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The Kings took out four of them on the way to the Stanley Cup. Similar to the NBA, hockey's postseason includes 16 of the 30 teams, making for 15 playoff series each season. What made the 2011 New York Giants' Super Bowl victory even more impressive?
Hence, there were 70 postseason series and two wild-card games from 2003 through 2012. When it’s a poor road team traveling to take on a strong home squad, the edge on the odds board may be even more pronounced; however, it could go the other way if the situation is reversed. Home field is factored into the sports betting odds, but you still need to take the time to figure out how much — if any — of an edge that it will result in. Regardless of which decade you analyze, home-field advantage in baseball has remained at right around 8%.
What Are The World Series In Baseball?
Home-field advantage is enacted by scheduling four of the possible seven games at the advantaged team’s home stadium. In order to qualify for the MLB playoffs, a team must secure one of the ten available spots during the regular season. For team-based sports, there’s typically a home side and an away side. It’s common knowledge that the team that doesn’t have to do any traveling has a slight advantage heading into the contest. Some venues are traditionally more difficult for visitors to play in as a result. As examples, consider home games for the Seattle Seahawks of the NFL at CenturyLink field, or for college basketball’s Duke Blue Devils at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
The extra stolen bases indicate that reaction time may also be playing a role. All of these numbers together indicate a large significance of mental aspects that are not quite emotional but that affect things like eyesight, reaction time, and learning about the home turf. That pretty much answers the question of what home teams are doing better. Official scorers, or so the accusation goes, give the home team credit for hits more often while recording as errors close calls involving road players. This may or may not be true, but it is highly doubtful that the reverse is true. Therefore, that home teams reach on error in 1.46 percent of their balls in play, and road teams on 1.42 percent implies that players on the road are fielding more poorly.
How CBT has impacted the MLB offseason
I decided to look at intradivision matchups for three-game and four-game series involving both closer than average distances and further than average distances. Those matchups have an 11.8 percent home-field advantage, though in a sample of just 254 games. This also highlights another important fact, which is that crowd support is unlikely to be the primary cause of home-field advantage, since one would expect a smaller home-field advantage in a mixed-fan crowd. This did not seem to surprise the Philadelphia media all that much. The Phillies had a regular-season home-field advantage of only 4.9 percent in 2008, and in the previous four years they had home-field “advantages” of 6.2, —3.7, 4.9, and —2.5 percent. Relative to how they performed on the road, the Phillies played much worse at home than did other teams.
It is easy to dismiss these effects as minor, considering how they are often small compared to the effects of talent, but their existence is clear. The psychology of the crowd may not be what is driving home-field advantage, but it is apparent that they will continue to enjoy its effects. Home-field advantage does not appear to be very team-specific. Other measures of statistical consistency imply that the effect all other teams experience when playing at home does not vary much from team to team. However, there are many indications that individual players see noticeable home-field effects. This could be a psychological issue as well, whereby road teams can generate the adrenaline to overcome some home-field advantage in the first and last game of the series but lose their steam in the middle games.
Teams that Benefit the Most From Home Field Advantage in Baseball
The good news -- or bad news for those with a fetish for the lamentation -- is that edge typically enjoyed by the home squadron figures to be quite muted in 2020. For the Red Sox, who scored nearly one full run per game more at home than on the road, perhaps it would be helpful to play more games at Fenway Park. At the same time, they allowed .81 fewer runs on the road than at home, so the impact there may not be as great as perceived. The 2013 Red Sox didn't quite take advantage of their home-field in the same way. They lost Game 1 of the ALCS at home to the Tigers before taking two of three in Detroit and wrapping up the series with a win back home in Game 6.
Two seasons ago, the Astros pulled out a road win in the 40th “winner-take-all” game in World Series history. Home teams in World Series “winner-take-all” scenarios now own an overall losing record of after the Cubs and Astros won two of the past three World Series in Game 7’s on the road. As noted, the reasonable assumption is that the presence of fans -- densely packed and making themselves heard -- is the driver here.
