Home field advantage

[Dr. dru]

When there are more people in the stands does this give you more of a home field advantage or help with rallys?

It seems like if you have a full stadium it should help your team. Is there any homefield advantage in the game? If not will it be added to OTTP 12?

[Curtis]

Homefield advantage IS in the game. It is not based on attendance.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Dr. dru

It seems like if you have a full stadium it should help your team.

I'm not aware of any studies that indicate the degree of attendance has any effect on how often clubs win at home. The fact is even the worst clubs will usually win more games at home than they win on the road.

[The Wolf]

LGO beat me to it. Attendance has no correlation with winning. Playing at home, even before empty seats, does.

[Kiko1313]

There was an interesting article in Sports Illustrated recently about home field advantage. It's not online, but the following link gives a bit of a summary of the article:

Sports Law Blog

For the most part they found that home field advantage was due to referee/umpire bias (unintentional) due to psychological effect. From the above website, the following was mentioned about soccer games played without spectators:

"The psychological effect is more pronounced in well-attended games (according to the story, in 2007, the Italian government ordered teams with deficient security to play games without spectators; 21 games were played in empty stadiums and a study by two economists found dramatic decreases in home-team benefits in fouls, yellow cards, and red cards)."

[RchW]

The book is Scorecasting by Wertheim and Moskowitz.

I had forgotten the title until I saw Wertheim's name.

Amazon.com: Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won (9780307591791): Tobias J. Moskowitz, L. Jon Wertheim: Books

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

Attendance has no correlation with winning.

Well, probably not in the sense that a club will win more often in front of a big crowd. There certainly is a correlation between how often a club wins and how many fans will turn up as a result.

[tigey75]

I would imagine there's at least a small home field advantage IRL, just based on OF's familiarity with the wall bounces i.e. Fenway.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Well, probably not in the sense that a club will win more often in front of a big crowd. There certainly is a correlation between how often a club wins and how many fans will turn up as a result.

Precisely.

[Curtis]

Originally Posted by tigey75

I would imagine there's at least a small home field advantage IRL, just based on OF's familiarity with the wall bounces i.e. Fenway.

Remember the saying that the groundskeeper is the team's tenth man.
If the visitors rely on the stolen base, and the home team doesn't steal much, water around the bases.
If the home team bunts a lot, angle the dirt along the infield foul lines to keep the ball in play.
If the home team doesn't like to bunt, angle the dirt to encourage foul balls.
If the home team has a lot of groundball pitchers, leave the infield grass longer to give the infielders more time to get to the ball.
Mostly flyball pitchers? Mow it short so your grounders scoot through for hits.

[tigey75]

Originally Posted by Curtis

Remember the saying that the groundskeeper is the team's tenth man.
If the visitors rely on the stolen base, and the home team doesn't steal much, water around the bases.
If the home team bunts a lot, angle the dirt along the infield foul lines to keep the ball in play.
If the home team doesn't like to bunt, angle the dirt to encourage foul balls.
If the home team has a lot of groundball pitchers, leave the infield grass longer to give the infielders more time to get to the ball.
Mostly flyball pitchers? Mow it short so your grounders scoot through for hits.

And there's always the Yankee approach of building stadiums with little league dimensions for their lefty power hitters.

[Henry]

What is "Home Field Advantage" comes up from time to time and I always wonder why no one points to the fact that last at bat mathematically gives you the advantage. Although each team gets 9 innings, there is no visiting team "answer" to a lead run scored in the bottom of the last inning, 9th or otherwise.

If two exact same teams played 100 games with one always being visitors and the other always home, the home team will win more often as a result of the last at bat.

[Dregen]

That is a very good point, but I do think the "atmosphere" of a home park has to go into it slightly. Not much but slightly...

Kind of like how a good catcher can help out a pitcher by calling a good game. How much? Not sure.

[The Wolf]

Here's an interesting study on the components of home field advantage.

The Baseball Analysts: A Study in Home Field Advantage - Will the New Stadiums Be Friendly to NY Teams?

[Kiko1313]

Originally Posted by Henry

What is "Home Field Advantage" comes up from time to time and I always wonder why no one points to the fact that last at bat mathematically gives you the advantage. Although each team gets 9 innings, there is no visiting team "answer" to a lead run scored in the bottom of the last inning, 9th or otherwise.

If two exact same teams played 100 games with one always being visitors and the other always home, the home team will win more often as a result of the last at bat.

