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Abstract:
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Home field advantage, the finding that home teams win more than half of the games played in a balanced home/away schedules, is well documented in many sports. Four factors are typically cited to account for this: crowd factors, familiarity with local conditions, travel factors, and rule differences for the home versus the visiting team. The simultaneous occurrence of these factors in games played at a team's home field makes it a challenge to sort out each factor's contribution to home field advantage, but neutral site games (where neither team is playing at home) helps address this problem, since crowd factors and local familiarity are much less relevant. Using neutral site NCAA baseball and softball playoff results, we find no evidence that batting last in a baseball or softball game provides an advantage, and find little evidence for the existence of travel and fatigue effects.
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