Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Home Field Advantage

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

In almost all sports, people will refer to what is known as having a home-field advantage. Home-field advantage is a simple concept. It implies that teams playing in their home stadium, arena, or field have a slight advantage over the visiting team. But is home-field advantage a real thing? And if it is, what are the reasons for it, and which teams and which leagues have the largest home-field advantages? Learn more about home-field advantage and if it is, in fact, a real thing on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to Butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily at checkout to get $30 off your first box! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In almost all team sports, people will refer to what is known as having a home field advantage. Home field advantage is a simple concept. It implies that teams playing in their home stadium, arena, or field have a slight advantage over the visiting team. But is home field advantage and if it is, what are the reasons for it and which teams and which leagues have the largest home field advantages? Learn more about home field advantage, and if it is in fact a thing, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time

to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I might as well cut right to the chase, home field advantage is a real thing. In fact, it's pretty easy to verify. All you have to do is look at the winning percentage for home teams versus away teams.

However, to make sense of this, you can't just look at a single team and a single season. A team might be really good or really bad. A bad team is going to lose at home and on the road, and likewise, a good team will win on the road and at home. To truly figure out if home field advantage is real, you need to look across all teams in a given season, or even multiple seasons. For any sports league, the league-wide winning percentage will always be 500, even if the league has ties. The only way to avoid this would be if there were double wins or double losses.

Home field advantage has been observed at every level of competition in almost every sport. The only difference is the degree to which home teams have an advantage. Let's start with baseball simply because we have such a large dataset. Ever since 1901, every team has played a season with either 154 or 162 games, save for strike seasons or seasons shortened by the pandemic. If we go all the way back to 1869, the start of professional baseball, there have been over 220,000 games played. During that time, with that large of a dataset, the home team won approximately 55% of all games.

In the NFL, the home field advantage is usually between 55 to 60% each season. Given the smaller number of games played every year, there's more variation in the winning percentage. The NBA, which plays more games in the NFL but less than baseball, has a steady home winning percentage of about 60%. In the National Hockey League, the home winning percentage is about 55%. The American Professional Soccer League, Major League Soccer, or MLS, has a home field winning percentage of 69%. percent if you assume ties are half wins and half losses. This isn't just a phenomenon of North American professional sports. In Division I men's college basketball, the home winning percentage varies from 67 to 69 percent in most years. In international cricket, the home

winning percentage is approximately 60 percent. In Rugby reunion, it's around 58 percent. In Japanese professional baseball, it's one of the lowest at just 53 percent. In the 2022-2020 season, in the English Premier League, using the same metric as with Major League soccer, the home winning percentage was 60%. So the effect is real, and every student of the sport knows this to be true. The big question is why? As easy as it is to verify the existence of home field advantages, coming up with a root cause is much more difficult. Without any knowledge or data, you could probably come up with some hypotheses as to why this is the case. One of the first of the one of the of the popular reasons it's often given is that visiting teams are at a disadvantage when they

have to travel. Traveling can be exhausting. They're in a place that they may not be familiar with, they may be tired from traveling, and possibly even suffering jet lag. For international competitions, there might be the issue of being in a different culture and eating different foods. Home teams get to sleep in their own bed and get to keep their normal routines. One of the problems with this theory is that home field advantage holds even for teams that play in the same city, or don't have to travel very far. There have been cases where there are two teams from the same city who play each other, and despite removing travel from the equation, home-feel advantage still holds.

I should note that while traveling doesn't appear to be the reason for home-field advantage, it very well might be a contributing factor, especially when teams travel long distances. The second obvious explanation would be that the actual playing fields are different. This is peculiar to each sport. In some sports, there is little to no variation in the size of the court or the field. Soccer pitches can have some variation in field size, but other parts of the field are consistent. NFL fields and NBA courts have the exact same dimensions.

NHL and international hockey rings vary slightly, but are not significantly different. So it's hard to use the field itself as the explanation for the large imbalances and winning percentages. However, there are sports where the field can make a big difference. Baseball fields famously have identical infields, but can have vastly different outfields. One of the craziest baseball stadiums ever built was the Polo Grounds in New York City. The Polo Grounds was the home in the early 20th century to both the New York Giants and the New York Yankees. The Polo Grounds had an outfield wall in dead center field of 483 feet. That is monstrous by today's standards.

Most stadiums have their deepest point in center field at 400. feet or less. The outfield was shaped like a rectangle with the corners a still impressive 450 feet. However, the foul pole in the right field corner was only 258 feet. Depending on where you hit the ball, it was either really easy or almost impossible to hit a home run. Fenway Park in Boston has its green monster, which is a close wall at 310 feet, but it's 37 feet high. Riggily Field in Chicago has an outfield wall made of solid. a brick that's covered in ivy. Cricket likewise has ovals that can differ greatly in size.

