Home Cookin'

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

All 15 home teams won last night for the first time ever.

[Frayed Knot]

That this has never happened before is less odd than many fans probably think.
Start with the fact that playing 15 games in a day couldn't happen, except for some Sundays in the DH era, until after the most recent expansion less than 20 years ago. Beyond that, for all the talk about home field advantage, the home team in MLB generally wins less than 55% of the time so getting this to occur is almost as rare as trying to get a coin to land 'Heads' 15 straight times.

But even giving home teams 55% shot at the win, I figure the odds of all 15 winning at 0.000127479497357656 or about 1 in 8,000*
So if a full slate of games is played maybe 4-5 times per week over a 26 week season that's around 120 chances where it's possible to happen meaning that the odds say a clean sweep should occur about once every 65 years given random match-ups. Giving a quick glance at last night's match-ups shows that the home team happened to be the stronger team in about 8 of the 15 games vs just 3 where the road team came in as the better squad and about 4 where the teams had relatively even records, so that tilts the odds in favor of the sweep a bit more.




* about 4x as often vs assuming a straight 50/50 split where the odds are more like once in 32,000. With a 60% H/R splits the odds fall to around 1 in 2,000

[seawolf17]

I was struck by this too. The previous best was 11-0 for the home teams, and that was in 1989.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I have a hunch that this is a bit more common in the NFL.

[Ceetar]

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I have a hunch that this is a bit more common in the NFL.

Happens most Monday's and Thursdays!

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

I thought the article's "first time in over a century" was overstating things, but that it's happened for the first time ever since expansion to 30 teams in 1998 is still pretty cool.

[Frayed Knot]

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I have a hunch that this is a bit more common in the NFL.

HF advantage is bigger in NFL than in MLB (although not as big as in the NBA) and the gap between the better and lesser teams is bigger as well, so yes, I suspect clean sweeps or near clean sweeps are more common too.
The hitch in the works is that the NFL, even with 32 teams, usually only plays 13-14 games/week because of the off* weeks built into each team's schedule and so there are probably no more than a half-dozen chances a year for a 16-0 or even 15-1 home-team week to happen.




* And, yes, they are OFF weeks not BYE weeks. A Bye is when a team earns an advance through a round of a tournament based on previous record or some such occurrence. What the NFL has is simply weeks off for teams and calling them a 'Bye' for a team doesn't make it one.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Isn't there always a Monday night game too? And often a Thursday night game?

[Benjamin Grimm]

Well, sure, but having the home teams go 1 and 0 isn't at all remarkable. It (1 and 0) has probably happened plenty of times in MLB, with the exclusive Sunday-night ESPN season opener. What's rare is when the sweep involves 10 or more games, or, like yesterday, 15 games.

[Ceetar]

speaking of synergy, all 30 teams start at the same time on 10/4. Cool stuff.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Ceetar wrote: speaking of synergy, all 30 teams start at the same time on 10/4. Cool stuff.

Yes, I think that was a smart idea. Sometimes MLB does get something right.

[Frayed Knot]

Mets � Willets Point wrote: Isn't there always a Monday night game too? And often a Thursday night game?

Yeah, the NFL equivalent to what happened last night in baseball would be if all games for that week were won by home teams.
Between the Thursday games, the Monday games, the late-season Saturday games, plus the built-in off-weeks, there are usually less than 10 games on your typical NFL Sunday afternoon which would make a home-team sweep even more likely if we were counting games from just the one day.

[seawolf17]

Ceetar wrote: speaking of synergy, all 30 teams start at the same time on 10/4. Cool stuff.

Yes, I think that's a cool idea, potentially creating some interesting down-to-the-wire playoff machinations.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Frayed Knot wrote: Mets � Willets Point wrote: Isn't there always a Monday night game too? And often a Thursday night game? Yeah, the NFL equivalent to what happened last night in baseball would be if all games for that week were won by home teams. Between the Thursday games, the Monday games, the late-season Saturday games, plus the built-in off-weeks, there are usually less than 10 games on your typical NFL Sunday afternoon which would make a home-team sweep even more likely if we were counting games from just the one day.

Yeah, that's what I was going for is that it would be hard to find any single day in NFL history when all the teams in the league played on the same day, much less have all the home teams win. Maybe before 1970.

[HahnSolo]

The last few years I think the final weekend has been all Sunday NFL games (ie no Monday or Thursday games). There is a Sunday night game though.