Tournament seed question (home vs. visitor)

[MD Longhorn]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

But even if they had a home field advantage, baseball is one of the few sports where none of this matters, even with the last at bat. It just means you bat last, it does not mean you get an advantage from being the home team.

Peace

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.