New York teams have won thirty-five Major League Baseball World Series championships. New York is one of only five cities (Chicago, Washington-Baltimore, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are the others) to have two baseball teams.
The two baseball teams are the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, who compete in six games each regular season called the Subway Series. The Yankees have won 27 championships, while the Mets have won the World Series twice.
The city also was once home to the New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants) and the Brooklyn Dodgers (now the Los Angeles Dodgers). Both teams moved to California in 1958. There are also two minor league baseball teams in the city, the Staten Island Yankees and Brooklyn Cyclones.
The city is represented in the National Football League by the New York Jets and New York Giants (officially the New York Football Giants), although both teams play their home games at New Meadowlands Stadium in nearby East Rutherford, New Jersey. The stadium will host Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014.
The New York Rangers represent the city in the National Hockey League. Within the metropolitan area are two other NHL teams, the New Jersey Devils, who play in nearby Newark, New Jersey, and the New York Islanders, who play in Nassau County, Long Island. This is the only instance of a single metropolitan area with three teams in one of North America’s four major professional leagues.
In basketball (NBA) the city of New York is represented by the New York Knicks and in the women’s basketball league by the New York Liberty team. Also within the metropolitan area are the New Jersey Nets, who currently share the Prudential Center in Newark with the Devils and plan to move to Brooklyn, where they will occupy the Barclays Center beginning in 2012. The first national college basketball championship, the National Invitation Tournament, held in New York in 1938 and remains in the city. Rucker Park in Harlem is a large area where many professional athletes play in summer league.
In soccer, New York is represented by Red Bull New York. The Red Bulls play their home games at the Red Bull Arena in nearby Harrison, New Jersey.
Queens hosts the U.S. Tennis Open, one of the four Grand Slam events. The New York City Marathon is one of the largest in the world, and from the 2004-2006 races it holds the top three positions with the largest number of finishers. Boxing is also an important part of the city’s sporting life, with events such as the Amateur Boxing Golden Gloves held at Madison Square Garden each year.
Many sports are associated with New York’s immigrant communities. Stickball, a street version of baseball, was popularized by working-class youth in Italian, German, and Irish neighborhoods in the 1930s. A street in the Bronx has been renamed Stickball Blvd, in homage to New York’s best-known street sport. York.
The city’s rugby union team is the New York Knights, who play in the AMNRL. In 2009 they won the AMNRL in the league final against the Jacksonville Axemen 32-12.
