Major League Baseball’s many rule changes this season have led to tangible results for fans to pore over: faster games, a higher rate of stolen bases and more runs scored early in games. Less noticed is a continued decline in home-field advantage, a tail off that began after the 2020 season, a 60-game campaign during the pandemic in which home teams had a winning percentage of .558.
The winning percentage for home teams declined in 2021 (.539) and again in 2022 (.533), and it’s down even further at the start of this year. Home teams are still winning a majority of games this season — they had a 288-271 record (.515) as of Thursday morning — yet if that pace continues over the full season, home teams would record their lowest win rate since MLB’s 1998 expansion. Through the 35-game mark, home teams this season have a worse winning percentage than the combined home win rate of any MLB era through each season’s first 35 games. Fans might root, root, root for the home team, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
Some teams are still performing notably better at home. The Cincinnati Reds were 11-8 (.579) at Great American Ball Park as of Wednesday morning and 4-12 (.250) in other stadiums, the biggest disparity of any team this season. The Toronto Blue Jays also enjoy the creature comforts of Rogers Centre, going 9-3 at home (.750) and 12-12 (.500) on the road. The Atlanta Braves, meanwhile, probably can’t pack their bags quickly enough. The 2021 World Series champions started 10-8 (.556) at home and 15-3 (.833) on the road. The Kansas City Royals are actually struggling at their home ballpark, Kauffman Stadium. The Royals began the season 4-17 at home (.190) and 6-10 (.375) on the road; their 1-13 start at home was the worst in franchise history.
“It would be nice to win some games here for [the fans], but to be fair, be nice to win games anywhere,” Royals Manager Matt Quatraro said, according to the Kansas City Star.
It’s worth remembering these are small sample sizes subject to fluctuation, but they appear to be part of an MLB-wide trend in which the home winning percentage is drifting downward. As you will see, home teams in other sports are not immune, either.
In baseball, at least this season, the shift has led to some noteworthy numbers. For example, home teams, as a group, are getting woefully outscored in the second inning, a frame that used to be a source of strength for hometown clubs. Through 35 games, home teams scored 24 percent fewer runs than their opponents in the second inning; they had outscored the visitors by 7 percent in the second inning from 2015 to 2022, otherwise known as the Statcast era. Home teams have also seen their former edge decrease in the first, third, sixth and seventh innings. (There is no evidence the latter is tied to poor fan performances of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch, but it is a topic for future research.)
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Another challenge for the home team appears to be at the start of a new series. From 2015 to 2022, home teams won 51.5 percent of series openers, yet this year that’s dropped to 48.3 percent. There has also been a drop in win rate for the home team during division games and a severe drop for home teams in interleague games. However, home crowds have seen more wins this year against teams in the same league. It’s too soon to know for sure what impact, if any, this will have on the ultimate interleague contest, the World Series, but home teams in World Series games have gone just 9-9 over the past three seasons.
Relievers — and especially closers — are also contributing to the relative struggles at home this season. The blown save rate for all home teams is 17 percent this season, a few percentage points higher than the rate for away teams. You have to go back to 2009 to see the home teams’ blown save rate significantly higher than that of the away teams at this point in the season. It also happened in 2005. In other words, over the past 18 years, this is just the third time the home teams’ blown save rate is outpacing the away team’s rate at this point in the season. Reynaldo López of the Chicago White Sox leads the majors with four blown saves, three of those at home.
The general phenomenon is not limited to baseball. Home teams in the NFL have surpassed a 52 percent winning percentage just once over the past four seasons, and oddsmakers have reduced the value of home field to less than two points since 2019. Observers have pointed to several potential explanations, such as road teams minimizing the impacts of travel with the help of modern technology and science, leading to new strategies as varied as larger planes and better sleep schedules. Visiting locker rooms are also bigger, and the online secondary ticket market means road teams have more fans in NFL stands than ever.
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Even road teams in the NHL are playing better than their hosts. In this year’s playoffs, home teams were 27-39 collectively as of Thursday morning. Two lower-seeded teams advanced with shocking upsets in the first round. The Florida Panthers, the second wild-card team in the Eastern Conference, beat the Boston Bruins on the road in Game 7, eliminating the NHL’s best team after a historic regular season. In that same round, the defending champion Colorado Avalanche lost a Game 7 at home to the Seattle Kraken, which had never won a playoff series.
And so it appears home-field advantage, once thought to be an all-powerful force willing North American pro teams to victory, could be a thing of the past. At best, perhaps, it’s a minor advantage in select situations that could be overcome by a team’s overall strength or a beneficial matchup. Perhaps the trend will correct itself as this MLB season wears on, but for now, home fans can expect quick games, lots of stolen bases and some novelty treats — just not wins.
