A consultant from the UK is in town this week and last night he asked me why we called it the “World” series when it isn’t open to the whole world. His theory is that is is associated with some product line.
There’s a theory that it’s named after the newspaper the New York World, but on closer examination, that turns out not to be true. Snopes has a good page on it. http://www.snopes.com/business/names/worldser.htm
Nope. Since to Americans at the time, the entire world of baseball was the United States, they called it the World Series. (And that title wasn’t the only one used in the beginning.)
See http://www.snopes.com/business/names/worldser.htm for a discussion.
What’s really amusing is that many baseball championships are called world series at least in some form.
I can’t seem to find a link but I believe I read it on the BBCnews site. Apparantly the MLB was trying to raise interest in the UK so they started some sort of little league with many different age groups and each age group had a championship game and each one was called things like “The 10 and under Little League World Series.” Or maybe it was in Ireland. It was somewhere around there. I hope somebody can confirm this. I just remember reading it and being amused for the very reason that some residents of other nations seem to take umbrage with the name.
The World Series is called that because it’s a trademarked name. Asking why the World Series is called the World Series is like asking a guy named Jeff why he calls himself Jeff. It’s been called the “World Series” for 99 years; it would be stupid to change such a recognizable name.
As to why it was originally called that, the term “World Series” was NOT made up in 1903 because they thought the USA was the entire world. During the late 19th century the term “world series” was just a turn of phrase used to describe an important championship event in baseball. The exhibition series between the NL and American Association champions in the 1880s were colloquially called “World Series.” It’s just a term that sounded big and important, no different than “Super Bowl.” The world is big, right? So a World Series, that’s a big series!
The modern day World Series began in 1903 (Boston won) and was, again, unofficially called the “world series” among other names. Eventually “World Series” stuck, and became a trademarked name.
I would also point out that literally speaking, the term is quite accurate. Unlike hockey, soccer or most other sports, baseball has no national-team championship tournament. Since players of all nationalities can play in the major leagues, and almost all the best players are in fact major league players, the World Series really is the championship of the world’s best players. There’s no Baseball World Cup or anything that supercedes it; it’s as good as it gets in baseball. That’s different from other sports where there’s a larger championship, like the FIFA World Cup, to be won.
Nobody proposed changing the name. The OP was asking why it was so called.
I’d be interested in seeing an American team up against a Japanese team.
“Buckaroo” Bokai, Baby!!!
IIRC, every year the Major Leagues send a team to Japan to play the professional teams there.
RickJay wrote:
I’m certainly not going to dispute that the American major leagues have, on the whole, the world’s best baseball players. I believe that most of the world’s best players are in fact playing in the AL or NL, or in the major league farm teams. Still, to call something contested almost completely among teams from a single country a World Series is stretching things a bit. Australian Rules football is open to anyone good enough to play, as is Irish hurling, and i’m sure most of the world’s best players in each sport play in Australia and Ireland respectively, yet neither sport has the hubris to call its annual winner the World Champion, despite the fact that the term would probably be a fair description. There are probably other sports where similar circumstances apply.
In principle, i’m not adamant that a world champion should necessarily be a national team, in the manner of the soccer (football, if you’re from Europe) World Cup. However, in these days of rapidly changing professional allegiances in sport (drafts, trades, transfers, etc.), it seems that national teams are about the only ones that can truly claim to be made up of players who hold a personal and emotional (rather than simply financial) and a permanent (rather than transient) allegiance to a team.
Sub-national major league sport teams in the US and elsewhere have become little more than flags of convenience in which the players care little for the city or state that they play for, and the fans accept that next year’s team may bear no resemblance to this year’s. Sure, there’s the occasional local hero who grows up in the area and spends his whole career with one team (Cal Ripken comes to mind), but the fact that such players are so noticeable indicates how few of them there are. The NY Yankees are said to hold some sort of mystique and allegiance from players, but i often think that’s little more than a desire to win a World Series (bad luck, Jason Giambi - didn’t work this year).
