Sylvester and Tweety

A few weeks ago, the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals entered the MLB playoffs with the worst performances in their last fifty games ever—19-31 and 22-28 respectively. Of course, the sensationalism is a bit frivolous: baseball has been sending eight teams to the playoffs only relatively recently. Still, raise your hand if you expected this unlikely pairing in the World Series. . . . That's what I thought.

But why don't we expect it by now? Wild card teams won the World Series three years in a row! (Granted, the Cardinals are not a wild card team. But they did have the worst record among playoff teams.) How do we account for this?

One proposal that has been made specifically with the Houston Astros in mind is that playoff teams don't need a full field of starting pitchers. If they have three good ones—e.g. Oswalt, Pettitte, Clemens—they can make it past teams with better overall starting pitching. But, the Astros haven't won the World Series lately.

I'm going to suggest something completely different. And I'm going to do so without any evidence. Feel free to ignore everything I'm about to say. Maybe the home field advantage that baseball and other sports try to give teams in playoff series doesn't really work. I mean, did they ever do any analysis before constructing the 2-2-1 or 2-3-2 systems? It's great to have the first two games at home, we can probably all agree. But those games will never completely decide a series. Whereas games three and four (of five), or four and five (of seven), may be decisive. And those games are always at home for the team that is supposed to have a disadvantage.

If I can dig up some data and some free time, I'll try to confirm or debunk this intuition in the next few days. Until then, just think about it.

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Related:

• Psychological jujitsu and pitching rotations
• What are the chances?