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Originally Posted by Malleus Dei
Eugene, consider that most real MLB teams try very hard to tailor both their style of play and their team to the properties of their home ballparks. This results in teams that perform better when playing at home than their competition does, because the away team has been designed for another ballpark. OOTP AI GM's and managers do not do this, and so OOTP AI-run teams do not tend to have better home records, home field advantage or not.
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i disagree. i think this hardly happens at all. teams may pay lip service to it, and they may sign the odd player that they think will fit their park, but mostly they just try to get the best players they can. i think the homefield advantage is due to comfort level, familiarity, and batting last. i'd guess that fitting the team to the park accounts for 5% of the HFA at most.
anyway, if Markus does want to get this correct:
homefield winning % in the post-war era is 53.9
since 1960 it's 53.8
since 1980 it's 53.8
the last 10 seasons it's 53.6
it was a little higher before WWII. so yeah, calling it 54% seems fair.
and btw, during the 1970s, the height of the cookie-cutter ballpark era, HFA was 53.7%. Since many of the parks were very similar, if teams built their rosters to fit the park wouldn't we expect HFA to drop when teams fit the visiting parks as well as their opponents do?
I believe i read some study that most of the reason for HFA is that the hometeam walks a little more and strikes out a little less. that seems consistent with what GMO linked above.
You can find all these records on baseball-reference. when i run them, it also shows the pythagorean winning % for home teams, and these are consistently less than the actual winning % (like 51-52%). i would guess this is because of home teams winning more games by 1 run than visiting teams do, due to the game ending when they get a lead in the bottom of the 9th. home teams score about 3% more runs than the visitors.