After the typical national writer musings on the umpires, Alex Rodriguez, and CC Sabathia, Tom Verducci drops an interesting tidbit in his column. After seeing the Angels drop two at Yankee Stadium and the Dodgers drop two at Citizen’s Bank Park, he wondered if there was something different about East Coast baseball, something that put their West Coast counterparts at an inherent disadvantage. Using Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Detroit, and Baltimore as East Coast representatives, Verducci discovered that West Coast teams don’t fare well when coming East.
It turns out there have been 22 playoff matchups when a West Coast team ventured into East Coast Baseball. The result: the West Coast teams are 10-36 in East Coast Baseball venues, a .217 winning percentage. In other words, get them out of their laid-back, warm environment and into the nasty conditions in the East, and they’re not even the 1962 Mets.
And it is not getting any easier. Since 2003 the West Coast teams are 3-17 in East Coast Baseball playoff environments. That’s the kind of history the Dodgers are up against tonight when they play NLCS Game 5 in Philadelphia. Bundle up, Dodgers.
While that isn’t the largest sample, it does look pretty conclusive. Why, then, do West Coast teams fail in East Coast ballparks? Verducci brings up two points: the media and fan environments, and the weather, both of which are more intense than on the West Coast.
Verducci uses seven West Coast teams in his sample, but I want to see what happens when we add the warm weather qualifier. That means the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Angels, Padres, and Dodgers. They are the only four warm West Coast teams to make East Coast playoff trips since 1995. We’ll also add the Mets to the East Coast list (I don’t know why Verducci didn’t).
Since 1995, the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Angels, Padres, and Dodgers are 5-26 on the road against the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, and Mets. That speaks even more to a cold weather bias. The Angels are really the only team with any success in colder weather venues. They have three of the four total wins (the other being Texas in 1996 against the Yanks), but their overall record on the East Coast in October is 4-6.
There is some bias in these samples. First is the home field advantage in the playoffs. I’m not sure what the overall home team winning percentage is, though it’s surely not 84 percent. So the cold weather bias isn’t quite as pronounced as the 5-26 record makes it appear. There’s also the issue of the 2003 NLCS, when the warm weather Marlins played the cold weather Cubs. The Marlins took three of four contests up north. The Marlins also took two of three in New York in 2003. Then again, we’re looking for West Coast and warm weather.
Ask any Jets fan, and he’ll tell you that he’d rather face the Dolphins at home in December. It’s that way with a lot of warm weather football teams. It appears to be the case with baseball as well. While we fans sometimes complain about the frigid conditions at October (and November) games, it seems to give the Yankees an advantage. The Yankees are 14-3 when a warm weather, West Coast team comes to town.
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