Cubs only team without a home-field advantage:

[UK1679666180]

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/03/22/by-the-numbers-do-home-teams-have-an-advantage/

 

Is there any validity? Is it the constant day time/night time adjusting, just a fluke, or something else?

[Northside Blues]

Yes, there is validity. Things like the t-distribution aren't merely conjectures, like black holes - or even gravity, they're proven facts. Now whether or WL is normally distributed is another question, though as the number of games goes up, you can scale them to make it normal, and that's not a conjecture but a fact as well.

[UK1679666180]

Good way to provide substance, if you're not smart enough to grasp a topic then why provide nothing? If you're trying to be witty, you're failing at anything even remotely close to clever.

 

Personally, I think the Cubs have a great opportunity to take advantage of day games but fail to take that approach and would rather view having to get to the park at 9:30 as the negative.

[Sammys Boombox]

Colorado's splits are ridiculous.

 

.576 Home W%

.402 Road W%

[Soul]

"If you're a Cubs fan, cheer on but know your efforts are fruitless."

 

Sigh. We are made to suffer, apparently.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Too much math for me to know if he's right or not, but it makes intuitive sense. My pet theory is that it's hard to find players specifically tailored to Wrigley, unlike other parks.

[CubColtPacer]

Too much math for me to know if he's right or not, but it makes intuitive sense. My pet theory is that it's hard to find players specifically tailored to Wrigley, unlike other parks.

 

Yeah, that's my favorite theory as well. Wrigley plays like two entirely different parks. Sometimes you need a fly ball pitcher and other times you need a strikeout/groundout type pitcher. Sometimes you need a lineup loaded with power hitters and other times you have to play more to contact. There's very little way for the Cubs to build a team that will dominate at home. I'm not sure there's another ballpark in baseball where that is true.

[MWV]

Yes, there is validity. Things like the t-distribution aren't merely conjectures, like black holes - or even gravity, they're proven facts. Now whether or WL is normally distributed is another question, though as the number of games goes up, you can scale them to make it normal, and that's not a conjecture but a fact as well.

I don't mean to go off topic, but just because general relativity and quantum field theory have yet to be unified doesn't mean that the the universal law of gravitation is suddenly a "conjecture" that is less "valid" than the notion home-field advantage. Back on topic, I agree with you regarding the question of whether WL is a normal distribution, though.

[Northside Blues]

gravity can never be fully proven. It will always be a conjecture. it's not based on axioms like probability theory is (now whether or not you believe in the axiom of choice is something else entirely). There's always a chance, albeit a very very small chance, that gravity doesn't exist and that what we perceive to be gravity is quite different. It won't be the first time a change like that would happen, I mean old civilizations were certain the earth was flat after all. That chance doesn't exist for probability theory.

[Guest]

Too much math for me to know if he's right or not, but it makes intuitive sense. My pet theory is that it's hard to find players specifically tailored to Wrigley, unlike other parks.

 

 

What you need is good players. then they are good everyday, everywhere. If you look at the Rockies, they are not successful when they dominate at home - they are successful when they are good everywhere. not really rocket-science but I dispute that building a team to dominate at home is a good strategy.

[MWV]

gravity can never be fully proven. It will always be a conjecture. it's not based on axioms like probability theory is (now whether or not you believe in the axiom of choice is something else entirely). There's always a chance, albeit a very very small chance, that gravity doesn't exist and that what we perceive to be gravity is quite different. It won't be the first time a change like that would happen, I mean old civilizations were certain the earth was flat after all. That chance doesn't exist for probability theory.

 

By that criterium, would not all empirical science be conjecture? If so, I think we simply use the word "conjecture" differently.

In any case, I digress. I blame the shifting winds off the lake.

[UK1679666180]

Too much math for me to know if he's right or not, but it makes intuitive sense. My pet theory is that it's hard to find players specifically tailored to Wrigley, unlike other parks.

 

 

What you need is good players. then they are good everyday, everywhere. If you look at the Rockies, they are not successful when they dominate at home - they are successful when they are good everywhere. not really rocket-science but I dispute that building a team to dominate at home is a good strategy.

 

That's a given but only a handful of teams are going to be good year in and year out and definitely doesn't include the Cubs.

 

I do agree with other posters that it does play like two separate parks at times, although over the course of a year, it usually evens out.

