How Hard are West Coast Road Trips?

The Indians will be heading to Seattle for the first time this season today and with it, the stigma of the ominous West Coast road trip. Because of the unbalanced nature of Major League Baseball (only two teams lie between Kansas and California with six more on the West Coast), most of the Indians games take place in the Eastern or Central time zone and when it comes time to visit the three AL teams in the far West, it is a fairly big deal.

Besides the inconvenience to those in Cleveland of start times after 10 PM, this is almost certainly a major hardship on the players. The longest trip the Indians would have to take to visit a team on the road would be the NL Padres at nearly six hours, but at four and a half hours to Seattle, it isn’t much better. This extended travel, both the trip itself and staying away from home for so long, has long been blamed for poor records on distant road trips. The question is, have the Indians actually played poorly (compared to their performance otherwise) in recent years (since 2007) when visiting Seattle, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area? They haven’t played in San Diego since 2005.

In an incredible coincidence (or is it), the Indians have played exactly 162 games on road trips that included at least a game against a West Coast team (series against other teams are included if they were part of the West Coast road trip). To start, they have won 76 of those games for a .469 winning percent compared to an overall .492 winning percent. This could be enough to validate the West Coast difficulties, but as always, we’ll dig a little deeper.

The chart above shows the Indians winning percent on these West Coast trips for the past nine seasons as well as for the season as a whole. In general, these two numbers have been similar to each other (excluding 2008 as an extreme outlier), four times the team has performing better on these trips than otherwise, five times the opposite. There isn’t much to glean from that, but since a large part of this is that road trips get progressively harder as the time away from home drags on, we can see how the Indians have fared game by game.

The chart above shows the Indians record in the first, second, third and so on game of each road trip. Since road trips vary, there are fewer times they played eight games in a trip than five, making the numbers further down the chart less significant. Considering the widely variable numbers, chances are all the numbers are completely insignificant anyway. It would be silly to say that the second game of a West Coast road trip (less than 35% WP) is significantly harder than the seventh game (nearly 54%). It is also not just that the numbers don’t come out the way we’d expect them to, but the fact that there is no trend in either direction.

People will jump at any chance of proving their convictions and if that is the goal, it is possible to select periods where it really looked like going out West hurt the Tribe. For example, in 2009, the Indians had the unfortunate scenario where they played in Anaheim, flew to Minneapolis for three, then to Oakland for four. They won the first of this trip, then lost the next nine. This is about as extreme of a road trip as possible and could go to prove the difficulty level of the West Coast trip, but it was certainly made harder by the fact that both the Twins and the Angels were play-off teams in 2009.

There were two other equally terrible road trips worth mentioning. Against the Angels, Athletics and Mariners in 2012, the Indians also won the first game then lost the next eight and in 2014 against the Giants and Angels when the Tribe went 0-6. Of course, those 2014 Giants won the World Series and the Indians were certainly nothing to get excited over in 2012 (or 2009 or 2014, really).

Looking more directly at that 2014 squad, after losing six in a row on the road to San Francisco and Los Angeles, they lost four in a row seven more times throughout the year. You can blame the road, but two of those streaks came with three of four games at home and many had to do with the Indians 8-11 overall record against Detroit. The fact is, it was an extremely streaky team, especially for a team that won 85 games, and that they lost six in a row most likely had nothing to do with the plane ride in.

In general, the home team in baseball has a significant advantage. Whether it is because they get the final out in the game, because they can hear the home team cheering or because they are more comfortable, the fact remains that home teams win more than road teams. In 2015, they went 1,315-1,114 (.541) and in 2014 1,288-1,142 (.530). This doesn’t work out for every team every year, but since 2007, the Indians have went 388-339 at home and 329-401 on the road. This includes great Indians teams (2007), good Indians teams (2013-2015) and terrible Indians teams. The point is, the more games you look at, the easier it is to see (and the more significant it is) that the home team wins about 5% more often than the road team.

Because of this, the Indians numbers from West Coast road trips don’t look bad. If you want all the information, it is in the chart below and as you can see, the Indians actually have a better record on these West Coast road trips than they do overall on the road (.469 to .451 winning percent). In the end, going on the road is always a hassle (or at least 3-5% of one), but the difference in flying a few more hours is negligible.