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You are here: Home / Sports / Home cooking

Home cooking

by | 78 Comments

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I haven’t read the book Scorecasting, which a friend of mine helped write, but I thought this might interest some of the sports fans here:

In the end, they determine, stunningly, that home-field advantage in virtually all sports is largely due to the bias of ­officials toward the home team. Soccer referees call more penalties against the visitors and allow more injury time when the home team is behind. In baseball, though the authors are a little naïve about the art of calling balls and strikes (no one, not even the players, wants or expects the umpires to call a strict rule-book strike), their numbers are, well, striking: fewer called strikes, especially in crucial situations, against the home team. In basketball, the authors write, “the chance of a visiting player getting called for traveling is 15 percent higher than it is for a home-team player.”

(bold mine)

Reader Interactions

78Comments

  1. 1.

    bk

    Yes, like last week, when Carolina played at Duke and was subject to some obvious home-cooking officiating (Carolina alum here).

  7. 7.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    I read the summary they had in Sports Illustrated about this. It was pretty interesting.

    It did make me wonder why calling strikes is not being done by computer. A few cameras watching the strike zone would eliminate the guesswork.

    And, contrary to the block you quoted, lots of people would want strikes called correctly, just not against their team.

  10. 10.

    dr. bloor

    Completely unsurprising. I stopped watching the NBA a few years ago when the officiating started rivaling that found in professional wrestling.

    Same could be said for any Colts home game as well.

  13. 13.

    Peter J

    @DougJ®:

    Not in a seven game series.

    That would depend on if the referees/umpires/etc change how they officiate because it’s a playoff game or not.

    The article doesn’t say anything about it, but the book is intriguing, so I might have to order it just to find out.

  14. 14.

    MikeJ

    In sailboat racing local knowledge of the waters, the winds, and when and how the wind shifts are almost the most important thing. But that’s pretty obvious, doesn’t involve officials, and is about a sport that few people care about.

    I had an official refuse to call a foul on the other guy in a chess match once, let him off with a warning for calculating in his doodles on his scorecard. I trounced him anyway, but it took me another ten minutes. Which I think might have been the deciding factor, since he’d seen the position.

  15. 15.

    Mornington Crescent

    There was a study (either Sports Illustrated or Baseball Prospectus, I forget which right now) on playoff percentages in baseball a few years ago and found that the winning percentage of the team with the better record is .534, which is essentially a crapshoot. All you need to do is get in the playoffs, and then take your chances.

    The better team has a distinct advantage in short series, where they have swept 16 – 2 series. When the lesser team takes the series to 7 games, they have a winning percentage over .500.

  16. 16.

    alwhite

    I think it goes well beyond home team. I’d love to see the ball/strike calls for the ‘deluxe’ teams (Yankees, Braves a couple others) as opposed to the other teams.

    And for traveling, compare the elite players compared to average.

    Look at the calls that Gretzky got when other players got too close to him compared to the slicing & dicing permitted in the NHL.

    And I’d bet in every one of those cases the official would tell you they didn’t think they had given different treatment.

  18. 18.

    Ailuridae

    @alwhite:

    I’m sure there is a youtube video of some of the outrageous “six inches off the corner” strikes Maddux and Glavine had in their Braves hay days. I would only encounter their games rarely (I am a Sox fan) but I was dumbfounded at some of the calls they received.

  20. 20.

    burnspbesq

    @bk:

    Eat it. You lost because we’re better. We’ll beat you at your place, and if we have to we’ll beat you in Greensboro.

  23. 23.

    KG

    @alwhite: it is no surprise that stars get better treatment, it has been that way as long as I can remember (I’m only 32, but still… Jordan’s push off in ’98?).

  26. 26.

    Cacti

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):

    And, contrary to the block you quoted, lots of people would want strikes called correctly, just not against their team.

    MLB introduced the QuesTec UIS system in 2001 to help evaluate umpire performance vs. the objective strike zone defined in the rule book.

    Pitchers hated it, and the World Umpires Association sued to try and have it removed.

  29. 29.

    dr. bloor

    I have to say I’m a bit surprised at the overall advantage for strike calls in baseball (less so with the “big pitch” calls, though). I track Pitch FX for a lot of games, and the rulebook strike zone is a joke, although I’ve not seen a ton of games where the ump was clearly favoring a particular team.

    More interesting would be a study looking at umpire/specific pitcher effects. Mariano Rivera routinely gets a ludicrous inside edge to LH hitters; Maddux used to “paint the corners” to RH hitters three or four inches off the plate.

