Answer for home-field dominance?

Saturday, May 31, 2008 | Feedback | Print Entry

We don't think of baseball as a sport with a significant home-field advantage, in the way we view the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. But what we are seeing in 2008 are home teams winning in a way that they haven't won in more than three-quarters of a century.

Only six teams among 30 have winning records in games played on the road this season, and the only team with a road record more than two games over .500 is the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. This is what Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau wrote in an e-mail about this season's numbers:
In recent years, baseball's home-team winning percentage has been very consistent: In each of the past 15 years, it was never lower than .516 and never as high as .550. The past four years were .535, .537, .546 and .542.

But this year, through games of May 29, home teams have a combined .577 winning percentage. The last major-league season in which the home-team winning percentage finished that high was 1931 (when it was .582). Since then, the HTWP has finished as high as .570 only once (.573 in 1978).
We're a third of the way through the season, so the sample size for 2008 is pretty robust. Is this just a fluke, a statistical aberration? Is there some sort of trend in play here? What is happening?  
 

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  • Buster Olney Buster Olney

    Buster Olney is a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine. He began covering baseball in 1989, as the Nashville Banner's beat reporter assigned to the Triple-A Nashville Sounds. Later, he covered the San Diego Padres (1993-94), the Baltimore Orioles ('95-96), the New York Mets ('97) and the Yankees ('98-2001). Olney joined ESPN The Magazine in 2003, after six years at The New York Times, and he's the author of the Times' best-seller "The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty," a book about the Paul O'Neill-Tino Martinez Yankees dynasty of 1996-01.

    He grew up in central Vermont collecting baseball cards and listening to Red Sox, Expos, Phillies and Pirates radio broadcasts, and was a rabid fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He graduated from Vanderbilt University the same year as hoops legend Will Perdue, and ranks among the all-time leading scorers in pickup basketball at Memorial Gym. He claims to have witnessed the Commodores' winning football season in 1982 (although anthropologists have not yet confirmed this).

    Olney also contributes to ESPN.com, ESPN Radio, ESPNEWS, "SportsCenter" and "Baseball Tonight."

    Follow Buster on Twitter: @Buster_ESPN

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