You’ll find strong teams against the spread or on over/under and others who are weak in both regards, for example. When it comes to records for teams in home or away settings, the same patterns can develop. We’ll be answering those questions and many more in our deep dive into what is a home-field advantage. There’s also greater park unfamiliarity when playing across leagues — especially early on in the series. AL teams playing in NL parks without a DH may have to hurt their defense to get one of their best bats in the lineup.
The National Basketball Association’s home court advantage has historically been a significant factor in determining which teams make the playoffs since its inception in 1946. The presence of a home court advantage can be extremely beneficial to a team in a sport where only a team’s record is considered to be indicative of its ability. Because this advantage usually accounts for 3-5 points, the team’s home record and road record are typically different. Because there are so many teams now playing each other on a regular basis, it is pointless to play at home. Some people believe that this advantage is still extremely valuable, especially in the playoffs, where a series could be decided by just a few games.
While in all games, the average winning percentage of any team is .500, its winning percentage goes up to .530 at home, and down to .470 on the road. Given so much research that consistently shows weak psychological and contextual effects, to see this large effect is refreshing. When you remove an average hitter from a lineup and replace him with a replacement-level player, you may lower home-field advantage only a little more than 1 percent. The effect of home-field advantage is so large that you are better off playing your third starter against your opponents’ ace in your home park than you are the other way around. Effects of familiarity and distance appear to be the primary drivers of home-field advantage, though other factors may be at play. Knowing how large these effects indicates that there is much to be learned from understanding context in baseball.
I suspected that the reason that the last game of the series may have a smaller home-field advantage is that it is more likely to be a day game, and therefore I suspected that road teams would have less of a disadvantage. However, Sunday games have larger home-field advantages than do Thursday games— which would probably not be true if night games are a cause of home-field advantage. My belief is that there is not only a travel-hangover effect but a different effect based on distance traveled, in addition to a “time away from home” effect. Home teams really do tend to do better in those middle games with an off day before the series, and away teams tend to do worse in middle games with an offday before the series. Although traveling earlier might help away teams get past jetlag during the earlier part of the series, it seems that, the longer the series goes, the more tired they get.
We examine divisional matchups and both intra- and interleague matchups in an attempt to learn more about home-field advantage. In doing so, we know that we do not need to worry about certain teams tricking us into reaching inaccurate conclusions, since it does not appear that the other 29 teams in MLB exhibit or enjoy any special home-field advantage. It is clear that home-field advantage affects each type of batted ball. It does not affect the batting average on line drives very much, but it certainly does affect the isolated slugging average on them. There are more triples than doubles, and there are a good deal more home runs as well (2.5 versus 2.0 percent).
However, without any more information, it is difficult to tell if the walks and strikeouts are only the products of home effects on hitters. For instance, it may be that, given enough time to prepare himself to pitch, the pitcher can overcome any disadvantage of being on the road while the hitter has an advantage at reacting to the baseball when at home. In other words, it is possible that travel or staying in a hotel dulls hitters’ reaction times but does not impede the pitcher’s effectiveness. That is why I now introduce the fourth true outcome— the neglected one on which fielders also have no effect. The baseball playoffs are the most challenging to make among the four major pro sports, simply because the fewest number of teams get in—only 10 in total.
Another potential source of home-field advantage is that outfielders at home know their parks better—they know how the ball bounces off the wall, etc. Many triples are the result of balls that get away from outfielders. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the rate of triples per ball in play is 7.59 percent for home teams and only 6.44 percent for road teams. In fact, the rate of doubles on balls in play for home teams is 6.81 percent, and 6.74 for away teams, a difference that is not even statistically significant . The reason is that so many extra-base hits get away from outfielders and turn into triples; the ratio of doubles to triples is 9.0 for teams at home and 10.5 for those on the road.
That’s just a shade over half of the games, so there wasn’t a massive advantage for home squads in 2019. However, we have to caution that the sample size is only a single year. The home-field advantage could be more dramatic in some years. We have two pitchers that can handle the bat with Houston’s Zack Greinke and Washington’s Stephen Strasburg. However, since Strabsurg is set to pitch Game 2 in Houston and Greinke Game 3 in DC, the Nationals will have less of a potential advantage at home with the NL rules.
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