Dispelling the “Aura and Mystique” of Home-Field Advantage
By David Damiani

After the 2002 Major League Baseball All-Star Game fiasco, a game called with a tie score in extra innings due to an alleged absence of pitchers with fresh arms, MLB sought to make the game a more meaningful and serious affair in response to the fans and commentators who felt the premature ending cheated them. Its solution was to make home-field advantage in the World Series contingent on which league won the All-Star Game.

 

MLB succeeded on two fronts. It revitalized interest in the All-Star Game, even if much of that interest was in the form of mockery of the endlessly repeated slogan, “This time it counts.” It also cleverly selected an outcome—home-field advantage—that appears meaningful at first glance. But the concept of a true home-field advantage in playoff baseball doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of recent history.

 

Before this season, home-field advantage for the World Series shifted between the American and National League pennant winners on a rotating basis. Some recent World Series suggest that home-field advantage may have affected the outcome. Last season, the Anaheim Angels defeated the San Francisco Giants in a 4-3 series in which four games were played in Anaheim, including the last two, both won by the Angels. The year before, the Arizona Diamondbacks won a 4-3 series over the New York Yankees. Phoenix was the site of four of the games, and the home team won each game of the Series. A more notorious example from a slightly earlier era is the 1987 World Series. The Minnesota Twins, who posted the worst record of any World Series champion and who had performed dramatically better at home than on the road during the regular season, won a 4-3 series over the St. Louis Cardinals, with all four wins coming in their home park.

 

Yet home-field advantage has often proved less useful in playoff baseball. Many observers have focused on its presumed effects on the last two World Series, but the earlier rounds of the playoffs have demonstrated little or no correlation between home-field advantage and success. Most surprisingly, in 2002 none of the teams with home-field advantage for the first round of the playoffs won their respective series. Similarly, in 2000 three of the teams with home-field advantage for the first round failed to advance.

 

Someone seems to have recognized this, as MLB never took the idea of home-field advantage in the playoffs seriously in the past. Before 1998, home-field advantage rotated randomly in the division series and league championship series rather than being granted to the team with the better record (or a division champion over a wild card representative).

 

Many baseball observers recognize that in general home-field advantage has little effect in an extended series (as opposed to its effect on a single playoff game in the NFL), especially among teams balanced and focused enough to reach the postseason through a grueling regular season schedule. As usual, though, the majority of sportscasters and sportswriters pay fealty to the golden calf of their sport, the New York Yankees. ESPN’s Joe Morgan announced last year that only the Yankees have a functioning home-field advantage in the postseason. Countless others echo his thoughts amidst endless references to “mystique” and “aura.” Arizona pitcher Curt Schilling memorably dismissed the two terms in 2001, asking whether they were dancers in a New York bar.

 

Whatever mystique may accompany the storied franchise, its alleged home-field advantage is an aura sportscasters have conjured from nothing. The Yankees lost a home game in their division series this month, one to Anaheim last year, and three to Oakland in each of the previous two years. (Invariably, the Yankee home loss will elicit many stunned comments in the media that the victorious team walked “unafraid” into Yankee Stadium.)

  

Can any team, then, legitimately claim a home-field advantage in the playoffs? The only possibility appears to be the Minnesota Twins. While the Twins do not have an extensive playoff history and lost several home playoff games in 2002 and 2003, their 1987 home/road record is actually more telling than deceiving. The Twins’ home stadium, the Metrodome, features off-white ceilings that make pop flies difficult to track (a problem that befell several Oakland players in last year’s playoffs) and turf on which baseballs often travel quickly and unpredictably. Given the stadium’s distinctive features and the fact that the Twins play in that atmosphere more often than their opponents, the Metrodome provides an actual home-field advantage, regardless of what record its occupants post. Unfortunately, this year’s early playoff results suggest that we won’t hear any diatribes on the “mystique and aura” of Minneapolis anytime soon.

 

Sports aficionado David Damiani works as a tax accountant for Witt Mares Eggleston Smith in Newport News, VA.

 

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