I always thought this too, but I found an interesting thought from this article:

http://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/245.../05-03.pdf.txt

"This supposed advantage, however, ignores that the team in the defensive position in the bottom half of the inning has the ability to implement defensive strategies based on what they did offensively in the top of the inning, which could cancel out any offensive advantage Courneya and Carron, 1990). Further, it could be that the strategies implemented by the last-batting team do not, in fact, improve the hances of winning, despite beliefs to the contrary. Many of these so-called small all strategies, such as the sacrifice bunt and the stolen base, have been found to be relatively ineffective in leading to more runs being scored, despite their popularity (see, for example, Bennett, 1998, and the references therein)."

It's a pretty long article so I didn't read the whole thing yet, but at a glance it looks like they conclude that the advantage of batting last is minimal.

[DrArbiter]

Originally Posted by Kiko1313

I always thought this too, but I found an interesting thought from this article:

http://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/245.../05-03.pdf.txt

For a complementary theoretical analysis:

"In Search of the "Last-Ups" Advantage in Baseball" by Theodore L. Turocy

Turocy, Theodore L. (2008) "In Search of the "Last-Ups" Advantage in Baseball: A Game-Theoretic Approach," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Vol. 4 : Iss. 2, Article 5.
DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1104


The references in the two papers cited above cover most of the literature on the topic: Summary: people have looked for more than 20 years for a "last ups" advantage, but nobody has ever found evidence it exists. The "standard" argument for it (cited already in this thread) does pass even simple game-theoretic scrutiny -- it assumes that the defense is entirely passive in the game of baseball, which is patently false.

Absence of evidence is of course not necessarily evidence of absence; however, one would think, if it were so obvious that batting last were an advantage, that the data would show this. It doesn't.

It's more or less a settled question that the order the teams bat in doesn't matter very much; if anything, it's plausible to me that it's better to bat first than last, though by at most a minuscule amount.

[Henry]

Originally Posted by DrArbiter

..it assumes that the defense is entirely passive in the game of baseball, which is patently false.

But the issue isn't about defense, it is about the go ahead run in the bottom of the ninth ending the game. If the rules of baseball said the team behind ALWAYS gets one more chance to at least tie the score and keep the game going, then there would be no home field advantage - but as long as the lead run in the bottom of the 9th or later for the home team ends the game - that is an advantage.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Henry

But the issue isn't about defense, it is about the go ahead run in the bottom of the ninth ending the game.

And how many games are won by the home club in the bottom of the ninth inning?

[The Wolf]

I don't see how it isn't fair. Both teams get until 27 outs (yes, the home club may only need 24) to score runs. Either one team scores more runs than the other and wins, or they score equal number of runs and then go to extra innings.

Where is the unfairness in this? Enlighten me, please.

[DrArbiter]

Originally Posted by Henry

But the issue isn't about defense, it is about the go ahead run in the bottom of the ninth ending the game. If the rules of baseball said the team behind ALWAYS gets one more chance to at least tie the score and keep the game going, then there would be no home field advantage - but as long as the lead run in the bottom of the 9th or later for the home team ends the game - that is an advantage.

But you've just repeated the fallacious argument I cited, which threatens to turn the discussion into a Monty Python skit.

Since I'm one of the authors in the literature cited, my standard response is, "read the papers and see why your argument is wrong." Here's the executive summary: The correct argument is not based on whether you have the last chance to score, it's whether you have the "last chance" to *take action*. Actions which prevent runs are equally as important as actions that score runs in winning a game.

Two key observations:
(1) At the middle of the 9th inning, the visiting team will have had three more outs with which to score runs; therefore, it is more likely, other things being equal, they have the lead. It is equally valid (and crucial) to point out that the visiting team, when they have the lead in the bottom of the 9th, knows that all they have to do is to keep the home team from scoring the required number of runs.

(2) In the bottom of the 9th inning of a tie game, it is true that one run wins the game with certainty. However, in the top of the 9th, one run wins the game with very high probability. Suppose in some situation in the bottom of the 9th you think bunting is a good idea. Then, it turns out, it is almost always also a good idea in the top of the 9th in the same situation. It's a well-documented phenomenon that people psychologically overweight certainty events versus ones which are just very likely, which is probably part of the fallacy.

I'm interested in educating on the correct way to think about this problem (but read the papers, most of them are quite accessible), but I regret I won't have further interest in responding to messages which unthinkingly parrot the same incorrect arguments.