Does Home Field Advantage Really Evaporate in October?

On the subject of throwing shade within the playoffs in recent times, nothing has caught as a lot – not even your least favourite broadcaster – than the idea of dwelling discipline benefit. The explanation for the detrimental emotions isn’t stunning. Apart from a doable first-round bye, dwelling discipline benefit is the principle reward for playoff groups that win extra regular-season video games than different playoff groups.

It’s true that dwelling groups have struggled in latest postseasons, however they really haven’t been too unhealthy this 12 months. The 19-18 file of dwelling groups isn’t probably the most scintillating of tallies, however their .513 profitable proportion throughout 37 video games will not be precisely a surprising departure from the .522 profitable proportion for dwelling groups through the 2024 common season. Probably the most video games a staff can probably play in a single postseason is 22, and 9 factors of profitable proportion works out to solely 0.2 wins per 22 video games.

Naturally, the info are noisy given the comparatively small variety of postseason video games, even beneath the present format, however the latest points with dwelling discipline benefit appear to largely be a 2023 factor, when dwelling groups went 15-26, comfortably their worst 12 months. Smoothing out the info a bit doesn’t actually do a lot, both.

You possibly can all the time discover an oddity when you shave information paper-thin like prosciutto, however with information as unstable as this, you’ll largely find yourself with bleeps and bloops that don’t actually imply something. Like, positive, groups are 29-31 since 1995 at dwelling in Sport 7s and Sport 5s, however that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS dwelling groups going 4-12 of their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 yet another time, I went again and regarded on the projections, each from ZiPS and regular-season file or Pythagorean file. Utilizing every staff’s precise 2023 file, the typical dwelling staff within the playoffs had a .562 regular-season profitable proportion; it was .551 for the highway groups. It’s a .564/.553 cut up utilizing the Pythagorean information. However I nonetheless have all of the projected matchups and rosters at first of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the outcomes of each precise recreation that was performed. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game foundation, with dwelling discipline benefit fully faraway from the equation, the highway groups had been really barely stronger, projecting the typical dwelling staff at .545 and the typical highway staff at .556. Dealing with off towards one another, ZiPS anticipated dwelling groups to have a .489 file within the 31 precise playoff video games, with an 8% likelihood of going 15-26 or worse.

Trying on the Wild Card period as an entire, dwelling groups have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs video games. Within the common season over the identical period, dwelling groups have a .537 profitable proportion. In different phrases, the playoffs simply aren’t that completely different from the common season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff profitable proportion for the house staff in a recreation of precisely equal groups.) So why does it really feel so unhealthy? I think one purpose will be discovered within the charts above. House groups had a fairly good run within the mid-2010s, on the heels of the growth from eight to 10 playoff groups, peaking at a .581 profitable proportion from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the sensation that dwelling discipline benefit is working as supposed, and the five-year runs stayed barely above the historic development till the 2023 dwelling discipline crash.

Since that crash feels particularly unhealthy, it’s pure that folks seek for deeper which means in information that don’t actually have lots to offer. One frequent cry was blaming the lengthy layoffs from the bye spherical. This argument doesn’t maintain up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It additionally doesn’t have a lot to do with fashionable baseball or fashionable gamers, both. House discipline benefit has been comparatively secure within the common season all through baseball historical past.

There’s been some long-term decline, however nothing earth-shattering.

The bigger drawback is just that basically, dwelling discipline benefit simply isn’t an enormous deal in baseball. It’s not as massive a deal in different sports activities as some suppose, however not like within the different main sports activities, the distinction in baseball between a terrific staff, a superb staff, a awful staff, and the Chicago White Sox will not be that massive. Different sports activities don’t want dwelling discipline benefit to be as a lot of a differentiator, particularly within the playoffs. A couple of years again, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances fee of the NBA playoffs, MLB groups would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I actually love me some baseball, however I can’t think about I’d nonetheless watch World Sequence Sport 63 with the identical depth as I do each Fall Traditional recreation now. In addition to, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make {that a} sensible impossibility anyway.

Even giving the staff with extra wins dwelling discipline benefit in each single recreation doesn’t drastically weight the cube. Assuming a .535 dwelling profitable proportion and evenly matched groups, the house staff would require a best-of-13 collection to turn into a 60/40 favourite; to extend its odds to 2-to-1, we’d should make it a best-of-39 collection. Simply to experiment, I simulated collection with the traditional postseason distribution of dwelling discipline benefit (one further recreation) between two groups, the one wherein the house staff is .020 wins higher than its opponent (simply over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for the way typically the higher staff could be anticipated to win, primarily based on collection size.

So what does this all imply? In all probability, dwelling discipline benefit within the playoffs hasn’t modified in any significant approach. And isn’t actually all that massive of a deal within the first place. With out altering the very nature of the postseason considerably — aggressive adjustments equivalent to requiring the lower-seeded staff sweep within the Wild Card collection to advance — baseball has a really restricted capability to reward particular person playoff groups primarily based on their regular-season outcomes. House discipline benefit isn’t damaged; it’s working within the extraordinarily restricted approach that one ought to count on. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees within the World Sequence this 12 months, it in all probability gained’t be as a result of they had been rewarded yet another doable dwelling recreation.