The History of the World Series: Formats, Champions and the Streaks

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 12 min read

How the World Series went from best-of-nine to best-of-seven, why 1904 and 1994 have no champion, which franchises have won the most titles, and the streaks and droughts that define the event.

The World Series has been played 121 times from 1903 through 2025 in the historical record, and the New York Yankees have won 27 of them. That is the headline number, and it is so lopsided that the second-place franchise, the St. Louis Cardinals, has 11 titles in the same period. After them come the Boston Red Sox, the Oakland Athletics and the Los Angeles Dodgers with nine each, and then the San Francisco Giants with eight. Past those six clubs, titles are spread thin across the rest of the sport.

The number of series is not the number of seasons, and the gap is part of the story. From 1903 to 2025 there are 123 calendar years, which would mean 123 series if the event had been held every autumn. It was not. There was no series in 1904, when the National League champions refused to play, and there was none in 1994, when a players' strike ended the season in August. Those two gaps are the only ones in the modern era.

This article follows the event through its formats, from the earliest nineteenth-century championship series to the best-of-seven that is standard today, then ranks the franchises by titles, and ends with the streaks, droughts and unusual outcomes that make the series more than a list of winners. All counts are from the historical record through the 2025 season. They count franchises as continuous entities across moves and name changes, so the Dodgers include their Brooklyn years and the Athletics include Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Before 1903: championship series without a settled format

The idea of a postseason contest between the two major leagues is older than the modern World Series. The historical record lists series from 1884 through 1890 between the champions of the National League and the American Association, which was then a rival major league. The formats were improvised and varied from year to year. In 1884 the Providence club swept New York in three games. In 1887 the Detroit club beat St. Louis ten games to five, and in 1890 Brooklyn and Louisville finished with three wins each and a tie.

Those early events were closer to exhibitions than to a fixed institution. The number of games, the cities and even whether the result counted as a championship depended on agreements between the clubs. The American Association collapsed after 1891, which left one major league and no one for the National League champion to play. The league tried its own postseason series in the mid-1890s, a contest between its top two teams for a trophy called the Temple Cup, but that experiment faded without becoming a permanent fixture.

What the nineteenth-century series show is that the appetite for a championship was there long before the modern format. What they lacked was a rival league that was equal in status and willing to commit to a shared agreement. That came in 1903.

1903: the first modern World Series

The modern series begins in 1903, after the National League and the American League ended their war over players and agreed to recognize each other. The Boston club from the American League faced the Pittsburgh club from the National League in a best-of-nine format, in which the first team to win five games took the title. Boston won, five games to three, after trailing three games to one.

That best-of-nine was the first of four years in which the series used that length. It also shows how the count in the historical record works. A five-to-three result means the series took eight games, not five. When you read a table of series results, check which format applied that year before you assume that "4" is the winning number.

1904, and why one year has no champion

The National League champion in 1904 was the New York Giants. Their manager, John McGraw, and the club's owner refused to play the American League champion from Boston, on the grounds that the American League was an inferior league and that the series was not required. There was no series that year. The refusal caused enough criticism that the two leagues put rules in place for the following season, and the Giants, who won the National League again in 1905, played and won.

That 1905 series set a pattern that has lasted. The Giants beat the Philadelphia Athletics four games to one in a best-of-seven. The format shortened the series to a length that could be arranged in advance, and from then on the event was treated as an obligation of the two pennant winners and not as a favor between clubs. It has been played every year since, with one exception to come.

The series after 1905 settled into a rhythm of a single best-of-seven, with 1918's wartime-shortened season the main disruption: the Boston Red Sox beat the Chicago Cubs in six games in a season that ended early because of the war. For more on how today's playoff rounds feed into the World Series, read How the MLB postseason works and a history of the playoff format.

The best-of-nine detour, 1919 to 1921

In 1919 the series returned to the best-of-nine format, and it stayed there for three years. The Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago White Sox five games to three in 1919, in a series now remembered for the scandal in which eight White Sox players were later banned from the game. The Cleveland club beat Brooklyn five games to two in 1920, and the New York Giants beat the Yankees five games to three in 1921, a series played entirely at the Polo Grounds, which both clubs used as their home.

