louis can call itself anything it wants, from “best team in the Midwest to sport red as a primary color” to “best team ever in the history of the universe.” Whatever. The phrase “world’s champion” means nothing specific to me and so I don’t care who uses it.
This is in direct contrast to those who insist that any athletic title that includes the word “world” must be a contest between national teams or whatever. Whatever. It’s just sports. Watch it or ignore it.
Seriously. If the Sydney Australian Rules Football team wants to call itself “World Champions”, I don’t have a problem with that, even though a US Australian Rules Football team (assuming there is such a thing) wasn’t invited to compete.
If it’s not a World Championship, what are you going to call it?
At the grade school level, you strive for a City Championship.
In high school, you hope to win the State Championship.
The pinnacle of college sports is a National Championship.
