Printer-friendly

March 5, 2003

Let's Play Two!

Are the Cubs at a Daytime Disadvantage?

by Nate Silver

I am not a morning person. The snooze button on my alarm clock is permanently compressed due to repeated poundings. In college, I refused to consider entire majors because they required me to wake up before noon. I don't have so much flexibility nowadays with my corporate job, but the person sitting at the desk in cubicle 18K3 in the first couple hours of the day is not really me, so much as a conference calling, Powerpoint-creating drone who lives off Twix bars and mocha lattes. So far as I am concerned, there is only one thing worth waking up early for, and I tend to fall right back asleep after that is said and done.

Thus, I am liable to give undue sympathy to the periodic pleadings from Cubs players and management that the team ought to play more of its home games at night. Sammy Sosa is not a morning person, and neither, apparently, is Dusty Baker. Their arguments, of course, are couched in terms of the team's ability to compete--I tell my company that I'd do damned good work at 2 a.m.--but those lines of reasoning are roughly as compelling as blaming the Cubs' long string of failure on a billy goat.

Do day games really set the Cubs up for failure? To answer the question, I consulted the Retrosheet game logs for each game played from 1997 to 2001 (Retrosheet doesn't have the 2002 data ready just yet). The first series of numbers I ran looked at every team except for the Cubs, with data broken down between day and night games, as well as various permutations on what the team's schedule had been like on the previous day (afternoon game on the road, and so forth). In the table below, I've provided the home team's winning percentage based on each condition. Day games are marked with (D), and night games with (N).

        AWAY GAME(D)    AWAY GAME(N)

          G      Pct        G    Pct
------------------------------------
Day      44     .568        4   .500
Night   520     .537      390   .515
------------------------------------
TOTAL   564     .539      394   .515


        HOME GAME(D)    HOME GAME(N)

           G     Pct        G    Pct
------------------------------------
Day      836    .530     2317   .526
Night   1040    .537     4577   .526
------------------------------------
TOTAL   1876    .534     6894   .526


             OFF DAY       ALL GAMES

           G     Pct        G    Pct
------------------------------------
Day      143    .503     3344   .527
Night   1297    .546     7824   .531
------------------------------------
TOTAL   1440    .542    11168   .530

According to the above data, there does not appear to be any systematic advantage from playing more games at night. Over the course of five seasons, the home team put up a record that's about four hundredths of a percentage point better in night games--a difference that is not statistically significant, even with thousands of games in our database.

There are, however, some meaningful numbers in the table. Whether it be due to jet lag or insomnia or a David Wells-style party on the charter plane home, the home field advantage is cut roughly in half following an away game played at night. Unfortunately, the first game of a homestand following a night game on the road is almost always played at night, so there's no convenient way for the home team to improve its schedule to avoid the hangover.