Quote:
Originally Posted by mbcrowder
That's just wrong. Baseball absolutely has the BIGGEST home team advantage (especially when played on a neutral court). Crowd likely means the same thing to every sport, so take that away. Each sport has MINOR differences for the home team (football excepted), baseball/softball has the greatest difference, in that your scoring opportunity always comes last.
Why does that matter? Because in late inning situations, you know exactly how many runs you need to win. In a tie game in the last (or extra) innings, the visitor has to make a strategic decision about whether to go for a big inning or sacrifice an out to get across a run... the home team KNOWS how many runs it needs, and can avoid that choice. They would not sacrifice if they needed 2 runs and only had 1 person on. Ditto stolen base decisions, etc.
In bigger baseball without DH, the pitcher also gets to go another inning than he would if he was visitor, all other things being equal, before being pinch hit for.
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The biggest advantage in all of sports? MLB used to alternate the home field games every other year and now they use the All-Star Game as the standard for who gets the home field. I have not seen any games in history be that greatly affected by who the home team is in such a way that it was a guarantee that the winner at home would win. It is certainly not even close to what you see in the NBA for example or even in the NFL where the team with the home field often goes to the Super Bowl in the Conference Championship.
It is one thing to have the last at bat, but if you score enough runs you are going to win the game regardless of what your opponent actually does anyway. And it has been proven in post seasons in the pros and even college tournaments that the team that hosts is not always the winner or the team that necessarily has a distinct advantage if they are the listed home team on the game. And then when we take this down to the youth level, this means even less. Just because a team knows they have to score a run or two to continue the game, certainly does not mean they will accomplish that feat. And it does not mean it is common that they do either. I know with our HS post season it is not unusual to see the top seed (who gets the home position) often has lost. In my state they seed teams by Sectionals and if a team wins the Sectional they go onto something called the Super Sectional which is one game to determine who is going on the State Finals (Semifinal level for the title). I have umpired many of the games in the Regionals and Sectionals where the home team lost the game in a big way. And if we went to the bottom of the last inning, they certainly did not miraculously win the game because they knew how many runs they had to score. And at the youth level if you just have the better pitching or the better defense, then none of that usually is going to matter.
It is one thing to say what you know you have to do; it is another to accomplish what you know you have to do. And with youth ball that "knowing" often puts more presser on the team to do something and when they cannot do anything the kids often panic and do not come through.
Peace