Much has been made of “home field advantage” in baseball – in particular, does playing at home vs away significantly affect a team’s outcome? Just how much impact does it have on a series’ outcome? What is home field advantage made of, anyway? Our favorite statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight once compiled a post about the disappearing effects of home field advantage for soccer in England, but what about the national pastime here in the USA? Buoyed by the Cubs’ recent success and egged-on by the MLB’s questionable interesting policy of awarding home-field advantage to the winner of the All-Star Game, we decided to see just what effect playing at home vs away has.
We went back 145 years and crunched the numbers from 210,719 baseball games to find out just what impact playing at home vs away has had over the past century-and-a-half of baseball… and then took it a step further with a look at some numbers on home field advantage by both team and park.