  30. 30.

    Cat Lady

    “Working the refs” isn’t a cliche for nothing, with the exception of Ed “Gun Show” Hochuli who only works as a ref to hear and see himself on TV, especially when he doesn’t have to wear sleeves.

    OT, but current pop music now being celebrated on TV sure is teh suxx0r. Get off my lawn, also too.

  33. 33.

    Yutsano

    @burnspbesq: Ehlo was about the only bright spot in an otherwise miserable basketball program for years. Then all of a sudden the Bennetts came along and made chicken salad out of chicken shit. Now we tend to run in the middle of the pack in the Pac-10.

  36. 36.

    Pat

    This has been really obvious in basketball for a long time, and it stands to reason it’d be true in the remainder as well. But I would echo the commenters above who have noticed one thing in particular with respect to baseball, namely that there doesn’t seem to have been an effort made to compare ref-factors with non-ref-factors quantitatively.

    I’ve always put it this way: In baseball, there are multiple obvious reasons for the home team to have an advantage. The team is constructed for their home park (think Yankees and left-handed power, San Diego or Seattle and flyball pitchers), their starter gets to start his warmup precisely 30 minutes before first pitch but the away pitcher has to guess how long the first inning goes, and in tied or close games in late or extra innings, the home team has the advantage of knowing how many runs they need to tie or win (the away team has to guess). In the other three sports, all fields are identical and first possessions are randomized, and climate conditions are pretty similar outside of a few football stadiums (and I suppose Denver’s teams, owing to air).

    Notwithstanding this, baseball, if I’m recalling correctly, consistently has the lowest home-field advantage. Not to dispute the underlying conclusion that advantage with the umpires matters, but it’s disappointing not to see the question answered, how much it matters, as compared to everything else.

  37. 37.

    mattt

    The obvious question, not really answered by the excerpts, is whether the refs call more penalties/strikes/etc against the visiting team because of bias, or because factors related to travel, being in an unfamiliar ballpark, and etc affect visiting players’ judgement.

  38. 38.

    Ailuridae

    @KG:

    Ughh this is pretty silly. Yes, Jordan pushed off there but that was only after he had been man-handled all game by Russell et al and after already having been fouled on the play twice. Heck when he pushed off he did so as Russell was holding him.

    Watch:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdPQ3QxDZ1s

    When Jordan crosses from left to right there at the three point line do you see what Russell is doing? He has two hands on his chest – that is a blatant foul.

  39. 39.

    SmallAxe

    @cathyx:

    Unfortunately you really can’t take advantage of the home team thing gambling because the handicappers have already built that bias into the odds, i.e. for football home team generally starts at -3 favorite before even calculating which team is actually better and moves from there + or – based on the teams quality.

  40. 40.

    Ailuridae

    @Maxwel:

    I love it when Duke fans point this out like “a-ha!”. Duke is a consistently glaringly more physical and dirty team than UNC so if the refs call the same number of fouls or send the team to the FT line the same number of times that’s evidence of bad officiating not good officiating.

  41. 41.

    DougJ®

    @Ailuridae:

    I see what you mean, but what Russell was doing was not normally called back then (it would be now with the emphasis on hand checking), whereas a push-off like that was generally called back then.

  42. 42.

    Ailuridae

    @DougJ®:

    Think about this for a second: if someone of decent strength is holding onto you with two hands as you dribble a basketball with one hand how can you possibly score? The answer to that is that you use your off-hand to knick their hands off you. You can see it in any pre-lockout game tape. Players did it all the time. And no it wasn’t called very often because without it scores would have been in the 40s. The reason that play looks so out of the ordinary is that Russell lost his balance. Nothing more, nothing less.

  44. 44.

    Ailuridae

    @Mark:

    Sorry, but Phil Birnbaum is kind of a dunce when it comes to this stuff.

    His posts on rebounding in basketball are so lost that nobody even bothers to discuss it with him. Check out his piece Box-score statistics are the RBIs of basketball. He tends to find rationales for statistics from anything imaginable besides Ockham’s Razor.

  45. 45.

    burnspbesq

    @Ailuridae:

    You’re right, there is a Duke basketball team that relies on superior physical strength to force opponents out of their comfort zone. It’s the women’s team.

    If you ever provide any evidence that you know anything about basketball I’ll start taking your views on this topic seriously. Until then, you get lumped in with all the other ignorant Dook haters.

  46. 46.

