This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The World Series has been decided in a best-of-seven format, the first team to win four games taking the title, for effectively its entire history. Home field advantage, by contrast, has changed its basis more than once: for decades it alternated between the two leagues on a fixed rotating schedule regardless of either team's record, before Major League Baseball began awarding it instead to the league that won that year's All-Star Game, an experiment introduced in 2003 after the 2002 All-Star Game itself had controversially ended in a tie. That system lasted until 2017, when the league replaced it with the current rule awarding home field advantage to the pennant winner with the better regular season record.
The Series has been interrupted only twice, and each interruption exposed a different institutional strain. In 1904, New York Giants manager John McGraw refused outright to play the American League champion Boston Americans, dismissing the younger league as inferior and unworthy of a genuine championship contest, a snub embarrassing enough that baseball's leadership moved afterward to guarantee the Series would be played every year going forward. That guarantee held for ninety years until 1994, when a players' strike over a proposed salary cap shut down the season entirely, cancelling the World Series outright for the only time since 1904 and leaving the sport without a champion until labor peace was restored the following spring.