Map 103 Answer

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Answer: This week’s proportional symbol map depicted the total number of World Series games played in each city in North America.

We had to update this map continually as the week went on because the 2018 World Series was taking place. That series consisted of two games in Boston and three games in Los Angeles. Although the Boston Red Sox won the series four games to one, there were more games played in Los Angeles, and accordingly the dot for Los Angeles grew by more than the dot for Boston. The two home games in Boston’s Fenway Park did, however, catch Boston up with Chicago for third place on the all-time list. Boston and Chicago have each hosted 45 World Series games, 17 fewer than second-place St. Louis at 62.

The city that has hosted the most World Series games—by quite a large margin!—is New York City with 194. New York has benefited not only from the extraordinary success of the New York Yankees, but also from its status as host to a large number of teams: formerly the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, and now the New York Mets. New York’s dot has also benefited from a number of so-called “Subway Series,” which take place when two teams from the same city play in the World Series. The last Subway Series occurred in 2000, when the Yankees beat the Mets four games to one.

New York is not the only city to have hosted all the games of a World Series. Notably, the 1944 World Series, which was played when Major League rosters were depleted due to World War II, occurred entirely in the same stadium; the St. Louis Cardinals defeated the St. Louis Browns four games to two. The year 1989 saw an interesting twist on the same phenomenon, when the San Francisco Giants took on the Oakland A’s in the so-called “Bay Bridge Series.” While it was certainly easy for fans of either team to attend home games in the other team’s park that year, Oakland and San Francisco have distinct dots on our map.

One phenomenon this map makes visible is the extent to which baseball history, if you go back as far as the first World Series in 1903, has been dominated by teams in the traditional industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. No team played on the West Coast until the Giants and Dodgers moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles before the 1958 season. The original organization of Major League baseball put two teams in many cities, usually with one in the American League and one in the National League. So Philadelphia’s dot benefits not only from the Phillies, who remain there, but also from the A’s, who subsequently moved to Kansas City and then Oakland. Boston’s dot owes its size not only to the Red Sox, but also to the Braves, who subsequently moved to Milwaukee and then to Atlanta.

The dot in Milwaukee is an interesting one. Milwaukee has hosted just three World Series: in 1957 and 1958, when the Milwaukee Braves played the Yankees, and in 1982, when the Milwaukee Brewers lost to the Cardinals. Those dots from two different teams are combined into a single dot.

The only two Major League cities that have never hosted a World Series game are Seattle and Montreal. Montreal no longer has a team, since the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, DC, and became the Nationals. Although the team has had somewhat more success in Washington than it did in Montreal, it has still never made it to the World Series. Instead, Washington’s dot derives its size solely from the very limited success of the first iteration of the Washington Senators, who made the World Series in 1924, 1925, and 1933. That team subsequently moved to Minneapolis and became the Twins. Neither the second iteration of the Washington Senators (who moved to Arlington, Texas, and became the Texas Rangers) nor the Nationals has made the World Series, so Washington’s dot has not grown at all since 1933. Still, at least a few very old people can look back very fondly on their memories from 1933. Seattleites don’t even have that.

There’s another team that has never won a World Series game: the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies won the National League pennant in 2007 and went to the World Series, where they got swept by the Boston Red Sox four games to zero. The small dot in Denver indicates that that city has hosted two World Series games. That’s an important dot because it’s the simplest way to tell that this map maps World Series appearances, not World Series victories. A great many people this week—the majority of all who submitted answers, in fact!—guessed that the map had to do with all-time World Series wins. This answer was wrong. Plus, if we had wanted to map World Series wins, we probably would have done it by team, not by city. We were strict this week. But also: you should be careful.

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