Reddit reviews Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

Scorecasting says the Cubs' strategy for years was to offer cheap beer to drive attendance. No need for a winning team when people can go day drinking at Wrigley for a reasonable price.

I wish the Nationals did this :(. $50 for bleacher seats and $10 per beer. As if I needed more reasons to not want to go to a regular season MLB game!

> Scorecasting

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Analytic Methods in Sports

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

An interesting book I read tried to figure this out for all major sports. The argument they made was (iirc) the largest impact on home field/ice advantage is how the home team's fans affect the judgement of the referees. And the largest impact is on the calls that are largely subjective (e.g. was that "holding" or not). They also spent considerable time trying to refute other ideas (e.g. travel issues, knowledge of ones own field/rink, fans boosting confidence/energy of players, a few others). Some data the book provides:

• In the NHL, home teams get 20 percent fewer penalties and receive fewer minutes per penalty. "On average, home teams get two and a half more minutes of power play opportunities ... than away teams. That is a huge advantage." If you multiply that by a 20 percent success rate, you get an extra 0.25 goals per game for the home team. Since the average overall differential is only 0.3 goals for the home team, "this alone accounts for more than 80 percent of the home ice advantage in hockey."
  
  
• There is no apparent [home ice advantage] in shootouts, where refereeing makes no difference
  
  I wouldn't go so far as to say the authors figured it all out, but they made some interesting observations.
  
  This website has more info for what the book said about other sports

Here's the thing with the Cubs, there are plenty of reasons for this prolonged title drought.

Chicago was the last team to move over to set up a farm system, ownership never spent a lot of money on payroll until the last decade or so, and they shared a division with one of the most successful teams in baseball; the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Chicago Cubs didn't win a title for over a century because they were doing everything to prevent a championship run for so long. Once they invested in the right people, right players, etc. they won a championship. In fact, stats pointed to the Houston Astros being the most cursed team in Major League Baseball prior to the Cubbies winning it all this year.

Here's a 2011 Chicago Tribune article that goes into greater detail on this. If you want to read further I strongly encourage reading Scorecasting that touches upon this and challenges, investigates other interesting topics in sports.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307591808

Nice, thanks for doing the math.

I've seen at least one study (I think in Scorecasting) that showed that there wasn't any identifiable performance hit to individual players' FT% on the road, at least in the NBA.

There is a difference in what fouls are called, though. So I'm wondering now if that ties in with /u/JonShoes' point that who got fouled matters -- maybe the borderline calls that Virginia would be expected to get away with more frequently at home are more likely to come against guards, and the clear-cut fouls are against bigs.

You are correct. Unless its an obvious generational talent (even those don't go in the top 3 - see Randy Moss), the players who end up being the best picks in the draft are usually the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th picks at their position. There is an excellent book called Scorecasting that delves into this subject. http://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591808

You should read "Scorecasting." It's a really cool book that is comparable to Freakonomics from a sports standpoint.

Here's a blurb about home field advantage.

Basically, the authors think that Home Field Advantage seems to come from referee bias and not that the crowd makes the players play better. That said, I don't know what happened to the Jets that weekend, but I see it as more of an anomaly and would be comfortable starting Asiata, McKinnon to a lesser degree.

It's pretty well established that home teams and teams that are trailing receive the benefit of the doubt when it comes to foul calls. What I'm saying is it doesn't surprise me that there was a massive disparity based on Nova being the home team and the fact that they were trailing (along with each team's FTR tendencies on off and defense) . That doesn't mean I don't think Nova probably should have been called for some more fouls if the refs were being objective.

If games were always called evenly then HCA would basically not exist However, we know that homecourt advantage does exist based on historical point differentials for home/away teams. The vast majority of HCA can be explained by officials giving more foul calls in favor of the home team according to the book Scorecasting. So stop complaining about a phenomenon that has existed in sports forever.

> then what accounts for how much more often teams win at home?

It probably doesn't explain why each team is getting blown out on the road but to answer your question in the general: Officiating bias, influenced by crowds.

In short, particularly when split second decisions are being made, referees do fall prey to a large group of people clamoring for a call at home.

Reference: This book. They even reference a fun study where I believe they ask refs to watch a game and call fouls with and without crowd sound to determine how much of an effect it has.

I found this book pretty enlightening regarding bias in sports - https://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591808

There's lots of different topics covered, but the one that I remember most clearly was that research supported the fact that referees/umpires are actually the portion of sports most susceptible to bias. The investigation began trying to identify the source of home field advantage in team sports, and eventually discovered that, while umpires/referees are extremely good at their jobs, they are inevitably human and react to verbal abuse (from either home fans or competitors) resulting in home field advantage being a real statistical anomaly that exists because of the influence home supporters have when abusing a referee/umpire for calls that go against their team.

Additional excerpts from book, though none supporting my memory above unfortunately - https://www.npr.org/2011/01/29/133280133/scorecasting-the-new-freakonomics-of-sports

A good book with that exact purpose.

They absolutely do judge that way, even if its subconscious. There have been studies that prove this.

http://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591808

Sure, he's hit big shots, and it's not that he's awful, it's more that they make him out to be way better than he is. And this gets haters perturbed, who then take it to the other extreme and say he is complete garbage. Sure, he hit some big shots, he also had some epic failures, particularly the Big Ten final where he couldn't even get a shot off.

Check out the book scorecasting. https://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591808