Red Sox fans celebrate World Series title; parade on Wednesday

Team will NOT be going to the White House, needless to say.

I never understood why the call it World Series if it's just an American thing.

William, trust me, as soon as it becomes economically feasible to expand beyond the US and Canada and have teams in the Caribbean and Mexico, it will happen, and if it becomes logistically feasible to travel to other continents, that will happen too.

"World" also means "the world of baseball" and not necessarily all the nations of the world, and indeed if you look at old newspapers from the early years of the World's Series (as it was often called), you will see phrases like "champions of the base ball world" in many articles:

Here is one from 1914 (enjoy the WWI commentary too): http://digital.chipublib.org/digital/collection/examiner/id/64546

And here is one from 1919, the year the "Black Sox" took money from gamblers to lose to Cincinnati, fully transcribed and with this phrase right in the lead: https://www.nytimes.com/1919/10/10/archives/punch-of-reds-is-deciding-factor-morans-men-have-ability-to-produce.html

This story really brings it home for me - congrats to Boston and the Red Sox.

I never understood why the call it World Series if it's just an American thing.

Because when they started calling it more than a century ago, the pro baseball world was really just an American thing

"A brief history of the name of the World Series"

https://www.rose-hulman.edu/~rickert/BB/wsname.html

Now ya can ask, why do they still keep calling it the World Series in this modern age, the answer to that is:

If there's any sport that's a stickler to traditions, not many moreso than baseball