The home team won enough victory in the extra situation. This is one of the most enduring mysteries of baseball in the past five years. Prior to the 2020 season, Major League Baseball changed the extra limit rules to start every half of each extra frame in the case of runners at second base. (This only happens in the regular season, which means the 18-inning Alds tilt between the Mariner and the Astronaut in the picture above doesn’t actually feature the zombie runner, but the shots are too good to pass.) They do this to reduce the wear and tear of the pitcher and keep the game to the length. It is almost certain that they have no plans to drop in their home field advantage.
In recent years, Rob Mains Baseball prospectus The home team’s dilemma has been widely recorded. Connelly Doan measured the incidence of Bunts in an additional site and compared the observed rate with the theoretical optimal value. Earlier this month, Jay Jaffe stepped into the details and pointed out that strikeouts and walking are key points between the regulatory framework and bonus baseball. These all explain the different dynamics that exist in the additional functions. But I don’t see a question answer: How does this work in practice? Is the home team scoring too few? Have you scored too many points on the team? Is the home team playing this situation incorrectly? I set out to answer these questions with all the data we have in the extra situation to understand theoretical and practical differences.
The theory of extra scores is relatively simple. I arranged it in 2020 and the math is still working. You can list the expected chart of running, start with second place, no one goes out, and figure out how many running teams are scoring overall. If you want to fantasize, you can even find a distribution: their frequency is one run, two runs, no runs, etc. For example, I can tell you that from 2020 to 2025, excluding the ninth and additional innings, the team puts runners to second base, no one eliminates, and scores 0.99 per inning.
This is a relevant situation facing the highway team in Extras. No one started the game in second place, they were trying to score. Their success rate was quite successful, and in my sample, they scored 1.00 innings per inning. Statistically, this is no different from the overall major league average. You still don’t see much difference by breaking it down by the frequency of the result:
The second time I scored after the man, no
| Score | Regulation | Top of the top |
|---|---|---|
| 0 Run | 45.6% | 47.5% |
| 1 Run | 31.1% | 28.3% |
| 2 lines | 11.7% | 11.1% |
| 3+ Run | 11.6% | 13.1% |
The difference in score frequency is exactly on the boundary of statistical significance, but the direction makes sense. Access teams delivered much less frequently than Naive Run expected, which tracks how the extra Inning game works. As Jaffe’s research shows, the extra situation strikeouts increase. Defensive positioning and strategy in the extra situation prioritizes keeping the tie; the team plays on the plate at a higher pace than the second inning inning and tries to play a role in the plate. However, for the most part, our visiting team has achieved the exact score we expected over the past fifty years, based on the widespread performance throughout the league.
With these numbers, we can focus on the home team. Unlike most analyses, we already know what we will find here. Visit the team to convert runners to run at the same speed as the statute. The home team must not be able to win fewer extra limiting games than you would expect. But how and where are they? Data must be our guide.
Consider the situation where the visiting team failed to score in the first half of the inning. A naive expectation that completely ignores the specific strategies that each team might deploy in additional deployments, suggesting that the home team’s time is about 55%, which is a reduction in the chance of not scoring after getting a run after the second place starts without anyone. What actually happened? The home team scored about 56.5%. How much do they score, so running expectations make no sense. If they score in this case, it’s enough to win. At least here, the home team is doing exactly what you expect from the way they score in the statutes.
Let’s keep moving forward. What happens when the home team starts the extra situation from the run in the second half? Using the naive probabilities above, you want them to score zero, thus losing 45% of your time. Instead, they have 49.1% of their time left empty. You want them to score one shot and tie the game to another frame, and another 31% of the time. However, in reality, the team only divides 29% of the time. Finally, you want the home team to score twice, about 23% of the time to win the game, but they only have 22% of the time. In other words, after the visit team gets into the situation, they will end the race more frequently than you do based on the overall production of the league, and the runners at the second base, no one.
This gap explains most of the local shortcomings associated with the new additional local rules. Under the new rules, the home team has started the lower half of the extra frame with a single deficit of 389. If they score the same in the regulatory way, they end up with 177 losses, 91 wins and 121, where they re-scored the game and sent it to another extra frame. Instead, they scored 191 losses, 86 wins and 112 points and kept the game going. Throughout the extra game, a net gap of 19 games was won – another 14 losses and 5 wins less – won 2 percentage points. From 2020 to 2024, the home team won with a 49.3% cut in the Extras, while the ratio under the Classic Extra Rule was 52.2%.
