Baseball will always be America’s game, but the World Series feels like its home is in the Bronx.
Rightfully so, too. The New York Yankees entered the 2024 season with 40 American League pennants, 27 titles, and 225 World Series games played since making their debut appearance in the 1921 Fall Classic against the New York Giants.
In the history of Major League Baseball, no other team is within 100 games of the Yankees’ record — the Los Angeles Dodgers have the second-most with 123.
Droughts have been few and far between with this franchise. They went 18 years from their founding in 1903 to that first Fall Classic appearance, losing to the Giants in eight games. They fell to those same inter-city rivals the following year before getting their first in 1923 — against the Giants.
In 43 years between 1921 and 1964, the Yankees made the World Series 29 times, winning it 20 times.
The longest stretch they had to wait between Fall Classic appearances during that stretch? Three years: They didn’t make it from 1929-1931, 1933-1935, and 1944-1946 — when baseball’s best talent was fighting in World War II.
They had the most dominant stretches in MLB history, winning four straight championships from 1936 to 1939 and five consecutive titles from 1949 to 1953. So it was almost unfathomable that they had to wait 12 years from a title in 1964 until their next World Series appearance in 1976, let alone the 13 years of no Fall Classic baseball between 1982 and 1995.
Then there was the last 15 years. Fifteen years of the maddening disappointment of getting to the doorstep, getting to the playoffs 10 times and the ALCS five, and taking that final step to get to the place that had long been perceived as a right.
The wait finally ended on Saturday night in Cleveland when Juan Soto’s three-run 10th-inning home run punched the Bronx Bombers’ seemingly overdue ticket back to the World Series with a 5-2 ALCS Game 5 win over the Cleveland Guardians.
This will be just the second time since the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009 that its tenants will be playing for a world championship within its confines, but the mystique rooted within its foundation — and the legacy of all that came before just a stone’s throw away — makes this feel all the more right that the World Series is returning to the Bronx.
