What is the advantage of playing at home in other sports? Briefly, hockey allows the home team the last change before the drop of the puck allowing the home team to match lines. The home team also places their stick down last before a face-off allowing the home team centre to judge how the visiting team player is going to play the face-off. The home team also gets to see the visiting team’s lineup before declaring their lineup.
Baseball gets last at bat.
What of basketball, football, rugby, and soccer? I don’t think crowds influence a game to any quantifiable degree so, other than the gate money being generated, where, if they exist, are the advantages.
Just because the influence isn’t quantifiable doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. A huge arena or stadium packed with fans cheering you on is a tremendous psychological advantage to a player or team. Conversely, a player trying to concentrate on making a free throw in basketball, or a field goal in football can be intimidated by fans from the other team trying to break his concentration.
Don’t think that since you can’t put a numeric value on crowd influence that it doesn’t play a big part in the game.
Also forgot to mention before I posted, that each playing venue has its own unique features, even though they try hard to make everything uniform. A team that practices on their home field gets to know and take advantage of these little “variations” that the opponents may not know about. Overall, though, I think the cheering crowd is the biggest home field advantage.
Perhaps. But as someone who has played competitive hockey and in some hostile buildings, I have found that it was easy to get up for a game when you knew the crowd was into it, regardless of who they were cheering for. It made it that much sweeter when they would boo us or just shut up altogether.
FBG covered my response quite well. Baseball parks are all different, and knowing the ground-rules by heart helps. If you practice playing balls off the Green Monster all the time, you are more likely to do it right when it counts.
In hockey, the home team also gets the last line change after a stoppage of play. Thus, if there’s a face-off, the visitors can put whoever they want on the ice, but they must remain there until the puck is dropped. The home team, however, can make a change in reaction to the visitors’, as long as they don’t take too long doing it.
It’s a small advantage, but it can make a difference if you can always put on the ice the best players to counter your opponent’s moves.
Hows about some hard figures? In the English Premiership this year, there’s been a total so far of 139 home wins and 85 away wins. So yes, there’s a huge advantage. 50,000 people telling you you’re shit can’t be good for any team’s concentration.
This is what happens when there are no Stanley Cup playoffs. Usually there are a rash of articles about home ice disadvantage this time of year based on research done at the University of New Brunswick.
A statistical analysis of playoff hockey during the 80s indicates that the home team loses more often than not-- They crack under the pressure.
Is the research valid? I earned $300 two years ago by consistently betting against home teams in a Stanley Cup pool.
Interestingly, home field advantage, as quantified by the proportion of games won by the home team, varies considerably between different sports. I’m not going to try to look up exact figures, but for baseball it is around 53-55% (home teams win about 55% of all games), for football and hockey it is around 60%, and for basketball it approaches 70%.
This has always seemed odd to me, because you would suppose that baseball would have the biggest home advantage. Every ball park is different, and one would suppose that this would give the home team a chance to learn its idiosyncracies much better than the visitors. Also, it is possible to build a team tailored to the characteristics of the parks, for example hitter’s vs. pitcher’s parks. or grass vs turf.
In contrast, the fields/rinks/courts of the other sports are virtually identical (although of course there will be a few minor differences), minimizing home advantage.
One possible explanation for this is that baseball depends much more on concentration and timing (for both hitters and pitchers) than it does on maximizing physical effort. Having a cheering crowd behind you may encourage you to greater exertion when you are running down the field or court, but it isn’t going to help you much (and can be a detriment) if what you need to do is focus. Another factor may be the closeness of the audience: in basketball the crowd is right on top of the players, in baseball they are quite distant, possibly affecting how much cheering can influence performance.
That could be chalked up to teams psyching themselves out. Like I said, I know many players enjoy a loud crowd, whether they on our side or not.
So in response to my question, other sports have no rules that offer an advantage to the home side?
The idea could perhaps be tested. For example, in basketball one could compare home/away percentages for making free throws, which depends mainly on concentration, versus statistics on rebounding, which probably depends more on exertion and adrenalin. I would predict that there would be a much lower home advantage for making free throws.
In (american) football sometimes the quaterback wants to change the play after the players are lined up and must yell out the new play to the players. When the visiting team is on offense the fans make a lot of noise making it difficult or impossible, of course the more imprtant the play the louder the fans get. When the home team is on offense the crowd is quite. You often here the commentators mention this.
I would think being used to the playing surface would be some advantage.
How much of an advantage would altitude be? UNM, for example, has these big signs on the gates leading onto the football field about potential altitude sickness (not too big a deal when playing other teams in the MWC, though.) It seems to me that this would be more prevalent in football, hockey, basketball, and the like where there is generally constant movement than for a game like baseball.
Home team gets to sleep in their own beds, away players sleep in a hotel. I have to believe that makes a difference.
Note that the court is not the only thing that affects one’s ability to play the game. When teams in any sport come to Denver, they’re gasping for air after a few minutes of play. After 3/4 of a game, they’re whoofed.
In baseball while it is advantage to bat last, a game theorist I know (and I actually know one, played baseball at Caltech and all that) believes that the team that bats first enjoys certain strategic advantages because it can dictate what it wants to. If the home team falls behind after the first inning, certain strategies (such as bunting and stealing) are forestalled.
At one point it was suggested that this factor explained why the Denver Broncos kept getting thrashed in three Superbowls between 1987 and 1990. The Broncos supposedly had an advantage against their opponents when playing at home, since they were acclimated to the altitude and their opponents weren’t. Therefore they were able to win their conference consistently and go to the Superbowl. But this advantage evaporated once they had to play at sea level in the Superbowl, showing the Broncos to be the mediocre team they actually were. (Of course, this doesn’t explain why Buffalo managed to lose the following four Superbowls.)
