List of World Series champions
The World Series is the annual championship series of Major League Baseball (MLB) and concludes the MLB postseason. First played in 1903, the World Series championship is determined through a best-of-seven playoff and is a contest between the champions of baseball's National League (NL) and American League (AL). Often referred to as the "Fall Classic", the modern World Series has been played every year since 1903 with two exceptions: in 1904, when the NL champion New York Giants declined to play the AL champion Boston Americans; and in 1994, when the series was canceled due to the players' strike.
World Series
Fourteen "Subway Series" have been played entirely within New York City, all including the American League's New York Yankees. Thirteen of them matched the Yankees with either the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League. The initial instances occurred in 1921 and 1922, when the Giants beat the Yankees in consecutive World Series that were not technically "subway series" since the teams shared the Polo Grounds as their home ballpark. The Yankees finally beat the Giants the following year, their first in their brand-new Yankee Stadium, and won the two teams' three subsequent Fall Classic match-ups in 1936, 1937 and 1951. The Yankees faced Brooklyn seven times in October, winning their first five meetings in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953, before losing to the Dodgers in 1955, Brooklyn's sole World Championship. The last Subway Series involving the original New York ballclubs came in 1956, when the Yankees again beat the Dodgers. The trio was separated in 1958 when the Dodgers and Giants moved to California (although the Yankees subsequently met and beat the now-San Francisco Giants in 1962, and played the now-Los Angeles Dodgers four times, losing to them in a four-game sweep in 1963, beating them back-to-back in 1977 and 1978 and losing to them in 1981). An all-New York Series did not recur until 2000, when the Yankees defeated the New York Mets in five games.