[hijack]Moving beyond baseball, which at least has the excuse that the term World Series is a trademark with a long history, i’ve always been amused that the annual NBA and NFL winners are constantly referred to as world champions. NFL is almost entirely a US sport (the European league, made up almost completely of Americans, notwithstanding) - why then the world championship tag? RickJay’s argument is tenable for baseball, but not for football (to be fair to RickJay, he never made the claim for football).
Basketball is truly a world sport (although not at the level of soccer), that does in fact have its own international competitions between national teams. And, if i remember correctly, the US team didn’t even make the championship game at the most recent event. Yet the NBA champs are constantly referred to as world champions. When i pointed out these things to a couple of Americans after the recent international competition, their excuse was that the international world championship wasn’t really a world championship because the US didn’t send its best players from the NBA. Now there’s a great rationalisation for you - we couldn’t be bothered sending our best team, so it wasn’t a fair competition.[/hijack]
The Toronto Bluejays have played in the World Series.
… Must … stop … myself…from posting… sarcastic… reply… to … complete … twaddle
… Must … stop … myself…from posting… sarcastic… reply… to … complete … twaddle…
Why all the playa hating on RickJay? I think that quote sums it up rather nicely.
Now what would be stupid is if the MLS had a “world champion” (do they?). The best MLS team would get schooled by several dozen European pro teams.
… Must … stop … myself…from posting… sarcastic… reply… to … complete … twaddle…
I’m sorry for the multiple posts. Everytime I submit something it hangs for a long time then comes up with the old “cannot locate page screen”
I don’t understand what’s happening but I will be more careful.
The point of my post was manifold:
- baseball is a ** team** sport. Trying to say that it is a world series when most of the world’s teams aren’t involved is obviously nonsensical, regardless if you have a lot of good players who come to America to play.
- suggesting that the baseball world series is more of a world championship than the soccer world cup because the teams from only one country are allowed to play is almost absurdly nonsensical
*“Since players of all nationalities can play in the major leagues”? When did the US relax its immigration criteria to that extent. Can ten year old chinese come to America to play in Little League and work their way up through the series?
To put it more succinctly: When my brothers and I were kids we used to play a self-invented game called Kellyball. Anybody else in the world would have been welcome to play but they never did. However that never led us to deciding we were world champions at Kellyball.
BTW the American insistence on calling a parochial sports championship the World Series is not something that annoys me (or most other people in the world). It’s just a bit humorous.
I agree with Elwood here. I think RickJay made a great post. I guess the term first was used in 1884. again. And eventually became synonymous with baseball championships.
We probably don’t want this to degenerate into another debate on whether it should be called the “World Series” and whether the winner should be called the “World Champion.” That’s not what poor Khadaji wanted. If you want to do that then you should open up either a GD thread or a BBQ thread.
So is there a real international baseball contest?
Apparently Cuba, Canada, Australia, Korea and Japan are rather good at the sport.
The Little League World Series includes teams from every continent and I don’t know how many nations, but quite a lot.
The Olympics includes teams from many nations but has yet to include America’s premier players. Do the Japanese send their pro players?
That’s all I know.
And I don’t think Australia belongs in your list, although they have made some really good players.
Yes, there is, and Cuba usually wins it.
Check http://www.baseball.ch/T/WC.htm ; The last one was in Taipei, the 34th edition.
So much for "There’s no Baseball World Cup… "
My only quibble with RickJay’s post is his assertion that the phrase “World Series” is trademarked. It certainly would be trademarked if it were created today, however, back in the day the parties involved were a lot looser with such names and frequently didn’t bother to obtain formal trademarks. As a result, without having done the research, I would suspect that legally speaking the phrase “World Series” is in the public domain. There are tournaments called the “World Series of Poker”, for instance, that wouldn’t be able to use that name if the baseball pooh-bahs had properly trademarked the phrase in the first place.