The reason owners returned to the longer format was commonly said to be revenue: more games meant more gate receipts. Whatever the motive, it did not last. In 1922 the series went back to best-of-seven, where it has remained, with the Giants beating the Yankees four games to none that year (one game ended in a tie). The Yankees then beat the Giants in 1923 for their first title. The format has been unchanged for more than a century, which is rare in a sport that tinkers with so many rules.

A best-of-seven has some mathematical properties that explain why it lasted. It is long enough that a clearly better team usually wins but short enough that an upset remains possible, and it can be played in a little over a week. A longer series would reduce the variance further and make the event harder to schedule around the weather. A shorter one would turn the series into something closer to a coin flip.

How the series fits into the rest of the postseason

For most of its history, the World Series was the only postseason event. The American League winner played the National League winner, and nothing came before it. That changed in 1969, when each league split into two divisions and added a league championship series between the division winners. The new round was a best-of-five at first and became a best-of-seven in 1985. In 1995 a wild-card team was added to each league, creating a division series, and later changes added more playoff teams. A new reader might expect that the league championship series are older than they are. They are not: the pennant winner was simply the team with the best record in its league for the first sixty-six years of the modern era.

That structure helps explain a pattern in the numbers. The historical record lists 121 World Series since 1903, and each one featured two pennant winners. The path to get there is much longer now than it was in 1950. A club that won its league with the best record in 1950 played one series. A club that wins as a wild card today may have to win three rounds first. As a result, the series now features teams that arrive through different routes, and the odds that the best regular-season team wins it have changed.

Home field has also had a changing rule. For many years it alternated between the leagues, and for 2003 through 2016 it went to the league that won the All-Star Game. Since 2017 it has gone to the club with the better regular-season record. The home-field pattern within the series has long been 2-3-2: two games at one park, three at the other and two more at the first, so that the team with the better claim to home field plays four of the seven there. The first night game in a World Series was played in 1971.

The 121 series by franchise

The table counts only the modern series from 1903 through 2025, and it counts wins and losses by franchise, following each club across moves. Losses here mean series lost.

The remaining titles belong to the Cleveland club (2, with 4 losses), the New York Mets (2, with 3 losses), the Philadelphia Phillies (2, with 6 losses), the Kansas City Royals (2, with 2 losses), the Toronto Blue Jays (2, with 1 loss), the Miami club listed as the Florida Marlins (2, undefeated), the Houston Astros (2, with 3 losses), and one each for the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Los Angeles Angels, the Washington Nationals and the Texas Rangers. The Milwaukee Brewers, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies and the Tampa Bay Rays have reached the series without winning. The Seattle Mariners have not played in one through 2025.

Two readings of the table are worth stating. The Yankees' 27 titles come with 14 lost series, which is 41 appearances in all and by far the most. The Dodgers have won nine and lost 14, a larger number of losses than titles, and the Giants have won eight and lost 12. Being in the series often is a different achievement from winning it, and several of the oldest franchises have a losing record in the event. For the two franchises whose records are traced in detail, see the Yankees' history and the Dodgers' history.

The Yankees, the Cardinals and the most common matchup

The Yankees' list of titles in the database is 1923, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1977, 1978, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2009. The team's pennants number 41. Two runs stand out. The Yankees won four straight series from 1936 to 1939, and five straight from 1949 to 1953. Between 1996 and 2000 they won four titles in five years, including three in a row in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

The most frequent pairing in the history of the event is the Yankees and the Dodgers. They have met 12 times by the historical data, including seven times when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn: 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956. The Yankees won eight of the 12 meetings and the Dodgers four. Brooklyn's only title came in 1955, when it beat the Yankees four games to three, and the Los Angeles club added wins over New York in 1963 (a four-game sweep), 1981 and 2024. The Yankees and the New York Giants met seven times, and the Yankees and the Cardinals five.

