Explained: Why baseball calls its championship the World Series

Baseball's biggest prize. 30 teams, but just two countries. So why on earth is it called the World Series? The 2026 World Series starts on October the 23rd. But 29 Major League Baseball teams are American. Just one is Canadian. And there are no teams from Japan, Cuba or the Dominican Republic. The story goes back more than 140 years. In 1884, two American teams played a so-called World Championship Series. Why World? Well, because America's professional leagues were regarded as the best on the planet, so the champions were therefore billed as the best in the world. In 1903, the modern World Series began, and the name kind of stuck. To be fair, now more than a quarter of modern Major League Baseball players were born outside the United States, so it does have a global feel, but the name is pretty misleading. There actually is a baseball tournament played between countries, that's called the World Baseball classic and this year's champions not the USA but Venezuela. So the World Series has world-class baseball Absolutely, but does the whole world compete? Not quite