Quote:
Originally posted by Le Grande Orange
The big question is how could this be factored in. Someone else had suggested simply raising the home team's batting a few points and lowering the batting of the visiting team's players a few points; this sounds like a workable solution to me. I'd suggest perhaps also including slightly better fielding for the home team players and slightly poorer fielding for the visiting team, since the home team will be far more familiar with their field's layout than the visiting team would (i.e. foul territory, the way a ball might bounce in the outfield corners, etc.)
|
I'm a big fan of home field advantage, and I have two suggestions, starting with a cheap shot. One is too get rid of the silly "anti-win streak" factor implemented during v4. The one implemented because a few people apparently were concerned that their All-Star teams were winning too many games. Pitchers for teams on 5+ game win streaks would suffer a "small penalty" to their performance to reflect the "pressure" of pitching during a win streak (which is probably as opposite of reality as it gets--players, both pitchers and hitters tend to perform better when their team is winning games; one feeds the other--winning improves confidence which improves performance, improved performance contributes to winning). Take this "anti-streak" effect and put it on the pitchers when pitching on the road to create a "home field" advantage, which is a time-tested reality. Or just get rid of the anti-streak effect entirely and do something else for home field advantage.
How about building a home field advantage into each stadium, perhaps creating a rating for the effect on opposing team fielding and home team hitting, say from "None" to "Significant". Stadiums are already customized for offensive output, so I'm sure such a thing would be possible. Such a rating would allow for a team's home field advantage to be "customized". I would argue though that the overall impact of either rating should not be huge, and even at the most "significant" levels should be only be barely perceptable.