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Originally Posted by Dirkadirkastan
No, I don't. See my response to xrobx. Consider the Giants in last year's WS. Are you really going to argue that they lost home field advantage simply because they got it done in five games? I would say they had a *strong* grip on home field because they had two home games in their back pocket that they didn't even need.
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Your response to xrobx was extraordinarily inane, in exactly the same way as your argument here. You don't lose an advantage by winning games. You gain an advantage by winning games. I should think that would be obvious.
When we talk about "home field advantage" and the like, we generally understand "all else being equal." Do you have a hard time understanding that?
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Yes. Baseball is unique because pitching matchups are the dominating factor over the course of a series. However, that would lead me to think all the more that the games are largely independent. The win probabilities won't be the same from game to game, but they would be independent nonetheless. For example, the Rangers won't have to worry about Carpenter tomorrow, so their probability of taking that game should be better than the last one (at least I hope!). Their chances would be determined by the matchup in that game, not in the fact they lost the previous one.
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Starters, yeah. Bullpen?
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Which is another reason why I don't think one can decisively say it's always better to have Game Five at home. Maybe you'd rather have your ace pitch both Games One and Five on the road and let your #2 guy pitch his second game in front of the home crowd.
I will concede that certain events in one game can affect the outlook of another. But these are tangible things like pitcher availability as you said. I was arguing in abstraction that the timing of the third home game does not affect overall win probability due to "momentum".
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Nobody but you introduced the idea of "momentum" into this discussion.