 

If I'm the Padres, I'm going after more flyball pitchers and take my chances with other pitcher parks while knowing there's a good chance of getting rocked at Coors, AZ, etc. Although, someone like Lowe or Webb will do just as well with their sinker.

 

Offensively, I don't think it matters as much as the same qualities that make a flyball hitter like Dunn effective, would still translate well.

 

I do think talent trumps all, though.

[Northside Blues]

gravity can never be fully proven. It will always be a conjecture. it's not based on axioms like probability theory is (now whether or not you believe in the axiom of choice is something else entirely). There's always a chance, albeit a very very small chance, that gravity doesn't exist and that what we perceive to be gravity is quite different. It won't be the first time a change like that would happen, I mean old civilizations were certain the earth was flat after all. That chance doesn't exist for probability theory.

 

By that criterium, would not all empirical science be conjecture? If so, I think we simply use the word "conjecture" differently.

In any case, I digress. I blame the shifting winds off the lake.

 

It is. I guess the word "conjecture" might be too strong, but now we're arguing pointless semantics. Not that we had an argument of any substance before. Blaming shifting winds off the lake is one thing, but it's hard to believe that there are no shifting winds in other ballparks. Later today, if I have a chance, I will look into this.

 

Honestly, it's probably not one thing. It's probably a combination of wind, day/night games, and other things. One would wonder if the effect existed if they restricted the data to pre WWII when most games were not played under the lights.

[CoolHandLuke]

gravity can never be fully proven. It will always be a conjecture. it's not based on axioms like probability theory is (now whether or not you believe in the axiom of choice is something else entirely). There's always a chance, albeit a very very small chance, that gravity doesn't exist and that what we perceive to be gravity is quite different. It won't be the first time a change like that would happen, I mean old civilizations were certain the earth was flat after all. That chance doesn't exist for probability theory.

 

By that criterium, would not all empirical science be conjecture? If so, I think we simply use the word "conjecture" differently.

In any case, I digress. I blame the shifting winds off the lake.

 

It is. I guess the word "conjecture" might be too strong, but now we're arguing pointless semantics. Not that we had an argument of any substance before. Blaming shifting winds off the lake is one thing, but it's hard to believe that there are no shifting winds in other ballparks. Later today, if I have a chance, I will look into this.

 

Honestly, it's probably not one thing. It's probably a combination of wind, day/night games, and other things. One would wonder if the effect existed if they restricted the data to pre WWII when most games were not played under the lights.

 

I don't know much about statistics, but since all of the other teams do show a home field advantage by these numbers, couldn't the data for the Cubs just be an outlier, that has no other cause than randomness?

 

I guess what I'm wondering is, does this study attempt to answer "does team X have a home field advantage", in which case it seems like there may not be a large enough sample size, or is it trying to find out whether or not a home field advantage exists period, in which case, the Cubs data point might just be a random outlier.

 

My gut feeling is that if you are trying to determine if a specific park gives a team a home field advantage you need more data than 11 seasons provides. But I don't know anything.

[KingCubsFan]

I wonder how much of it has to do with Hendry's inability to have a consistent philosophy on how to build a team. Since we build most teams off of last year's World Series winner, seems like some teams play to Wrigley's strengths, while others don't.

[Northside Blues]

I don't know much about statistics, but since all of the other teams do show a home field advantage by these numbers, couldn't the data for the Cubs just be an outlier, that has no other cause than randomness?

 

I guess what I'm wondering is, does this study attempt to answer "does team X have a home field advantage", in which case it seems like there may not be a large enough sample size, or is it trying to find out whether or not a home field advantage exists period, in which case, the Cubs data point might just be a random outlier.

 

My gut feeling is that if you are trying to determine if a specific park gives a team a home field advantage you need more data than 11 seasons provides. But I don't know anything.

 

Considering that we only need a little over 1000 polled people (randomly) to be able to give us a 95% chance to gauge the votes of over 100,000,000 voters to within 3%, then yes, 11 seasons (roughly 900 games) is enough of a sample.

 

An explanation of what's actually going on in statistics:

 

The way he was doing this basically said this question*:

 

Let's assume that there's no HFA. What is the probability that a team without HFA did that well at home. For instance, let's say the Cubs are a .500 level team. What's the likelihood that they played .550 ball at home. IE if you flip a coin 81 times in a season. What are your chances of getting 45 or more heads. Then do this for each season. Finally over that data you find out the probability all that would happen to chance.

