sponsored by the newspaper, no?
Just an explanation to why American use the term World Series, mainly used in baseball and also basketball.
The title of this championship may be confusing to some readers from countries where baseball is not a major sport (or even where it is), because the "World" Series is confined to the champions of two baseball leagues that currently operate only in the United States and Canada.
The explanation is that when the term "World's Championship Series" was first used in the 1880s, baseball at a highly-skilled level was almost exclusively confined to North America, especially the United States. Thus it was understood that the winner of the major league championship was the best baseball team in the world. The title of this event was soon shortened to "World's Series" and later to "World Series".
The United States continued to be the zenith of professional baseball some decades into the 20th Century. The first Japanese professional baseball efforts began in 1920. The current Japanese leagues date from the late 1940s. Various Latin American leagues also formed around that time.
By the 1990s, baseball was played at a highly skilled level in many countries, resulting in a strong international flavor to the Series, as many of the best players from the Pacific Rim, Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere now play on Major League rosters.
Early in 2006, Major League Baseball conducted the inaugural World Baseball Classic, to establish a "true" world's championship in the way the term is normally used for other international sports. Teams of professional players from 16 nations participated, and Japan won the first World Baseball Classic championship. Olympic baseball was instituted as a medal sport in 1992, but in 2005 the International Olympic Committee voted to eliminate baseball, and it will be off the Olympic program in 2012.
A recent myth has arisen that the "World" in "World Series" came about because the New York World newspaper sponsored it. There is no evidence at all supporting that hypothesis.[4]The annual publication called the World Almanac was originally published by the New York World. Its ambiguous title and U.S.-centric content may have inspired the World Series myth, either facetiously or naively.