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The New Home Field Advantage Rules Stink as Bad as the Old Ones

Something stinks about the new CBA.

By John EdwardsPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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Arturo Pardavila III/Flickr

Thanks to years of complaints by fans and media alike, for the first time since 2002, home-field advantage for the World Series was determined not by the All-Star game results, but instead by regular season record. I'm sure everyone out there who lobbied for this change is patting themselves on the back for getting a change that, in their minds, fixed the All-Star game. I'm hesitant about the new CBA, however, because I fear that in fixing the All-Star game, the MLB broke the World Series.

The All-Star Game, despite a recent stretch of American League dominance, has been about a coin-flip — both the AL and NL have each won 43 games exactly (with two ties). While the AL has won 23 of the last 30 games, the NL has had their own stretches of dominance, winning 19 of 20 from 1963-1980. Streaks aside, both teams have roughly even odds of winning, and thus, equal odds of getting home-field advantage.

Royals fans ballot stuffing to put really terrible players onto rosters aside, the All-Star game deciding home field advantage wasn't too far off the mark from how arbitrary advantages are given out in sports. It's the equivalent to the coin flip before a football game, but it takes place a couple month earlier, and players can actually help determine the outcome of that coin flip. But it also took what should have been a fun celebration of the sport and turned it into something that took itself too seriously, and the current iteration of the ASG works damn well on its own.

The old system wasn't great because it ruined the All-Star Game itself, but it at least gave teams a roughly 50/50 chance of getting home-field advantage. Under the new system, we've suddenly tipped the scales: strength-of-schedule is the new decider for home-field advantage, rather than pure chance.

Take the 2017 Dodgers for instance. I refuse to contest that the Dodgers are the best team in baseball — in fact, I picked them to win it all before the postseason began (my postseason bracket would have been perfect if not for the Damn Yankees!). But the Dodgers have not exactly had the toughest road to the playoffs — per ESPN, the Dodgers had the 26th easiest schedule in baseball.

While the Rockies and Diamondbacks were both playoff contenders this season, at the bottom of the NL West were two exceptionally awful teams, the Giants and Padres. The Dodgers lost the season series to both the Rockies and Diamondbacks but feasted upon the weaker teams in their division, which helped give them an edge in the NL West in their overall record.

Compared to the Astros, the Dodgers had a much easier schedule, yet only finished three games ahead of the Astros in terms of overall record. Since the Dodgers were lucky enough to be scheduled to play 23 percent of their total schedule against the two of the worst teams in the NL, they have a significant advantage for the World-Series over the Astros.

How significant is this advantage? We can actually quantify the home field advantage by looking at historical data.

Using Baseball Reference's play index, we can see that in the regular season, teams have held a significant advantage from playing at home. Since 1950, the home team has won 53.9 percent of the time at home. That can turn an 81-81 team into an 87-75 team!

But the playoffs are a different environment — more fans, a rabid atmosphere, etc. There exists an even bigger advantage for home teams during the postseason.

There's a lot of variances owing to the fact that the playoffs present a smaller sample size than the regular season, but since 1950, the home team has won a playoff game 55.7 percent of the time (81-81 team becomes a 90-72 team!). If teams were to play only six games, there'd be no problem, since both teams receive equal opportunities to play with the home-field advantage. But since teams play an odd number of games at most during the playoffs, one team can play one more game at home than they will on the road — hence where the home field advantage comes into play.

Walking into game seven with 12 percent better odds than the other team is huge. Imagine running a 100-meter dash against someone else, but instead of running from the starting line, you are placed six meters ahead of the starting line, and your opponent is placed six meters behind the starting line. It is not impossible for your opponent to win, but it makes things easier for you.

And game seven is a fairly often occurrence — of the 108 World Series that have been played in the best-of-seven format, 38 of them have gone to seven games. To give a team a substantial advantage that's largely dependent on strength of schedule seems unfair to the teams that have been forced to claw their way to the top in a tougher division than those that are surrounded by rebuilding teams.

If the MLB wants to ensure fairness in the playoffs, the fair, better way to go about assigning home field advantage is by using a literal coin flip. Exactly the way football does it. If both teams have an equal chance of being given the home-field advantage, both teams essentially have the same advantage going into the World Series. Best of all, strength of schedule is removed completely from the equation.

The new CBA rules fixed the All-Star game — but I fear that they broke the World Series. Maybe we'll see it fixed when the current CBA expires in 2021, but it might take longer than that for the MLB to realize the flaws in its current system. Until they do, watch this space...

(Stats and data via ESPN, Baseball Reference, and Wikipedia)

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About the Creator

John Edwards

Staff Writer for The Unbalanced, Contributor at Sporting News.

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