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.
List of pre-World Series baseball champions
The modern World Series, the current championship series of Major League Baseball, began in 1903, and was established as an annual event in 1905. Before the formation of the American Association (AA), there were no playoff rounds—all championships went to the team with the best record at the end of the season. In the initial season of the National League (NL) in 1876, there was controversy as to which team was the champion: the Chicago White Stockings, who had the best overall record (52–14), or the St. Louis Brown Stockings (45–19), who were the only team to have a winning record against every other franchise in the league. The teams agreed to play a five-game "Championship of the West" series, won by St. Louis, 4 games to 1. Beginning in 1884, the championship series between the National League and the American Association were promoted and referred to as the "World's Championship Series" (WCS), or "World's Series" for short; however, they are not officially recognized by Major League Baseball as part of World Series history. Though early publications, such as Ernest Lanigan's "Baseball Cyclopedia" and Turkin and Thompson's "Encyclopedia of Baseball", listed the 19th-century games on an equal basis with those of the 20th century, "Sporting News" publications about the World Series, which began in the 1920s, ignored the 19th-century games, as did most publications about the Series after 1960. Major League Baseball, in general, regards 19th-century events as a prologue to the modern era of baseball, which is defined by the emergence of the two present major leagues.