Are seven-game baseball playoffs fairer than five-game series when home-field advantage is considered?

摘要

Conventional wisdom in baseball circles holds that a seven-game playoffseries is fairer than a five-game series. In an earlier paper, E. Lee May, Jr.showed that, treating each game as an independent event, a seven-game series isnot significantly fairer. In this paper, we take a different approach, takinghome-field advantage into account. That is, we consider a given series toconsist of two disjoint sets of independent events--the home games and the roadgames. We will take the probability of winning a given road game to bedifferent from the probability of winning a given home game. Our analysis againshows that a seven-game series is not significantly fairer.