The road less traveled

I have a secret to share with you. It may shock you; it may not. Consider yourself warned.
The Red Sox won yesterday on the road.
Yes, yes, quelle surprise. The win, in which J.D. Drew proved himself to be a beast of the highest order, moved the Sox to 18-22 on the road.
Even more curious, though, is that it is a problem that plagues all of baseball. The New York Yankees are one game above .500 on the road, the Angels are road warriors at 21-12, Oakland’s 17-14, and that’s it for the American League. Only Philadelphia and St. Louis have that honor in the National League. Of 30 teams, only five can say they have a record of .500 or higher on the road.
So clearly, the issue doesn’t lie in just Boston. It lies everywhere. And it’s already been noticed by a few people, one being Buster Olney. Back on May 31, he wrote a blog about this very subject. He presented a statistic saying that through May 29, home teams had a combined winning percentage of .577. The last time this percentage was that high was in 1931 when it was .582. I think gas was cheap then, too. Guess what? It’s gone up and now home teams win a dizzying .5964 amount of the time (through June 17). That’s .600 ball, people. To put that in perspective, the Red Sox and Cleveland Indians tied last year for the best record in the majors at 96-66 — a .593 clip.
Olney e-mailed “players, scouts and executives and other folks in the game and asked what they thought” and came up with two primary theories. Emphasis on theories.

1. As the game has injected more and more young players in recent years, without benefit of as much minor league experience, the youngest players don’t have the experience to deal with games on the road and all that comes with it, as well as they have in years past.
2. Given that Major League Baseball has more parity than in years past, home-field advantage might be more of a factor than it has been.

Intriguing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a combination of both. Look at the five teams that have a winning record on the road. Again: NYY, LAA, OAK, PHI, STL. None of them have any especially green rookies. Sure, they have some, but by and large, they are indisputably veteran teams. The Red Sox are a nice blend of youngsters and veterans alike but it’s not just the youngsters scuffling. Yeah, Jacoby Ellsbury has a .648 OPS on the road and .926 at home, but Jason Varitek’s OPS is .685 on the road and .807 at home. Big Papi also has a rather disparate split, while Manny, Youkilis, Lowell and Drew don’t have a large difference, and the former two actually hit better on the road.
The Red Sox are clearly an inferior team on the road. At home, they’re batting .294/382/.472. On the road, they’re .267/.332/.430. The pitching ERA at home is 3.37 and on the road it’s 4.27. Roughly the same number of homers (31 to 34, with more innings on the road) have been given up, ditto walks (131 to 136) but the hits are the divergent path. At home, we’ve coughed up 285 hits while the road has us at 320. The difference in innings is 24, by the way — 315 at home, 339 away.
I think it may have less to do with the young player element (without truly discounting it) and another element being that in this day and age of statistics, of objective analysis, that front office executives are realizing that it makes sense to play to your team’s extreme strengths at home. A team has 81 games at home, by far the most in any stadium by a wide margin. So why not take advantage of your park’s quirks and exploit them? The Red Sox have done a lot of studies on Fenway and their player acquisitions almost always have an element of Fenway Park built in. Case in point: Curt Schilling. Schilling, when being wooed by Theo over Thanksgiving, mentioned that he was averse to pitching in Fenway because he was a flyball pitcher and Fenway was notorious for not being friendly to righties who give up flies. Theo and his calvary showed Schilling hard data that proved otherwise, a major selling point to Schilling that they had come prepared and proven Fenway would help.
The home-field advantage factor can’t be overlooked too. We Bostonians know exactly how much this factors in because the fans literally carried the Boston Celtics to the NBA Championship during some points where they were most vulnerable. In Kevin Garnett’s words, he played like trash in Game 5. He was worn down, people were sniping at his ability to play in the clutch (right, that’s why he’s the only Celtic other than Larry Bird to have over 500 points in a playoff season and averaged a double-double in the Finals) and the end was coming. You don’t think the crowd lifted him up? Hey, it’s not just me. Bill Simmons wholeheartedly agrees. “Tuesday night’s crowd gave him one last energy boost, like 18,000 people were pouring a giant Red Bull down his throat.”
I’ve long felt that Fenway Park has to be the park where the crowd influences the team the most. Oh, I know to an extent that the stadium and crowd influences every team, and perhaps more so this year, and in terms of intimidation, Yankee Stadium has Fenway beat, but in terms of crowd? It’s gotta be the crowd — us.