World Series

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 1919 World Series produced the deepest scandal in the event's history when eight players on the Chicago White Sox conspired with professional gamblers to deliberately lose the series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for payoffs. Resentment over the notoriously low salaries paid by team owner Charles Comiskey is widely cited among the plot's underlying causes, though the players' own motives varied. Suspicious errors and uncharacteristically poor play during the series itself drew scrutiny from sportswriters even before the conspiracy became public.

A grand jury investigation opened in 1920, producing confessions from several players, but all eight were acquitted at trial in 1921 after key evidence, including some of those confessions, went missing before the proceedings. The outcome did not save the players' careers: Kenesaw Mountain Landis, hired as the sport's first Commissioner in the scandal's aftermath specifically to restore public confidence, banned all eight men from professional baseball for life regardless of the trial's result, asserting an authority over the sport's integrity that has defined the commissioner's office ever since. The role of Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose batting statistics during the series were among the best of either team, remains genuinely debated by historians, keeping his banishment a recurring subject of reconsideration in baseball writing and popular culture, including the film Field of Dreams.

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.