Does Home Field Advantage Really Evaporate in October?

Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images

When it comes to throwing shade in the playoffs in recent years, nothing has caught as much – not even your least favorite broadcaster – than the concept of home field advantage. The reason for the negative feelings isn’t surprising. Other than a possible first-round bye, home field advantage is the main reward for playoff teams that win more regular-season games than other playoff teams.

It’s true that home teams have struggled in recent postseasons, but they actually haven’t been too bad this year. The 19-18 record of home teams isn’t the most scintillating of tallies, but their .513 winning percentage across 37 games is not exactly a stunning departure from the .522 winning percentage for home teams during the 2024 regular season. The most games a team can possibly play in a single postseason is 22, and nine points of winning percentage works out to only 0.2 wins per 22 games.

Postseason Winning Percentage at Home, 1995-2024
Year Wins Losses Winning Percentage
2023 15 26 .366
2010 13 19 .406
1996 14 18 .438
2019 17 20 .459
1998 14 16 .467
2003 18 20 .474
2016 17 18 .486
2012 18 19 .486
1997 17 17 .500
2024 19 18 .514
2001 18 17 .514
2018 17 16 .515
2000 16 15 .516
2015 19 17 .528
2005 16 14 .533
2020 29 24 .547
2002 19 15 .559
2008 18 14 .563
2014 18 14 .563
2006 17 13 .567
2022 23 17 .575
2004 20 14 .588
2011 23 15 .605
2013 23 15 .605
2007 17 11 .607
1995 19 12 .613
2021 24 14 .632
2009 19 11 .633
1999 20 11 .645
2017 27 11 .711

Naturally, the data are noisy given the relatively small number of postseason games, even under the current format, but the recent issues with home field advantage seem to mostly be a 2023 thing, when home teams went 15-26, comfortably their worst year. Smoothing out the data a bit doesn’t really do much, either.

Postseason Winning Percentage at Home, Five-Year Periods, 1995-2024
Five-Year Period Winning Percentage
1995-1999 .532
1996-2000 .513
1997-2001 .528
1998-2002 .540
1999-2003 .538
2000-2004 .529
2001-2005 .532
2002-2006 .542
2003-2007 .550
2004-2008 .571
2005-2009 .580
2006-2010 .553
2007-2011 .563
2008-2012 .538
2009-2013 .549
2010-2014 .537
2011-2015 .558
2012-2016 .534
2013-2017 .581
2014-2018 .563
2015-2019 .542
2016-2020 .546
2017-2021 .573
2018-2022 .547
2019-2023 .517
2020-2024 .526

You can always find an oddity if you shave data paper-thin like prosciutto, but with data as volatile as this, you’ll mostly end up with bleeps and bloops that don’t really mean anything. Like, sure, teams are 29-31 since 1995 at home in Game 7s and Game 5s, but that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS home teams going 4-12 in their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 one more time, I went back and looked at the projections, both from ZiPS and regular-season record or Pythagorean record. Using each team’s actual 2023 record, the average home team in the playoffs had a .562 regular-season winning percentage; it was .551 for the road teams. It’s a .564/.553 split using the Pythagorean records. But I still have all the projected matchups and rosters at the start of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the results of every actual game that was played. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game basis, with home field advantage completely removed from the equation, the road teams were actually slightly stronger, projecting the average home team at .545 and the average road team at .556. Facing off against each other, ZiPS expected home teams to have a .489 record in the 31 actual playoff games, with an 8% chance of going 15-26 or worse.

Looking at the Wild Card era as a whole, home teams have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs games. In the regular season over the same era, home teams have a .537 winning percentage. In other words, the playoffs just aren’t that different from the regular season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff winning percentage for the home team in a game of exactly equal teams.) So why does it feel so bad? I suspect one reason can be found in the charts above. Home teams had a pretty good run in the mid-2010s, on the heels of the expansion from eight to 10 playoff teams, peaking at a .581 winning percentage from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the feeling that home field advantage is working as intended, and the five-year runs stayed slightly above the historical trend until the 2023 home field crash.

Since that crash feels especially bad, it’s natural that people search for deeper meaning in data that don’t really have a lot to give. One common cry was blaming the long layoffs from the bye round. This argument doesn’t hold up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It also doesn’t have much to do with modern baseball or modern players, either. Home field advantage has been relatively stable in the regular season throughout baseball history.

Regular Season Winning Percentage by Decade
Decade Winning Percentage
1900s .551
1910s .540
1920s .543
1930s .553
1940s .544
1950s .539
1960s .540
1970s .538
1980s .541
1990s .535
2000s .542
2010s .535
2020s .531

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

The larger problem is simply that fundamentally, home field advantage just isn’t a big deal in baseball. It’s not as big a deal in other sports as some think, but unlike in the other major sports, the difference in baseball between a great team, a good team, a lousy team, and the Chicago White Sox is not that large. Other sports don’t need home field advantage to be as much of a differentiator, especially in the playoffs. A few years back, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances rate of the NBA playoffs, MLB teams would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I certainly love me some baseball, but I can’t imagine I’d still watch World Series Game 63 with the same intensity as I do every Fall Classic game now. Besides, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make that a practical impossibility anyway.

Even giving the team with more wins home field advantage in every single game doesn’t drastically weight the dice. Assuming a .535 home winning percentage and evenly matched teams, the home team would require a best-of-13 series to become a 60/40 favorite; to increase its odds to 2-to-1, we’d have to make it a best-of-39 series. Just to experiment, I simulated series with the normal postseason distribution of home field advantage (one extra game) between two teams, the one in which the home team is .020 wins better than its opponent (just over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for how often the better team would be expected to win, based on series length.

Playoff Simulation, Better Team’s Series Win Probability
Series Length (Maximum Games) Win Probability
3 54.7%
5 55.1%
7 55.5%
9 55.9%
11 56.3%
13 56.6%
15 57.0%
17 57.3%
19 57.7%
21 58.0%
23 58.3%
25 58.6%
27 58.8%
29 59.1%
31 59.4%
33 59.6%
35 59.9%
37 60.1%
39 60.4%
41 60.6%
43 60.8%
45 61.0%
47 61.3%
49 61.5%
51 61.7%
53 61.9%
55 62.1%
57 62.3%
59 62.5%
61 62.7%
63 62.8%
65 63.0%
67 63.2%
69 63.4%
71 63.6%
73 63.7%
75 63.9%
77 64.1%
79 64.2%
81 64.4%

So what does this all mean? In all likelihood, home field advantage in the playoffs hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. And isn’t really all that big of a deal in the first place. Without altering the very nature of the postseason significantly — aggressive changes such as requiring the lower-seeded team sweep in the Wild Card series to advance — baseball has a very limited ability to reward individual playoff teams based on their regular-season results. Home field advantage isn’t broken; it’s working in the extremely limited way that one should expect. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series this year, it probably won’t be because they were rewarded one more possible home game.





Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.

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4min33Member since 2017
1 month ago

In the immortal words of Billy Beane, the playoffs ARE a crapshoot.