So I have like ten articles half-written, and I can’t finish anything.   Literally ten articles, now that I count them; I had promised to write ten pieces for BJOL by the end of July, and by coincidence I have ten pieces here half-written.    Let me choose the simplest and least complicated of them, and actually finish it.

            Does the performance of a team on a home stand or a road trip vary with the length of the home stand or road trip?   Does a team that has a nine-game road trip tend to play worse, on the ninth game of that road trip, than they did in the first game?   If so, how much worse?

            I took all games in the major leagues in the years 2000 to 2009, and identified each by its position on a home stand or road trip—H1 is the first game of a homestand, R4 is the fourth game of a road trip, etc.    This is the performance of all teams during the decade in the first games of home stands:

            Whereas this is the performance of all teams in the seventh games of home stands:

            There is little difference.   The data shows little reason to believe that the home field advantage is meaningfully different late in a home stand, versus early in the home stand:

            Apart from the interesting spike upward on the second day of the home stand, about which we’ll say more later, there is little reason to believe that teams get better or worse as home stands extend.   The home field advantage is what it is.

            Whereas there does appear to be some reason to believe that road trips are. . .well, roadier. . .as the trip lengthens:

            The winning percentage of teams in the first four games of a road trip is .463.  The winning percentage of teams which have been on the road more than four games is .451.   It’s not a huge difference, but there are more than 10,000 games in each group, so it could be statistically significant; I don’t know.   I could figure it, but I’m having a hard enough time finishing articles without that.

            OK, I figured it.  It’s not statistically significant.   A difference of that magnitude could result from chance.  How do we resolve this?

            Let’s do another decade.   In the 1990s, the winning percentage of teams in the first four games of a road trip was .467.  After the first four games, it was .463.

            In the 1980s, it was .460 for the first four games of a road trip, and .460 after the first four games of a road trip. 

            I give up.  There’s nothing much going on there.  You can believe what you want to believe, but there is no clear proof, within this data, that the road team performs worse as the trip wears on.  It would have been a cool thing to demonstrate, because suppose the data showed that teams played .490 baseball in the first few games of a road trip, but .440 late in the road trip, whereas the “home stand” data was flat.   Then we could argue that the data showed that the real difference wasn’t being at home, it was being on the road, and then we could say “It’s not a home field advantage; it’s a road team disadvantage.”

            I decided to say that anyway; the data doesn’t support the conclusion, but I still like the concept.   Also, it would be a cool thing to know because, since nobody else would know it, you could probably make money betting against teams that were late in a long road trip. . .I couldn’t; I’d get fired.   But maybe you could.

            The data above shows that teams play poorly in the second game of a road trip, which makes intuitive sense, as that’s the day that Jet Lag kicks in.   Unfortunately, the 1980s/1990s data doesn’t support that, either; in the 1980s, teams had a .443 winning percentage in the first games of road trips, but .463 in the second games.   Same thing with the home-field percentage spiking upward in the second game.  In both the 1980s and 1990s, teams played less well in the second games of home stands than in the first.   It was just a random anomaly.

            Oh well.   At least we know. 

            Nine articles to go.