    Jaquandor

    I’m not sure about the assertion that nobody wants the rule-book strike zone enforced in baseball; seems to me that whenever I read an article about how long baseball games are, one of the first suggestions for speeding things up is to enforce the rule-book strike zone. I remember a few years back, an umpire was retiring, so on the last day of the season, in his last game ever (and between two teams who weren’t in the playoffs or playing for it), he decided to call the rule-book strike zone, and he informed both teams he was doing so. The game was over in two hours.

  47. 47.

    Jeanne ringland

    No, no home team advantage in baseball; some umps really hate certain teams (or certain players) and the umpiring teams get moved around a lot.

    If your team is in the playoffs and the team name starts with Redsox or ends with Yankee there is no home team advantage, just an East Coast Bias advantage.

    Haven’t you ever see a called ball because the big name slugger didn’t swing at one right down the middle?

  48. 48.

    Bill Murray

    Also, in many cases call more for the home team isn’t really a very good comparison, because for a variety of reasons the home team is often playing differently at home than they do on the road. So the question first must be how many possible calls should there be and then is the percentage awarded different between home and visitors.

    The assumption that Questec and whatever the tennis system is called are true is not valid either. they look great, but don’t tell you the error on their calculation, which can be off by up to 10 mm (although is generally claimed to be accurate to 5 mm most of the time, with an average error of about 3.6 mm).

    If you treat officiating errors as binomially distributed, they don’t ever truly average out over a season and probably really ever. As an example if there is one controversial call a game, there is around a 1% chance that a team will end up with 96+ of these calls going there way, which means about 1 team every 4 years will have a bonus of 14 or more calls (and the same number have a deficit of the same amount)

  50. 50.

    Jeanne ringland

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent): There are cameras watching the strike zone, and you can check the location of any pitch online during the game.

    Certain stadiums have been designated to keep track of accuracy of the umpires’ calls in baseball but there is a growing number of fans who would like to see that checking being done at every baseball stadium.

  51. 51.

    Ailuridae

    @burnspbesq:

    I almost certainly forgot more about basketball than you’ll ever know.

    You’re like nearly any other Duke apologist (the irony that you are also a Catholic Church apologist is not lost on me) – you have some association with the University, you cheer for their basketball team and the Nixon clone that coaches them and you can’t admit something really obvious. It is really no different than talking to a Knicks’ fan during the 90s.

    I’d ask why Dukies have been so overdrafted and unsuccessful in the NBA but watching you twist into contortions to explain that wouldn’t be enjoyable. The next time you see someone prone on the ground though remember to stomp on their abdomen.

  52. 52.

    Jeanne ringland

    @Bill Murray: Good point about playing differently at home and away, especially when it comes to baseball. The parks are not identical, nor do they have identical weather patterns. Boston has the Green Monster, that gigantic wall left field and left field is much shorter than say Yankee stadium. Some individual players play better in warmer weather, some in cooler weather, such as Vladimir Guerrero. He has always blasted the ball when he played in Rangers stadium, regardless of which team he played on. He likes the warmer weather… heck, it’s like hell in that stadium half of the year. At Angels stadium the marine layer prevents the ball from going out of the park half the time, which is an advantage to pitchers from either side but once in a while the weather is just right that the ball carries beautifully and those games are a wonder to behold.
    I would like to talk about the A’s but their ballpark is such an execrable space that it’s hard to even think about. It’s cold and windy a lot of the time and I FREAKIN’ HATE AL DAVIS FOR MAKING THAT PARK EVEN WORSE FOR BASEBALL THAN IT ALREADY WAS.

  53. 53.

    Jeanne ringland

    @efgoldman: There is at least one team in the American League that didn’t even “show up” until the 7th inning for a few years, and the fans got used to it.

    I use the term “fans” as in people who have been paying attention to the game and their preferred team.

  54. 54.

    Jeanne ringland

    @dr. bloor: You know, we fans of the “lesser” teams wouldn’t mind that if our pitcher was given the same inside corner calls. All we ask for is consistancy.

  57. 57.

    bk

    @burnspbesq:

    If you read my response, I referred to the “second round” as in “ACC Tournament”. I am well aware that you have played them twice this season.

  58. 58.

    Jeanne ringland

    @Yutsano: I loved going there (you can park for free at a BART station and there is a station right at the stadium) but hated the weather. I have frozen near to death in August. Davis had the place remodeled when he brought the Raiders back from LA, had the county pay for it with a referendum that was only voted on inside the city of Oakland. I’ve been told by people Who Weren’t There at the time that I must not have understood something, but I know what happened. Oakland voted on a tax increase that affected all of Alameda County. We call the outfield bleachers Mount Davis.

