Does Dwelling Discipline Benefit Actually Evaporate in October?

On the subject of throwing shade within the playoffs in recent times, nothing has caught as a lot – not even your least favourite broadcaster – than the idea of dwelling area benefit. The rationale for the destructive emotions isn’t stunning. Aside from a attainable first-round bye, dwelling area benefit is the principle reward for playoff groups that win extra regular-season video games than different playoff groups.

It’s true that dwelling groups have struggled in current postseasons, however they really haven’t been too dangerous this yr. The 19-18 document of dwelling groups isn’t essentially the most scintillating of tallies, however their .513 successful proportion throughout 37 video games will not be precisely a surprising departure from the .522 successful proportion for dwelling groups in the course of the 2024 common season. Probably the most video games a staff can probably play in a single postseason is 22, and 9 factors of successful proportion works out to solely 0.2 wins per 22 video games.

Naturally, the info are noisy given the comparatively small variety of postseason video games, even underneath the present format, however the current points with dwelling area benefit appear to principally be a 2023 factor, when dwelling groups went 15-26, comfortably their worst yr. Smoothing out the info a bit doesn’t actually do a lot, both.

You possibly can all the time discover an oddity if you happen to shave knowledge paper-thin like prosciutto, however with knowledge as risky as this, you’ll principally find yourself with bleeps and bloops that don’t actually imply something. Like, positive, groups are 29-31 since 1995 at dwelling in Recreation 7s and Recreation 5s, however that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS dwelling groups going 4-12 of their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 yet another time, I went again and regarded on the projections, each from ZiPS and regular-season document or Pythagorean document. Utilizing every staff’s precise 2023 document, the common dwelling staff within the playoffs had a .562 regular-season successful proportion; it was .551 for the highway groups. It’s a .564/.553 break up utilizing the Pythagorean data. However I nonetheless have all of the projected matchups and rosters firstly of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the outcomes of each precise recreation that was performed. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game foundation, with dwelling area benefit utterly faraway from the equation, the highway groups had been really barely stronger, projecting the common dwelling staff at .545 and the common highway staff at .556. Dealing with off in opposition to one another, ZiPS anticipated dwelling groups to have a .489 document within the 31 precise playoff video games, with an 8% likelihood of going 15-26 or worse.

Trying on the Wild Card period as a complete, dwelling groups have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs video games. Within the common season over the identical period, dwelling groups have a .537 successful proportion. In different phrases, the playoffs simply aren’t that completely different from the common season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff successful proportion for the house staff in a recreation of precisely equal groups.) So why does it really feel so dangerous? I believe one cause will be discovered within the charts above. Dwelling groups had a fairly good run within the mid-2010s, on the heels of the enlargement from eight to 10 playoff groups, peaking at a .581 successful proportion from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the sensation that dwelling area benefit is working as meant, and the five-year runs stayed barely above the historic pattern till the 2023 dwelling area crash.

Since that crash feels particularly dangerous, it’s pure that individuals seek for deeper which means in knowledge that don’t actually have loads to present. One widespread cry was blaming the lengthy layoffs from the bye spherical. This argument doesn’t maintain up, as Ben Clemens identified final postseason.

It additionally doesn’t have a lot to do with trendy baseball or trendy gamers, both. Dwelling area benefit has been comparatively steady within the common season all through baseball historical past.

There’s been some long-term decline, however nothing earth-shattering.

The bigger drawback is solely that basically, dwelling area benefit simply isn’t an enormous deal in baseball. It’s not as large a deal in different sports activities as some assume, however in contrast to within the different main sports activities, the distinction in baseball between an ideal staff, a superb staff, a awful staff, and the Chicago White Sox will not be that giant. Different sports activities don’t want dwelling area benefit to be as a lot of a differentiator, particularly within the playoffs. Just a few years again, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances fee of the NBA playoffs, MLB groups would wish to play best-of-75 playoff sequence. I actually love me some baseball, however I can’t think about I’d nonetheless watch World Collection Recreation 63 with the identical depth as I do each Fall Traditional recreation now. In addition to, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make {that a} sensible impossibility anyway.

Even giving the staff with extra wins dwelling area benefit in each single recreation doesn’t drastically weight the cube. Assuming a .535 dwelling successful proportion and evenly matched groups, the house staff would require a best-of-13 sequence to turn into a 60/40 favourite; to extend its odds to 2-to-1, we’d need to make it a best-of-39 sequence. Simply to experiment, I simulated sequence with the traditional postseason distribution of dwelling area benefit (one further recreation) between two groups, the one through which the house staff is .020 wins higher than its opponent (simply over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for the way typically the higher staff can be anticipated to win, primarily based on sequence size.

So what does this all imply? In all probability, dwelling area benefit within the playoffs hasn’t modified in any significant method. And isn’t actually all that large of a deal within the first place. With out altering the very nature of the postseason considerably — aggressive adjustments akin to requiring the lower-seeded staff sweep within the Wild Card sequence to advance — baseball has a really restricted capability to reward particular person playoff groups primarily based on their regular-season outcomes. Dwelling area benefit isn’t damaged; it’s working within the extraordinarily restricted method that one ought to count on. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees within the World Collection this yr, it most likely gained’t be as a result of they had been rewarded yet another attainable dwelling recreation.