A four or a six in one stadium might not be in another. In baseball, football, and soccer, there are also differences in surfaces. Some fields have natural grass and some have artificial turf. Artificial turf is considered to be faster than natural grass. Weather and climate are also factors that can come into play. Cold weather teams that play outdoors are often thought to have an advantage over warm weather teams who visit and are not used to the cold. The NFC North is considered to have the teams who play in the coldest climate in the NFL,

but with the Chicago Bear's recent announcement of a new stadium, three of the four teams in the division will now play indoors, leaving only the Green Bay Packers to play outside. The Packers have used their unique playing conditions to garden a home-winning percentage of over 70% over the last 10 years. From 2013 to 2022, the Packers had the largest difference in winning percentage. between home and away games. And now that the Bears will have an indoor stadium, all of their fans will be able to watch them lose in comfort. Another very special case is that of Denver. Denver is known as the Mile High City because it's located at an altitude of 5,280 feet

above sea level. Nothing is even close to Denver in terms of altitude for other American cities with major sports teams. The altitude can affect visiting athletes' performance in several ways, particularly through reduced oxygen levels which can lead to quicker fatigue and slower recovery times. Also, thin air reduces air resistance, allowing baseballs and footballs to travel further than at lower altitudes. This phenomenon significantly increases the number of home runs hit at Coors Field. To counteract this, the Colorado Rockies have used a humidore since 2002 to store baseballs in a moisture-controlled environment, somewhat mitigating but not eliminating the altitude's effect on the game. The Rockies are the only team that's allowed to do this.

Also, not surprisingly, Denver was the location of both the longest punt and the longest field goal in NFL history. Other cities such as Mexico City and Kito have altitudes much higher than Denver, which make playing there very difficult for visiting teams. And of course, there's also the noise factor. Stadiums tend to focus noise, and they can get very loud. In the NFL, this can make things very difficult on opposing teams. teams who have to communicate on the field. Lumen Field, where the Seattle Seahawks play, is considered to be the loudest stadium in the world. It's listed in the Guinness Book of World's Records as the loudest, with a volume of 137.6

decibels, which was measured in 2014. Despite these massive differences in altitude, climate, and fields, many people who have studied the matter do not think that any of these are the major reasons for the discrepancy in home-winning percentages. The one factor that has data to support it affecting winning percentages is crowds. And it isn't for the reason you might think. If you ask most athletes, they'll tell you that it means a lot to have their fans cheering for them, which is probably a contributing factor.

In some stadiums like in Seattle, the sheer volume can be an issue. However, one factor which has been measured and found over and over again in different sports are the calls made by referees and umpires. even though it's not intentional. Officials have a bias in favor of the home team. When a batter has a full count in baseball, a pitcher from the home team is more likely to have a pitch called a strike than one from the opposing team.

Over in the NHL, the home team gets 20% fewer penalties called against them, which results in about a quarter of a goal per game. In the NBA, traveling is less likely to be called against the home team, and fouls are more likely to be called against. against the visiting team. This results in 0.8 more free throws or 0.6 points per game for the home team. How do we know that this bias is due to the fans and not something else? It's mainly because we've been able to test it. In European soccer, referees call more fouls against visiting teams. However, that number drops when teams played in a stadium with a track around the outside,

which puts more distance between the officials and the fans. The NFL offered a grand experiment in 2020 during the pandemic when games were played without fans. For the only time in NFL history, the visiting teams won more games than they lost. Granted, it was only one more game, but the season with no crowds did correspond to the only season where the home team did not have an advantage.

There's one other element of home field advantage that I should bring up because as of the time I'm recording in this, it's something that's in the news, the Olympics. Every Olympics, there's a curious thing that happens. The host country almost always wins far more medals than they did in the previous Olympics. In the last 75 years, there have only been two Olympics where the host country did not win more medals than in the previous Olympics, Finland in 1952 and the United States in 1996. And in both of those cases, it was only a very slight decrease, whereas the increase in the metal count is usually quite large.

The usual explanation given for this is similar to why teams tend to win at home. Most people think it's due to the crowds and the lack of travel. However, that is not the real reason. The real reason why host countries do so well is because they're allowed to bring more athletes than they otherwise would. They simply have more people competing, which gives them more. chances to win medals. If you normalize medals on a per athlete basis, then the host country advantage totally disappears. It either stays the same or actually decreases a tiny bit.

One thing I'll close with is that across the board, home field advantage seems to be decreasing over time. It's still there, but it appears to be going down. Again, no one is quite sure why, or if the trend will continue, or if it will become more pronounced in certain leagues. In 2019, for example, the World Series went to a full seven games, and for the first time in history, the visiting team won every game. Home field advantage is a real thing, and it's important enough that teams often fight for it to have an advantage in the playoffs. In sports that determine champions in a single game,

it'll often be played at a neutral site for this very reason. So, if you ever get to choose between playing at home or on the road, your choice is easy. Always play at home. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the completionist club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.