    Davis is a true bastard.

  59. 59.

    burnspbesq

    @Ailuridae:

    I almost certainly forgot more about basketball than you’ll ever know.

    Still waiting to see some evidence of that. Link to a picture of yourself in uniform at a D1 school, maybe?

    Same old crapola from the ABD crowd. Yawn.

  60. 60.

    CT

    I’m not sure if calling the rule book strike zone would speed up games. It seems that right now, “the corner” extends 3-4 inches off either side of the plate, but nearly anything above the belt is considered high-I don’t know whether the widening of the strike zone totally compensates for it being squished vertically, but its probably not too far off. The main thing extending games is the excruciating time between pitches, as the batter steps out and tightens all his various pads, and the pitcher asks the catcher to go through the signs AGAIN. In the postseason, you can easily go a full minute between pitches. No wonder the ratings keep sliding.

  63. 63.

    Pooh

    Ailrudae,

    Just out of curiosity, who do you think we should be paying attention to if not Birnbaum? Also, there’s no I-AA for basketball, but please enlighten us with more basketball knowledge ;)

  65. 65.

    Ailuridae

    @Pooh:

    I’m aware there is no 1-AA for basketball but am also aware that the poster in question went to college at Union a D3 school in everything except Hockey AFAIK. Interestingly, Union did recruit me – I lived just up the road. But Burnes suggested I needed to have played D1 ball to know more about basketball than him so we couldn’t have both played D3 ball right? So apparently Union must have been D1 or 1AA in his time (he is a fossil after all)

    Read Birnbbaum’s stuff on rebounding. It is just lost in the woods stuff.

    From here he makes the amazingly off claim that

    In my previous post on rebounding, I promised to review some of the evidence supporting the “diminishing returns” hypothesis. That’s the theory that, in general, a player’s individual rebound totals are not mostly a product of his own ability to snare rebounds, but, rather, predominantly because of his positioning on the court, or the role he is assigned on his team.

    That is: if a player gets a lot of rebounds, even adjusted for what position he plays, a large part of his total is rebounds that other players would have gotten to regardless.

    This claim should be to anyone who has every played a lot of basketball prima facie absurd. But if you want you can so check out the top twenty defensive rebounders by percentage at basketball-reference and then look at how their team rebounds with them on the court and off the court at basketball value. If Birnbaumm is correct and much of a team’s defensive rebounding is attributed to n role and position and not to individual success how do you explain the effect that these elite rebounders have on their team rebounding percentages. Of the twenty best rebounders who qualify 18 have a positive effect on team rebounding, two are marginally negative: Ilyasova whose back-up for some of the season Gooden is a better defensive rebounder and also fills in some for Bogut at center who is a better rebounder and Cousins whose back-up Dalembert is a marginally better defensive rebounder.

    I’ll take an illustrious case. Kevin Love is the best rebounder since Rodman. If Birnbaum were right, when he left the game his replacement might not rebound the ball as well (he’d “steal” fewer rebounds from teammates) but the team wouldn’t be adversely affected. But that is really, really untrue. When he is on the court the Wolves grab 67.5% of total defensive rebounds – when he is off the court 64.1%. That 3.31% (rounding issues) doesn’t seem like a lot until you realize just how big of a gap it represents. To break it out

    Overall the Wolves are about the 17th best defensive rebounding team in basketball.
    Without Love (when he is on the bench) they are either the 29th or 30th worst rebounding team in basketball.
    With Love they are around the 13th or 14th best defensive team in basketball. Weighted averages and all that (Love plays just over 75% of available minutes for the Wolves.

    This is a pattern you can see from any of the top rebounders provided their back-up isn’t also an elite rebounder. For Birnbaum to suggest what he did indicates a couple of things:

    1) His natural eye and intuition around the game is really, really off.
    2) That data, freely and publicly available indicates he is pretty far off too.

  66. 66.

    Ailuridae

    @Mark:

    Read my post above. If I were to start anywhere with APBR reading it would be the main board and then Kevin Pelton from basketball prospectus.

    Looks like part of the quote I needed got cut off:

    That is: if a player gets a lot of rebounds, even adjusted for what position he plays, a large part of his total is rebounds that other players would have gotten to regardless.

  67. 67.

    DPirate

    home-field advantage in virtually all sports is largely due to the bias of ­officials

    Duh.

    Unless its MAGIC!

  68. 68.

