I was just reading last night, in fact, of the legendary Parquet Floor used at the Boston Garden from 1952 to 1995 (and the Fleet Center from 1995 to 1999. It had a multitude of dead spots and warped boards that were a definite advantage to those who knew of them—dare I say the home team, the Celtics, in most cases.
There are also myriad cases of so-called “groundskeeping” done in order to give the home team an advantage, on the order of sloping a baseline so balls would roll inside fair territory in at least one instance.
Curiously, though, I believe that it’s in fashion now (and has been for some time) in the NFL for teams to stay at a local hotel the night before home games, too. I think the idea here is to isolate the players from the pressures & distractions of their homes, or something like that. Makes evening meetings the night before the game much more convenient, and to an extent makes sure the players are in bed at a reasonable hour.
I just did a quick search and found a few references to this practice on the web:[ul][li]This article, from 1999, describes how the Kansas City Chiefs would be adopting the hotel-before-home-games practice for the first time.[]This 2003 article speaks of it as standard practice for the Cincinnati Bengals.[]This article speaks of the practice and suggests that it’s very widespread.[/ul][/li]
This seems more practical in the NFL, where they only play one game per week, than it would be in the NBA or NHL. If a Major League Baseball team tried this, the players would only be sleeping at home once every two or three weeks.
Well, it’s long been noted that NFL teams who play their home games in domed stadiums rarely do well in the playoffs (the St. Louis Rams are the only such team to go all the way).
That’s partly because, in a dome, the “weather” conditions are always perfect. There’s never rain, there’s never a wet, sloppy field, it’s never cold… so dome teams often set up pass-happy offenses, offenses that work brilliantly in a dome, but which can falter terribly when played in December or January under harsh conditions.
Ask the Indianapolis Colts if they like the idea of playing the AFC finals again in New England in the mud next year, or if they’d rather play indoors. Or ask Warren Moon why he put up such huge numbers with the run-and-shoot in the Astrodome, but couldn’t duplicate them outdoors at Denver and Buffalo.
I remember reading an article (a good 20 years ago) that talked about this. No groundskeepers would openly admit it, but it seemed to be common knowledge that it went on.
Got slow infielders? Let that infield grass grow really long. If your infield is lightning quick, cut the infield grass like it was a putting green.
I’d also heard of the slight slope on the baselines bit: Would you prefer that dribbling bunts stay fair or roll foul? Take your pick, according to your team’s relative strengths and weaknesses.
Before a playoff game against the dome-optimized Indianapolis Colts this past January, the New England Patriots left the tarp off the field at Gillette Stadium for as long as NFL rules would allow during the week before the game. They were accused of trying to create a muddy field, on the theory that it would hurt the Colts’ precision game more than their own. Patriots coach Bill Belichick didn’t really admit to anything, claiming that “My job is not to pull weeds, or rake the field.”
The Patriots did win, but how much was the field and how much was Peyton Manning’s inability to win important games will probably be argued for years.
I can buy the fact that the length of the grass in the infield can have an outcome of a ballgame in that it can speed up or slow down grounders.
But tilting the dirt is very unlikely to make a difference even in an era with a lot of bunting. There just aren’t that many plays that can be affected in that way. It might help a team on one play out of thousands in a season.
In 1962, the year that Maury Wills stole 104 bases for the Dodgers, the Giants wanted to slow down the basepaths to keep Wills from getting good jumps when he stole. So they tried putting sand in the basepaths. But the umpires wouldn’t allow it. So instead the Giants groundskeeper turned on a hose to water down the infield dirt. (This is normal) But the groundskeepers essentially flooded the field. So the umpires had to allow the Giants to put sand on the field to soak up the water.
Because of this Dodgers announcer referred to Giants manager Alvin Dark as “The Swamp Fox.”
For all the differences between baseball stadiums, as BobT points out, it simply doesn’t come up very often. The number of times that a play occurs that’s affected in an unusual fashion by a unique park feature AND baffles a visiting fielder is, well, miniscule. I’ve been watching baseball all my life and can’t remember any examples I’ve ever seen, ever. The only time I ever saw a really bad bounce at Fenway Park cost someone a game, it cost the RED SOX the game.
Consider, however, that the sport with the most dramatic home field advantage is basketball, where there is no difference in the dimensions of the playing areas. The basketball home field (court) advantage is just colossal. It is by far the single most important determinant of what team will win any given game.
