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Rewriting history with new WS home-field rules
- Updated: December 1, 2016
The new Collective Bargaining Agreement comes with its fair share of legalese, the menial mumbo jumbo that makes up many a binding document. And inquiring fans will have to familiarize themselves with the complex new free-agent compensation scenarios, among other changes.
But here’s the easiest element of the new CBA to wrap your head around: Game 1 (and Game 7) of the World Series will be hosted by the pennant winner with the best regular-season record.
This replaces the provision in which home-field advantage went to the team whose league won that season’s All-Star Game, which was implemented in 2003, after the All-Star Game ended in a tie in ’02. It was a hotly debated decision, which itself replaced an arbitrary and equally debatable one: home field alternating back and forth between leagues.
• Rave situation: Owners, players deliver
And sure, the new arrangement has an inherent imperfection, because not all schedules are created equal. In 2016, the National League had significantly more rebuilding teams than the American League. And so while the Cubs clearly had a better regular-season record (103-58) than that of the AL-champion Indians (94-67), Chicago played 105 (or 65.2 percent) of its 161 games against teams that finished with sub-.500 record, whereas Cleveland played 67 (or 41.6 percent) of its slate against such teams.
But much like life itself, there is no perfect answer, unless you’re one of those people in favor of a neutral site — but even then we’d probably argue over who should bat last.
This new setup is as equitable as we’re going to get, and more equitable than what we’ve gotten in the past. There have been 90 World Series under the 2-3-2 format, and in only 46 of them did the team with the better regular-season record have the home-field edge.
More importantly, of the 38 World Series to come down to a winner-take-all game (that’s 37 Game 7s and one Game 8, in 1912), only 19 had what we would consider to be this fair arrangement of the team …