 

Next you pick an arbitrary value which you deem to be statistically significant. What that depends on depends on what type of data you're looking at. If you are looking at things in the social sciences you usually pick this value to be .05 or .01. If you are looking at things in the natural sciences you pick something much smaller, usually .001.

 

If the probability that a team with no HFA is smaller than your value then you reject the original hypothesis, ie that there is no HFA. If your probability is larger then you don't reject the original hypothesis.

 

For instance he used .01. That means that if the chances of a none HFA team to play that well is smaller than 1 in 100, then you reject the HFA notion. Some of those teams could conceivably have no HFA, but it happened to chance. There's just a 1% chance of that happening. For the NL teams in the study he found:

 

1.7% Cubs

1.0% Orioles

0.9% Braves

0.8% Red Sox

0.4% White Sox

0.4% Indians

0.4% Angels

0.3% Marlins

0.2% Royals

0.2% DBacks

0.2% Tigers

0.1% Jays

0.08% Giants

0.04% Astros

0.04% A's

0.02% Dodgers

0.01% Rangers

0.01% Rays

0.01% Mariners

0.00004% Rockies

 

*its a little different since you include the away data but this is close enough for me to explain it.

 

Honestly, he should have used .05 or even .1 instead of .01. Regardless it IS enough to conclude that if the Cubs have a HFA, it's much much weaker than most others. Maybe not the Braves.

 

Also, for the hell of it. This is only 2008 data, but # games in each win direction and average windspeed.

+------+-------+------+---------+-----------+----------+
| home | b_out | b_in | b_cross | b_indoors | avg_wind |
+------+-------+------+---------+-----------+----------+
| ana  |    75 |    2 |       4 |         0 |     7.22 | 
| ari  |     2 |   16 |      13 |        50 |     3.53 |
| atl  |     8 |    2 |      73 |         0 |     8.11 |
| bal  |    39 |   16 |      26 |         0 |     6.88 |
| bos  |    45 |   19 |      20 |         0 |    10.61 |
| cha  |    24 |   13 |      47 |         0 |    10.99 |
| chn  |    24 |   37 |      20 |         0 |     9.00 |
| cin  |    17 |   12 |      49 |         3 |     7.72 |
| cle  |    21 |   31 |      31 |         0 |     9.28 |
| col  |    22 |   38 |      22 |         0 |     7.35 |
| det  |    17 |   19 |      46 |         0 |     9.94 |
| flo  |    11 |   54 |      16 |         1 |    11.46 |
| hou  |     8 |   10 |      12 |        50 |     2.26 |
| kca  |     1 |   12 |      68 |         1 |     8.10 |
| lan  |    78 |    0 |       3 |         0 |     6.44 |
| mil  |     9 |   17 |      54 |         1 |     6.15 |
| min  |     0 |    0 |       0 |        81 |     NULL |
| nya  |    32 |   15 |      37 |         0 |     9.48 |
| nyn  |    22 |   29 |      33 |         0 |    11.37 |
| oak  |    43 |   11 |      25 |         0 |    12.37 |
| phi  |    26 |    4 |      52 |         0 |     9.33 |
| pit  |    32 |   14 |      36 |         1 |     7.93 |
| sdn  |    12 |    0 |      69 |         0 |     8.43 |
| sea  |    32 |   23 |      14 |        12 |     2.52 |
| sfn  |    65 |    5 |      11 |         0 |    12.98 |
| sln  |    33 |   20 |      29 |         0 |     8.09 |
| tba  |     0 |    1 |       1 |        79 |     7.33 |
| tex  |    21 |   40 |      20 |         1 |    12.15 |
| tor  |    29 |   14 |       5 |        33 |     6.25 |
| was  |    25 |   30 |      24 |         2 |     8.27 |
+------+-------+------+---------+-----------+----------+

 

You can cross-reference the two lists if you want to. The Cubs are hardly the only teams with variable winds. Granted one season only.

[Fro]

I think the failure of this analysis is it's just measuring wins and losses. I'd like to see run differential used instead.

[Eric Clipperton]

Nowhere in these numbers does it say the Cubs are the only team without a home-field advantage.