The "world" series

I was really interested to see what my baseball-obsessed friends had to say about this issue. Apparently this was not a concern, as shared by a friend who moved to the U.S. from Japan at the age of 9. He said it made sense because in 1903 the U.S. really was the only team to have the baseball franchise. It was also, at that time, called the "Modern World Series" which has been shortened over the years to simply the World Series. He told me he'd actually watched a documentary on baseball (totaling 23 hours) and learned a lot about the history of world baseball.

On the other hand, one of my conservative friends just stated right out that it is name the world series "because Americans are excessively ethnocentric and think that the world revolves around us." I had several people agree with that comment.

Another interesting take was one friend who looked up the definition of world: "a particular division of the Earth (the Western world). I suppose that we either consider ourselves the center and driving force of the Western world in the traditional sense, or that only the U.S. is the Western world.

I found myself agreeing with my friend from Japan, it made sense at the time. They didn't anticipate such a regionalized response to baseball around the world, and the sport itself simply hasn't become popular enough to become a true world series yet.