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No advantage here That hometown edge just not all it's cracked up to be
Updated: Tuesday October 17, 2000 2:26 AM
ST. LOUIS -- The roar climbs out of the stands at Busch Stadium like some Midwestern mating call, a chorus of 50,000 deep-throated Redbirds giving up some love for their hometown heroes. It starts low and rises, reaching a crescendo when every man, woman and red-sweatshirted kid stands and screams like a freaking maniac. The noise is beautiful. It's thrilling. Mostly, it's dang loud. The fans in St. Louis -- and in both parks in New York, for sure, and up in Seattle, I imagine -- are a wonderful postseason edge for the home team, it is said. They are part of the so-called home-field advantage. Maybe the main part. So it's said. This is what having the home-field advantage for a series in the baseball playoffs is supposed to mean: Fans screaming their ever-loving heads off. Curses from the bleachers -- or at least some mocking cheers -- aimed at the visiting team. The comforts of home for the players, like a clubhouse with your very own locker, your favorite seat in the first-base dugout and your own Mercedes in the lot. This is what home-field advantage in the baseball playoffs really means: A solo home run in a 12-1 game. A stare from Will Clark . A ticket to see the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. Home-field advantage, let's face it, is pretty much worthless. Maybe the most overrated aspect of the baseball postseason -- more overrated than, say, San Francisco's chances this season or the city of Chicago's any year -- is having the home-field advantage for a series. You have the home-field advantage, you're sitting pretty. Supposedly. If you don't, you're a sitting duck. Except, if anyone is counting ... well, no. In the first round of the playoffs this season, the team without the home-field advantage for the series won three of the four series. And check out the league championship series. St. Louis, bless its little red and swollen uvula, already has lost its home-field advantage and then some. The New York Yankees lost theirs in Game 1. They are not alone. In the 28 championship series played, in both the American League and the National League, since baseball went to a best-of-seven format in 1985, the team that began the series with the home-field advantage has won all its home games in only four series. Atlanta and the New York Yankees both did it last season. Minnesota did it in '87 and Oakland in '89. Every other time, the team with the HFA lost at least once at home. Lots of times, the team with the HFA won it back and won the series by winning in the other city. But only four times out of 28 -- that's a .143 batting average, for those without calculators -- has the team with the HFA at the beginning of the series won all the games it was "supposed" to win. The ones at home. Home-field advantage? Come on. Give it up already. "When home-field advantage really becomes an advantage," New York Mets pitcher Al Leiter says, "is when you allow the fans to come into play. If you can keep them quiet ... " Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. But even that, Leiter admits, often doesn't make a difference. Every ballpark is loud in the postseason. At some point during every game the fans start to scream their heads off and flail around. After awhile, it's just so much noise. "It all depends," Leiter admits, "on who's going out there and what kind of quality-pitched game it is." And so it comes down, as it almost always does, to the people on the mound, not the ones in the stands. It comes down to who's hitting and who's pitching, not who's serving breakfast or what bed was slept in last night. Still, no one can shake the notion that this thing is hugely important. Players often talk about the home-field advantage as if it were some magic cure. They'd be better off trying to find a way to hit off Kazuhiro Sasaki or getting Rick Ankiel to stop looking so much like Nuke LaLoosh. Meanwhile, the hometowns keep on screaming. And screaming. And no one would want it any other way. Because, really, even if the home-field advantage doesn't work as often as it should, you wouldn't want to see how it works with no screaming at all. John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
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