I started this little excursion to try and figure out why baseball has such a small home field advantage. I had a theory that I could explain it through baseball’s differential travel behavior. That hypothesis failed pretty miserably. But I think I learned a fair bit nonetheless, and I’ll take a few paragraphs to sum it up.

1. The home field advantage is…

Continue readingHow Big Is Home Field Advantage? Part 5: Summing Up (by JonathanF)

Note from Alex: The previous piece in this series, Part 3, was pre-empted by rumors about the Upton trade within hours of publication. I’m linking to it here, so that you can go back and read it.

I started this series proposing that baseball should have a higher home field advantage than other sports because it has an…

Continue readingHow Big Is Home Field Advantage? Part 4: Batting Last (by JonathanF)

So… if travel doesn’t seem to do much, what about teams? Once we go to teams, we can no longer just look at home and road winning percentages, since those will depend greatly on how good the team was. Instead, we now switch to home-road splits: winning percentage at home minus winning percentage on the road. Franchise-by-franchise since 1966 (now including 2012) here are the…

Continue readingHow Big Is Home Field Advantage? Part Three (by JonathanF)

So what does the home field advantage in baseball look like? In my database of almost exactly 200,000 baseball games which didn’t end in ties, the home team won 54.7 percent. But road teams did really badly in the early days of baseball. Before 1900, the home team won 59.1 percent. Post WWII, only one year had an advantage over 57 percent: 1978.…

Continue readingHow Big Is Home Field Advantage? Part Two (by JonathanF)

Alex has asked me to do something that scares me a little bit. So I’m going to try it. I am troubled by the size of the home field advantage in baseball — it seems way too small. So I’m going to do a study, but Alex wants me to do it in public at Braves Journal, so I’ll give it a try. Let this…

Continue readingHow Big is Home Field Advantage? Intro (by JonathanF)