It seems to me that the only explanation of the basketball home court advantage can be the home fans.
The home court advantage in basketball probably won’t show up in free throw shooting. I have a feeling that percentage will be fairly constant. But I would think field goal percentage would drop. The players are going to be in an unfamiliar environment and that could affect their shooting.
The home crowd is also likely to influence the officials to call more fouls on the visitors.
No cite, but I have read about studies showing that crowd noise affected soccer referees’ foul calls (referees watching a play on videotape would call more fouls against the visiting team when the sound was on).
For football, I imagine that the difference between grass and astroturf is as important as wind/rain in a dome vs open stadium. Testing that would be a pretty easy research project, I would think.
(I believe the Chicago (Reader) Opalcats are undefeated at home)
For the basketball advantage, I assume that’s for the regular NBA season, or regular season plus playoffs?
I wonder if the long, and therefore often not very intense, regular season in the NBA contributes. Almost nobody goes 100% for the whole season, so they may be particularly susceptible to picking it up when there’s a cheering crowd and dogging it on the road. As opposed to NFL players, who make the most out of every one of their 16 games.
Home fans may affect referees. Note that the above stats roughly correlate to how many calls are made during a game. Ignoring strike/ball, baseball has relatively few times per game where a ref’s call matters. Football and hockey more so, basketball more than any.
Australian Rules Football (which is derived from cricket, and commonly played on cricket ovals) is played on ovals of varying size and shape. Some teams can take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of their home ground; e.g. by kicking to all available space if it’s a particularly large oval.
In cricket itself, the varying size of ovals may not help the home team, but they can create a home advantage by preparing a wicket which suits their dominant bowling style (example).
I think that a bigger factor is that there’s a lot more variance in baseball than in most sports. If a baseball team wins two out of three games over the course of a season, that’s considered amazing, but strong football and basketball teams can go undefeated, and routinely win 90% or more of their games. If the advantage for being best in the league is only 65% or so, suddenly a 55% home field advantage looks huge.
By “more variance” do you mean that winning is more due to chance factors? (Because there is less variance between the season records of baseball teams than in football and basketball.)
This could be a factor. Scoring in baseball, except for solo home runs, mostly depends on the accumulation of a series of events, each of low probability on its own, and each subject to a lot of random error. Therefore the “better” team in terms of skill can often lose due to what is basically bad luck.
Remember when the monuments in Yankee Stadium were in deep CF?
How many centerfielders - rookies and otherwise - do you figure botched up plays on balls hit to that area?
For the young…
These monuments were like three tombstones, erected side by side in dead centerfield, .to honor Ruth, Gehrig and Huggins. Dimaggio and Mantle played the field quite deftly despite them. But you can bet your bottom dollar it gave lesser outfielders — visiting players, particularly — big problems.
Perhaps, But the immediate issue is to field the ball, as noted in this excerpt
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Stadium
In the 1992 book The Gospel According to Casey, by Ira Berkow and Jim Kaplan, it is reported that the Yankees manager, Casey Stengel, was watching his centerfielder fumbling with the ball in the vicinity of the monuments, while the batter-runner circled the bases. Stengel yelled out, “Ruth, Gehrig, Huggins, somebody get that ball back to the infield!”
Your statement applies to football, but not basketball. They play 82 games per season in basketball, and a winning percentage of more than 75% is extremely rare.
Aside from any of that or even hotels, I imagine a lot of people are simply more confortable when they know they’re at home. It can make a big different in performance as to whether of not someone has no other owrries or cares, and being far away from home might well seem strange, at least for the newer players.
Another eyebrow-raiser involving the Patriots: the December of ‘82 “Snowplow Incident,” in which an inmate on weekend furlough drove a snowplow to clear a strip for the benefit of the Pats’ placekicker, after Miami had just failed to make a field goal with no such groundskeeping service. Pats won, 3-0, squeaking into the playoffs, only to be trounced by the Dolphins in the Orange Bowl, 28-13. Payback’s a bitch…
In a hot, humid clime, sitting your opponents in the hot, sunny side of a stadium can also be a substantial home field advantage, as in the aforementioned Orange Bowl, where the opponents get the courtesy of the naturally well-lit sideline. Be sure to turn around every twenty minutes, guys – you wouldn’t want to be sunburned unevenly!
