15 October 2015

How's That Home Field Working For You?

"There's nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a great big fight." Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, 1988

Oh, that home field advantage! It has catapulted two Wild Cards into the division series and four teams into their League Championship playoffs.

Wait, what's that? It hasn't?
  • Road warriors swept the Wild Card play-ins games.
  • Road teams have captured exactly half the Division Series wins, not counting tonight's Mets-Dodgers finale. If the home nine wins in L.A., the "advantage" will amount to 5% (a 10-9 record or .526 winning percentage), exactly as noted a fortnight ago in this space.
  • Last licks played a role in exactly none of the contests. The team ahead after eight innings won every time.
And while we're inconveniently deflating the long-held myths that have passed for conventional wisdom in baseball, let's examine the myth of the critical first game.

If the Dodgers win their tilt with the Mets tonight, the Game One victor from every series will be watching the League Championship Series on television. Oh-for-four. That's the definition of critical, all right.

Finally, there are those mental calculations people do to predict who will win a series. Specifically, let's look at the ridiculous strategy of comparing pitchers and just assigning the win to the ace.

I calculate that the eight teams in the Division Series would have considered these pitchers aces:
Jacob deGrom - Mets
Clayton Kershaw - Dodgers
Zack Greinke - Dodgers
David Price - Blue Jays
Cole Hamels - Rangers
Jake Arrieta - Cubs
Dallas Keuchel - Astros
Johnny Cueto - Royals

We're having a plumbing problem here. I'm not sure the Cardinals would consider John Lackey their ace and you could make a case for the Cubs' Jon Lester. You could certainly argue against Johnny Cueto, but he was brought to K.C. for just that purpose. So that's three Johns at issue.

Let's see how their teams fared when they pitched:
Cueto - 2-0
Price - 1-1
Keuchel - 1-1
Hamels - 1-1
Kershaw - 1-1
Greinke - 1-0
deGrom - 1-0
Arrieta - 1-0

Greinke and deGrom will split tonight's game, so that's a wash. All told, the team sending its ace to the hill went 10-5. That's superb. It's probably unusual. But in any case, it's hardly automatic. You would love 2-1 odds in your favor for the deciding game, but every third time you would lose.

These are still uselessly small samples. But the point is that when you count something as an automatic, as many people do with the #1 arm, the first game winner and the home team, and it turns out to be a 5% advantage, that's a bit of a myth-buster.

And if you know that's a small sample size, then you know enough to examine a large enough sample -- like playoff games all time. In other words, you examine the facts. And that's when you stop predicting games based on who's got the shorter commute.

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