Watch out, though, because the Nationals now have the “Road Team Advantage”. LOL
I Googled but couldn’t find an answer. Have the road teams ever won all 7 world series games?
I complain about it a lot because living here is mostly a drag, but every now and then it has its moments. That was one of them.
Good job, everyone who went to the game.
Nope.
I went through the list of WS and, unless I missed something, the answer is no.
The Oakland A’s won 3 away games and one home game to beat the Cincinnatti Reds in 1972.
No, and in fact we have tied the record. The 1996 World Series went the same way up to this point; the Braves won the first two games in New York, and then the Yankees won three straight in Atlanta, but the streak was broken when the Yankees won at home in Game Six.
The home team also lost the first five games of the 1906 all-Chicago World Series, though the format was different; they alternated every game as to who was home. They did have different home ballparks.
In the 2010 ALDS-1, between the Rangers and Rays, the home team lost every game, Texas winning 3-2. That is the only complete series in which the home team never won.
Incidentally, the home plate umpiring was terrible. Robot balls and strikes, please. It’s long overdue. Let the games be decided by the players.
I never thought I’d agree with this, but yes.
Never. This year’s series is only the 3rd time the road team has won the first 5 games, with the other two examples given above.
The road team has also never won the first 6 games in the WS, much less 7.
This. The performances of the homeplate umps has been pretty bad throughout this postseason. Maybe it’s always been thus, and the zone box on the screen just makes it apparent now how bad a lot of these guys are at their jobs?
We’ve the tech now to do the job better, seamlessly, and so we should.
So 538 is now giving the Astros an 80 percent chance of winning - which is exactly what it gave the Nationals when they were up 2-0. Verlander is 0-2 so far this postseason while trying to close out a series, so who knows? Still some baseball to be played.
So, we have a shot at history! Since I neither like nor dislike either team, I find that prospect much more exciting than the outcome of the series itself.
It has. The WS overall seems about average, though Game 5 was egregious.
Mostly, players are ok with an imperfect strike zone as long as there’s consistency and it’s called the same for both sides. It’s usually the lack of consistency that riles them up (like Game 5). At the very least, it doesn’t seem like any of these games have been decided through officiating errors, though they probably did affect the scores.
Some umps are worse than others, too, and the tech backs up a few the fans know are not good. cough Joe West cough
It’s always been like this and might once have been worse. The Eric Gregg game was 22 years ago, after all.
In other news…two women who flashed Gerrit Cole from the seats behind home plate in the seventh inning last night have been banned indefinitely from MLB games.
https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/10/28/mlb-bans-women-for-flashing-astros-gerrit-cole
Ban last nights starting home plate umpire indefinitely and let the two topless woman take turns calling tomorrows game. Bad calls are alot worse than breasts. And it would help jumpstart the ratings.
It would have been far more appropriate if their seats were across from second base to the mound.
[Moderating]
It seems to have passed naturally, but in the future, let’s please keep the politics out of this forum.
In all seriousness, good. If you’re going to be an asshole, take a hike. Ballparks should enforce rules about appropriate behaviour.
Umpire accuracy degrades with age. But even the best umpires are still wrong 7% of the time today with an average blown call percentage over 9%.
Umpires used to be really bad until electronic umpiring technology. Now all umpires, even the worst pones are more accurate than they used to be. The average blown call percentage used to be 16%.
The error rate was even more disturbing when the umpire was of a different race than the pitcher.