Playoff Home Field Advantage

[grmagne]

Originally Posted by termcl

My take on all this? Hockey gets it right with it's 2-2-1-1-1 format. That's the thing that bugs me the most about baseball playoffs. In game 5, the team without home field advantage has more home games than the team with the advantage. How is that fair? If you steal one game as the visitor in game 1 or 2, then you are cruising with 3 games in a row at your home park. The team with "home field advantage" has to hope there's a game 6 to play in front of their fans.

If the series goes the full 7 games then the home field advantage is a real factor. If it ends 4-1 then it didn't really matter who had the home field advantage. The extra home game for the underdog doesn't bother me too much in that case.


I understand why the NHL does it that way, but I would prefer to have the players get more rest days then fly back-and-forth 4 times for a 7 game series.

[Matt Arnold]

Yeah, the NHL has a day off between games all year, so whether it's a travel day or not doesn't really matter. Sure, if you have CHC-CLE then they could keep travelling back and forth without off-days, but if it happened to be San Diego vs Boston in the World Series, you can't have teams finish the game late night in San Diego, take a red eye flight to Boston, and play the next game the next day. So because you don't have the off-days in baseball to play with, 2-3-2 is a fine compromise.

[bwburke94]

Random thought: Did the original poster have playoff re-seeding enabled? I ran into the same issue in my Portland Beavers game.