Does Home Field Matter In The Playoffs?

For the teams that have already clinched playoff spots, what’s the most important thing they can do in the last few days of the regular season? Get rested and healthy, sure. Try to line up their pitching rotations if they can, definitely. If they’ve already punched their tickets to the playoffs, then they’ve earned the right to manage their teams with more than the final meaningless regular-season games in mind.

But what about getting home-field advantage? Shouldn’t a team that knows it’s headed to October do everything it can to play as many games at home as possible, in front of its screaming fans, without having to fly, potentially across the country? Getting the best record in the league not only ensures you face the wild-card team, but it gets you home-field advantage throughout the league playoffs. Getting the second-best record at least gets you the advantage over the third-best division winner in the Division Series, plus a chance to play at home in the Championship Series if the wild card pulls a first-round upset.

Objectively, that makes sense, and every team wants it. But is it really worth keeping the pedal to the metal after a playoff spot has been clinched? The numbers say, maybe not that much.

From 2000 through this season, regular-season baseball games have been won by the home team 54.1 percent of the time. In some seasons that percentage is a little higher (55.9 percent in 2010) and sometimes it’s lower (52.7 percent this year), but the range there is small, and it has stayed relatively constant through history. For example, in 1984, the home team won 52.9 percent of games; in 1954, it was 53.1 percent; in 1924, it was 53.8 percent.

Bottom line: We can say that in the regular season, home teams win on average 54 percent of the time, and that’s convenient, because that holds up almost exactly in the playoffs. Since 2000, home teams have won 255 of 466 playoff games, a 54.7 percent winning percentage. If we want to push that back to the last 30 years, predating the wild-card era, home teams have won 429 of 783 games … also a 54.7 percent winning percentage. Though the playoff sample size is smaller than the regular-season number of games, the fact that the two numbers come out nearly identical gives us confidence that they’re providing an accurate viewpoint.

There’s no shortage of theories as to why players and teams are better at home. Players will tell you they like not having to travel and get energized by the home fans, which are intangible reasons that are impossible to rule out but also difficult to measure. A recent New York Times article indicated that umpires, if even only subconsciously, tend to give more calls to the home team. There’s also the behavior of the managers themselves, especially in extra innings, where a majority of skippers endlessly — and infuriatingly — refuse to use the closer, ostensibly the bullpen’s best pitcher, in a tie game on the road. Far too often, lesser pitchers lose the game while the closer waits for the save situation that never comes, a situation that isn’t in play for the home team when a walk-off scenario is in effect.

What this means is that in both the regular season and the playoffs, there’s a small yet discernible advantage for the home team. Depending on your perspective, you could come away from that with multiple outlooks. You could say there’s no additional benefit to having home-field advantage in the playoffs, because the numbers show that it’s not any more helpful than it was in the regular season. Conversely, you could say that since there is a small advantage, it’s absolutely worth going for. So which is it?

Let’s look at this a different way, because so far we’ve been taking a look at all playoff games. Two interesting ways to investigate this are to ask if home-field advantage matters in one-game, winner-take-all matches, of which there will be at least two each year given the current wild-card format. Secondly, does a team that gets home-field throughout the playoffs — the “best” team in the league, as it were — often get to the World Series?

On the winner-take-all games, that has happened 38 times since the wild card was added in 1995, including three times last season, and the home team won 20 times (52.6 percent of the time). This fits right into our expected range. Again, though, the team with the home-field advantage in a deciding game should be the better team, because it had earned that right. To say that home teams win because they’re at home is an oversimplification.

How about teams with home-field advantage getting to the World Series? In theory, this should happen a lot, because these teams not only get to stay home, but they proved over six months of the season that they were the league’s best. This actually happened twice last year, as Boston and St. Louis were the league’s best and faced off in the World Series, but since the wild card came into play in 1995, it has happened less than you’d think. Of the 38 teams to make the World Series, 13 were top seeds, or 34.2 percent.

That means that having home-field doesn’t guarantee you anything, and it gets to the greater point, which is that in the world of expanded playoffs, October is no longer about the “best” teams making it to the World Series. It’s closer to a coin flip, because anything can — and does — happen in a short series, with injuries, hot streaks and bullpen performance often carrying more weight than game venue.

So postseason home-field advantage matters maybe a little, but not as much as you’d think. It matters less if a series doesn’t go long enough for a home team to get that extra game. It matters less if you remember that the team with home-field advantage also earned that right by being, at least by number of wins, better on any field. And it especially matters less when you remember how many other things, several with greater importance, can affect a small number of games.

After all, in a short October series, anything can happen. Joe Saunders‘ Orioles can march into Texas and beat Yu Darvish and the team with the second-most home wins in baseball, which actually happened in 2012. Home-field advantage in the playoffs matters a little. Player performance, a bit of luck and many other variables matter a whole lot more.