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Originally Posted by Malleus Dei
Exactly, and those are the only stats that show any significant difference. You can pretty well attribute the K's and W's to the home team's better familiarity/comfort with that particular batting box and with the associated batting background and sun/shadow effects of the field (been there/done that/have the jersey).
But - here's the important part - there just aren't any other significant statistical differences between home and away teams, and batting last can't account for the difference. You saw all that for yourself. And the increased W's/decreased K's rate simply can't account for the W-L% difference.
You are left with the effects of sleeping at home, travel fatigue, regular/irregular eating habits, different levels of carousing, the effects of the cheers of the home crowd...and, gee, how well the team is tailored to the ballpark (and vice versa).
Again, note the results in Montoya's league. They tailored their OOTP teams to their home fields and GOT HISTORICAL HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE RATES.
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I am not sure what you mean by "significant" in the differences. It seems you mean more than half that of the BB/K numbers looking back at the numbers I showed. {EDIT - I am guessing you mean "meaningful" because I would suspsect the differences in the other stats would probably pass tests of statistical significance, if not in the sample over 2001-2003 alone, then in more complete stats I expect would show similar differences.} You say that the BB/K differences are from some sort of a comfort thing, but you dismiss that for the other stats because... the differences are smaller in those stats? Tailoring to the park gives you the differences in wins and the differences in other stats like AVG, but those statistical differences outside BB & K are not meaningful, even though you say the BB/K differences do not explain the differences in results? Why would BB/K differences be related to comfort but differences in AVG not be? I simply do not follow.
The league linked by f.montoya is nice, but the numbers are for 20 teams over about two-thirds of one season. Looking at some unique field teams, Boston & New York in the AL show no clear HFA, but LA in the NL does. Are those results of poor & smart GMs or just variations in small samples? It is hard for me to draw any sort of conclusions about the relative importance of tailoring from that little data even showing a 55.5% home team winning percentage.
Back to some previous points - How do you explain HFA in other sports, particularly those with uniform playing dimensions like basketball? By your reasoning how does HFA work for teams that play in neutral parks (and thus by extension how does that influence the teams that do)?