    Maxwel

    For those who aren’t familiar with Duke and UNC, it’s not that Duke people are that smart, but that the anti-Duke people are stunningly stupid. For example, note the comment by the hapless twit about Duke players being unsuccessful in the NBA when the exact opposite is true.

  69. 69.

    jayackroyd

    I’ve always wished MLB would publish umpire ERAs. Now I wish that they’d give batter home/away breakdowns as part of that stat.

  70. 70.

    kd bart

    It explains why the Steelers never seem to get called for holding during home games when their line consistently holds.

  71. 71.

    mark

    I don’t buy the “phil birnbaum was wrong once therefore he’s wrong always” line. You’re not addressing his post on scorecasting.

  72. 72.

    ThresherK

    @CT: “the corner” extends 3-4 inches off either side of the plate

    Slightly OT: The regular TV view of a pitch is over the pitcher’s right shoulder, isn’t it? I’ve lately wondered if couch fans (I’m one–I simply don’t see enough live baseball to have trained my eye) have a bias: Pitches by lefties inside to RH batters, or by righties away to RH batters, cross the visual cue of the plate.

    So, having actually been on the plate, don’t they look more like strikes regardless of where they end up?

  74. 74.

    Pooh

    As a former DIII player myself, I feel well credentialed to comment as well. I completely disagree that Birmbaum’s point about rebounding can be dismissed out of hand for several reasons. First, at some point, it’s obviously true, there are only so many D-Rebs available and so at some point me getting another is necessarily taking one away from you. Second, he’s not claiming a 1for1 replacement, only that on the margins D-rebounding is somewhat replaceable and duplicative. This doesn’t mean that Kevin Love isn’t awesome, it means that if Kevin Love was traded to the Magic, he and Howard wouldn’t combine for 28 RPG mostly. As a more mundane example, last week true hoop linked to a piece about Charlie Villanueva and how his rebounding was “down” when itvwas far more likely that his rebounding abilities have stayed about the same in Detroit as they were in Milwaukee, just that he was playing with well below average teammates in Mil and with well above average in Det.

    Finally, you have to remember the subtext of Birnbaum’s discussion of rebounding is that Dave Berri is an idiot.

  75. 75.

    Ailuridae

    @Pooh:

    I think as much as Birnbaum has a point its one that doesn’t have a lot of “there” there. Look here:

    So the best defensive rebounding team in the league only snares in about 8% more defensive rebounds than the opposition. A lot of rebounds in the NBA aren’t heavily contested but having a great rebounder by percentage (or pace adjusted) has a pretty high effect on team defensive rebounding percentage and, that, in turn correlates reasonably strongly to winning games. You can verify this yourself by doing what I did or looking at best rebounding rates by positions and cross checking basketball value.

    Well, if you are looking for a composite score to assess a players value how do you reflect that fact (that individual rebounding affect team rebounding which affects winning). Well the obvious way to do it is put wait on how well a player rebounds relative to other players at his position with standard adjustments for pace. It might be minutely more accurate to also look at the on-court off court rebounding data but that seems unnecessary. In the overwhelming amount of cases, especially for big men, if you are a poor rebounder for your position you are hurting your team’s chances of snaring a defensive rebound and vice versa.

  76. 76.

    Pooh

    Don’t disagree with any of that, the problem is more in the assigning of entirety of the credit for a DREB to the guy who actually gets it. Additionally, I think you’re running into a little problem, conceptually at least in that most Big Guys who are good at Big Guy defensive things (protecting the rim, post defense, etc) also tend to be good at DReb and vice versa. I could just as easily suggest that the good D-reb is an outcome of the same “Big Guy” factors which correlate with team success. Kevin Love is an interesting case here, because he’s regarded as a pretty shit defender, and the Wolves are (unsurprisingly) pretty bad defensively.

  78. 78.

    BruinKid

    Except when it’s UCLA basketball at home. Then the refs seem to WANT to screw us over. Just look at Thursday’s game against Oregon, when an Oregon player FELL ON TOP of one of our players in the backcourt when he had the ball, and the refs DIDN’T CALL ANYTHING. Or the Cal game from 2 weeks ago, when they kept fouling us on every possession near the end to catch up, but we STILL finished with 4 more fouls than they did.

    Or how about this game we had against Stanford at home where we were called for almost TWICE as many fouls as Stanford? Yeah, I’d love to see a home court advantage for us when we play at home.

    Y’all should look at the fouls that have been called on our freshman center Josh Smith this season. Half of them are total bullshit calls, made only because he’s big. Then he gets totally hacked on the other end, and no foul is called.

    Ugh.

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