Home field and the World Series

I have blogged before about the problem of having one Major Baseball League have the DH and one not.  Now that inter-league play is year-round it messes up the contests, putting the American League teams at a disadvantage when playing in a National League park.  It also plays havoc with the World Series, making home field advantage crucial.  Well, most of the time; this year the Cubs actually have an advantage playing games in Cleveland where they can use injured Kyle Schwarber as a DH.

I watch a lot of talking heads on ESPN, and many of them have railed at the inequity of determining home field for the World Series by using the winner of the All-Star game. I’ll grant some of the injustice of basing home field on the play of players most of whom play for teams with no chance at making the post-season.  But the managers are from last season’s championship teams, so they usually have a chance of going back and can manage the game accordingly.  Of course, this might mean not playing some of the marginal all-stars, but we are long past the days when Lefty Grove pitched 6 innings in an all-star game.  So, most players will still get to play.

I find using the All-Star game to determine home field in the World Series defensible, but lots of people have a problem with it.  So what’s the solution?  One bad idea often floated around is to return to the format that used to be in play before Bud Selig decided the All-Star Game needed to “mean something.”  Namely, the NL hosts one year and the AL hosts in the next.  This seems equitable, but I don’t find it satisfactory.  If the claim is that the All-Star Game outcome is random, how is it better to base the decision on numerology?  Let’s see, the number of the year is evenly divisible by 2, therefore the NL should host the Fall Classic.  That’s nuts.

A solution that attempts to base the decision on merit, but ultimately fails, is the notion that the team with the better record should be the home team.  This sounds reasonable, but the team with the better record isn’t necessarily the better team, but the team that played against weaker opponents.  There is one other criticism—the team with the better record wouldn’t be known until the end of the season, but reserving the potential stadiums might need to be done before the last minute.  I’m sure they could work around this, but knowing that the AL will host the World Series in mid-July helps planners more than finding out in early October.

There is one potentially reasonable solution, and that is use the outcome of interleague play for all teams.  This also has the problem of not being known until the end of the season, so maybe say the result of inter-league play as of September 1^st.  It’s not perfect, and given how the schedule works maybe weaker teams in one league are playing stronger teams in the other, but these things even out over time (which is no solace to the team playing four games in the other team’s park come October). 

But I still think this is a solution in search of a problem.  To a great team, home field advantage in a seven-game series shouldn’t be that big of a deal.  And, as I said above, playing by the AL rules actually helps the Cubs this year.  Hey, there are a bunch of new stats coming out every day; maybe home field should go to the team with the highest average exit velocity on batted balls!

So, let’s stop worrying about home field advantage in the playoffs and start worrying about important things, like how mankind will go on without Vin Scully calling Dodger baseball games.