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Home field advantage
In team sports, a team representing a city or a region is to be that area's home team. Teams typically play half their games at a stadium or arena in or near their home region; when hosting a match there, they are objectively known as the home team. The other team is known as the visiting team or the away team, and is said to be on the road.
Teams typically have better chances of winning when playing at home rather than away; this is called their home-field advantage (or, in other sports, home-ice, home-court or simply home advantage).
Factors of home-field advantage
The most-commonly cited factors of home-field advantage are usually ones whose advantageous effects are most dubious. That is to say that it is nearly impossible to determine if they have any real bearing on the final outcome of the game. Usually psychological in nature, these advantages include: a familiarity with the playing grounds, the ability for participants to lodge in their homes, and the psychological support of the fans in attendance.
Other factors, however, are easier to detect and can have noticeable effects on the outcome of the game. In American football, for instance, the stadium crowd often makes as much noise as it can when the visiting team is about to run a play. This can make it very difficult for the visiting team's quarterback to call audible play changes, thus making it difficult for the visiting team to adjust to a particular defensive formation shown by the home team. In basketball, when a visiting player is making a free throw, home fans behind the backboard typically wave their arms or other objects in an attempt to break the visiting player's focus on making the shot.
There are also factors having to do with players being accustomed to peculiar environmental conditions of their home area. The city of Denver, being a mile above sea level, has thinner air; enough so that it affects the stamina of athletes whose bodies are not used to it. Although baseball is less aerobically demanding than most other sports, high altitude affects that sport's game play in several important ways. The reduced air resistance of Denver allows fly balls to travel about 10% farther than at sea level, and also reduces the ability of pitchers to throw effective breaking balls.
Consequently, the Colorado Rockies (Major League Baseball) and the Colorado Avalanche (National Hockey League), enjoy very large home-field advantages, as do many teams located in the mountain west area of the United States. The Colorado Rockies, accustomed to the high altitude of Coors Field in Denver, have posted nearly a 30% better record at home than away over their history.
Sometimes the unique attributes of a stadium create a home-field advantage; the Metrodome's unique off-white Teflon roof traps and amplifies noise to such an extent that it can become distracting or even harmful, this combined with the color of the roof can cause opposing players to commit more errors in the Dome than in other ballparks.
Lastly, there exist some advantages for the home team which are actually written into the rules of the game. In the National Hockey League, during stoppages of play, the home team is allowed to make player substitutions after the visiting team, allowing them to obtain favorable player matchups. In baseball, the home team gets to bat last in each inning. If the game goes into extra innings, this can yield very real advantages when deciding strategies regarding base-stealing and sacrifice hits.
Gaining/losing home-field advantage
During the regular season for a sport, in the interest of fairness, schedulers try to ensure that each team plays an equal number of home and away games. Thus, having home-field advantage for any particular regular-season game is largely due to random chance. However, in playoffs, home-field advantage is usually given to the team with the better regular-season record. One exception to this is Major League Baseball, which since 2003 has awarded home-field advantage in the World Series to the team representing the league which won the All-Star Game that year, to help raise interest in the All-Star Game after a tie in 2002. In MLB's first and second round of playoffs, home-field advantage is given to the team with the best record if both teams are division champions, and to the division champion if one of the teams is a wildcard. For the first round in the NFL and NHL playoffs, home advantage is given to the team with a higher seed (which may or may not have the better record). The NBA is the only league that has home advantage based solely on which team has the best record.
In many sports, playoffs are comprised of a series of games played between two teams. These series are usually a best-of-5 or best-of-7 format, where the first team to win 3 or 4 games, respectively, wins the playoff. Since these best-of series always involve an odd number of games, it is impossible to guarantee that an equal number of games will be played at each team's home venue. As a result, one team must be scheduled to have one more home game than the other. This team is said to have home-field advantage for that playoff series.
During the course of these playoff series, however, sports announcers or columnists will sometimes mention a team "gaining" or "losing" home-field advantage. This can happen after a visiting team has just won a game in the series. In playoff series format, the home-field advantage is said to exist for whichever team would win the series if all remaining games in the series are won by the home team for that game. Therefore, it is possible for a visiting team to win a game and, hence, gain home-field advantage.
As an example, suppose that a blue team and red team are about to play a best-of-seven series against each other. Four games will be played at blue's venue, while three will be played at red's venue. If the home team were to win each game, then blue would win four games, red would win three games, and blue would win the series, so we say that blue has the home-field advantage. However, suppose that the first game is played at blue's venue and the visiting red team wins. Red now has one win, and there are three games remaining at each venue. If the home team wins each of the remaining games, then red will have won four games, while blue will have won three. Since red would win the series in such a scenario, it is said that red has taken home-field advantage away from blue.
It is worth noting that in World Cup qualifying matches, when two teams play a series, it is in a set of two games, one at each participant's home stadium. If both games are draws, or if the two games are split, a tiebreaker is used to determine the winner. Should that fail to give a winner, penalty kicks ensue.
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