If we are looking for specific details, that will narrow down why the team can’t cash out in that zombie runner often to equalize the game. This is the crux of this analysis. Runners score more frequently than other racing cars in the statute. It is not difficult to understand the reason. After all, defense is different. The defense has a variety of options. They can join the infield and strike out. They can admit to running. They can deliberately walk someone for doubles.
In early innings, it seems wise that the team almost always lets the run run in exchange for strategies that are most likely to record some type of elimination, scoring, or otherwise. When it’s still playable most of the game, playing points doesn’t make much sense. However, in later innings, most defenses will change tactics, giving lead saving priority over the highest chance of spawning.
For example, consider the home team defending on top of the extra frame. When no one in the runners ranked third, the visiting team scored 61.5%. When runners ranked third, their time was 33.5%. These numbers roughly meet what happens under the same circumstances in the regulations. The visit team scored less in the extra times than in the regulations, but within the wrong range. Maybe the Department of Defense is working to prevent this effort, but the offense is spending the same effort to score (run on contact, shortening the swing to pursue the ball in the ball, etc.), and the net result is that the access team’s cash accessed at essentially the same speed, whether they are in the statute or in the statute or the same speed.
On the other hand, look at the home court of things and you will find something different. When the home team ranked runners third, no one was in the tie competition and they only had 43% of the time to cash in. The third runner ranks first? Their time is 30%. Under run, these numbers are roughly the same. This is much lower than you expect of the scoring environment where regulations prevail. In other words, whether you compare them to regulatory baseball or on the extra visit team, the home team isn’t very good at delivering on the third inning in the extra situation.
why is that? Defensive positioning and strategy are my best guess. When the visiting team is in the extra situation where no one is ranked third in the tie competition, they have no choice: they are stuck in the runner or the race is over. You can take more risks by leaning your back against the wall. You can strike out for strikeouts, walk the batsman intentionally, you don’t want to face, at ridiculous distances in the infield and outfield, even for long shots, try to throw the runners at home and even bring the best strikeout pitcher to make the scale tilt. It’s not quite When you play, the team is still willing to sell out to stop scoring in this situation, much more than in the first half of the game or earlier in the game.
In fact, this positive defensive posture is nothing new. From 2010 to 2019, there is nothing the home team can do to get runners from third base in the extra innings – or, if you want, the defensive team is equally good at preventing that run score. Now, the only reason it’s more obvious in the home advantage is because we see these situations quite often. In the past, it was absolutely rare that no one had a runner on third base in the extra situation, and it wasn’t common there to make a runner uncommon. Now, this is almost given.
In other words, the home team has been at a disadvantage in the additional innings, relative to their regulatory win percentage. Mains’ research shows that I have made similar findings on this before. This is partly because they have historically performed worse than the teams visited: scoring less than two points from third place. Now, this happens more frequently than before. It’s a classic unexpected consequence – no one thought the home team was not doing well at these attractions as it almost never appeared. Without an automatic runner, this imbalance doesn’t matter. But it’s more important to put someone on the basis to start the frame and then convert the runner to start running.
If you are like me, there is still a thread still naming. If the defense is very good at blocking third-place scores, why do we quote the results from the home team winning percentage when the visiting team fails to score? This is because we are missing a variable: Bunts.
Look, the home team is less efficient at converting third to running runners, but in tie games they take runners to third base, which is more than you would expect. They do this through colored flags. Of course, Doan’s research found that the team was inadequate in the extra situation, but it also showed that far beyond the shadow of doubt, the team played far more than they did in the statutory innings. The extra situation from the championship is a win game. It meaningfully increases the probability from naive estimates. It happens that it increases the probability of victory to offset the subsequent challenge of the home team driving home.
I found this puzzle fascinating. Just feel Wrong That home team was at a disadvantage in the extra situation, when it was when the opponent was seeing the first thing that mattered. But it turns out that the home team always struggles on a relative basis to deliver on the “easy” extra run. New extra limit rules will cash in more opportunities in an easy run. Like that, you end up with a mysterious result – the home team won enough victory. The key factors that contribute to this counterintuitive family disadvantage have been around for a long time. Have we never noticed it before the zombie runner turned around and said, “Can you bring that guy home?” ”From the extra start to high frequency challenges after thought.