The Cardinals' 11 titles in the modern era came in 1926, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982, 2006 and 2011. The database also lists a title in 1886, which is why the franchise's total there reads 12. They won three in five years in the 1940s. Their eight lost series include 1928, 1930, 1943, 1968, 1985, 1987, 2004 and 2013. A pattern worth noting is how many of their series went the full seven games. The Cardinals won the 1926, 1931, 1934, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982 and 2011 titles in seven games.

Sweeps, seventh games and the shape of a series

Of the 121 modern series, 21 were won four games to none, according to the historical data. Some of those sweeps were by famous teams: the Yankees in 1927, 1928, 1932, 1938, 1939, 1950, 1998 and 1999, among others, and the Dodgers over the Yankees in 1963. Others were upsets, such as the Boston Braves over the Philadelphia Athletics in 1914 and the Giants over Cleveland in 1954. A sweep is the clearest sign of a lopsided series, though a sweep can hide close games.

At the other extreme, 42 series ended with the winner taking four games to three. The full list is long, and it includes some of the most remembered Octobers. The 1924 series, won by Washington over the Giants, the 1925 series, won by Pittsburgh over Washington, the 1960 series, won by Pittsburgh over the Yankees, the 1991 series, won by Minnesota over Atlanta, the 2001 series, won by Arizona over the Yankees, the 2016 series, won by the Cubs over Cleveland, and the 2025 series, won by the Dodgers over Toronto, all ended in game seven. For the Cubs' win, see The 2016 Chicago Cubs: Ending 108 Years of Waiting.

The 2025 final matters for another reason. The Dodgers won in 2024 by beating the Yankees four games to one and won again in 2025, which made them the first repeat champions since the Yankees completed their three straight titles in 2000. Repeating is difficult in a long postseason: in the database, no club won in consecutive years from 2001 through 2024.

Droughts, firsts and the clubs still waiting

The stories that attract the most attention are the long waits. The Chicago Cubs won in 1908 and then not again until 2016, a gap of 108 years. The Boston Red Sox won in 1918 and did not win again until 2004, and the Chicago White Sox won in 1917 and again in 2005. Cleveland's last title in the database is 1948, which is the longest wait among clubs that have won at all. Among clubs that have never won, the Seattle Mariners, in the league since 1977, have never even reached the series, while the Brewers, Padres, Rockies and Rays have appeared and lost.

The Kansas City Royals won in 1985 and 2015, a story told in the best Royals seasons and every October run. The Washington club that began as the Montreal Expos won its first title in 2019, and the Texas Rangers, who began as the second Washington Senators, won their first in 2023. The Toronto Blue Jays are the one club outside the United States that has won the series, in 1992 and 1993, and the 2025 series was the first in the database to feature a Canadian team since 1993.

Baseball's own history includes a separate and equally important tradition, which the historical series table does not list: the Negro World Series of the 1920s and the 1940s. Those events were contested between the champions of the Negro leagues and deserve a place in any account of the sport's championships, and the Hall of Fame and other official sources hold their records.

Common questions

Why was there no World Series in 1904? The New York Giants, champions of the National League, declined to play the American League champions from Boston. The refusal led to rules that required the pennant winners to meet from 1905 on.

Why was there no World Series in 1994? A players' strike ended the season in August and the postseason was not played. It is the only year since 1904 without a series.

How many games does a World Series last? It is a best-of-seven, so the first team to win four games takes the title, and it lasts at least four games and at most seven. The earlier best-of-nine format, used in 1903 and from 1919 to 1921, required five wins.

Which team has won the most? The New York Yankees, with 27 titles in the historical record from 1903 through 2025.

Which teams have lost the most World Series? The Yankees and the Dodgers have each lost 14 since 1903, and the Giants are next with 12. Those clubs have also won many, which is how they came to play so often.

Where to go next

For the sport's longest chase at a different record, read the single-season home run record from Ruth to Bonds, then look at one of the most famous single moments of October in the 1988 World Series. To see how the champions of the past are listed with their leaders, use the history and the Hall of Fame topic page or the playoffs and World Series page.