Hometown Heroes in the All-Star Game

Sandy Alomar Jr.’s career has been marred by frequent injuries, and one could argue that he has not lived up to the expectations most people had for him back when he was one of the most promising young catchers in the game. But no one was disappointed in him on the night of July 8, 1997. The American League’s three-game losing streak in the All-Star game came to an end when Alomar, then of the Indians, hit a two-run homer in the seventh inning to power his team to a 3-1 victory. Alomar was voted the game’s Most Valuable Player—and to top it all off, his moment of glory took place in Cleveland, in front of the home crowd at Jacobs Field.

Needless to say, not every All-Star game features such a memorable performance by a hometown player. But, Ron Kaplan, in a 1996 Baseball Research Journal article, suggested that standout performances by All-Stars playing at home are even less common than one would expect. He concluded that hometown batters have a decidedly “un-All-Star-like” record and that “pitchers have fared little better.” For example, his calculations showed that through the 1995 season the aggregate batting average for hometown batters in the All-Star game was a not-very-impressive .238. The data presented by Kaplan are compelling because they seem to fly in the face of the well- known home field advantage in sports.1 If teams and players generally turn in better performances than do visiting players, why should hometown players in baseball’s All-Star game so frequently fall on their faces?

Kaplan’s findings are not very intuitive—but if they are valid, they would not be without precedent. In fact, some people have suggested that “home chokes” like the ones that he might have documented in his paper are actually quite predictable in certain circumstances.

THE HOME CHOKE

Why do people choke under pressure? A series of studies conducted by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister2 supported the idea that situations that cause people to be extremely self- conscious can lead their performance in all sorts of skilled activities to deteriorate. Quite simply, focusing on what your performance will mean for how you feel about yourself and how others will see you wastes mental energy and redirects attention from where it should be properly focused.

The results of that research will probably not seem surprising to most readers, but it led to the prediction of a somewhat more surprising outcome. Baumeister and Andrew Steinhilber3 studied seventh (and decisive) games played in the World Series and seventh games in National Basketball Association finals. They reasoned that the imminent prospect of becoming a world champion in front of a group of people that desperately wants that outcome—in their words, the possibility of “claiming a desired identity” in front of a supportive audience—could lead to very high levels of self-consciousness.

That self-consciousness, of course, could lead to choking. Therefore, they predicted that having the home field “advantage” when one is on the verge of reaching an important and cherished goal could paradoxically cause one to perform worse than visiting players. In fact, an examination of the 1924 through 1982 World Series contests and 1967 through 1982 NBA finals showed that the home team was significantly more likely to lose than win the final game. The pressure and distraction caused by the supportive hometown fans also seem to have led to more home team fielding errors and more missed free throws in the decisive seventh games.

This research is not without its critics,4 and the home choke in the World Series has been notable only in its absence in the last 20 years or so. But the general effect has been replicated in other sports, such as Stanley Cup hockey and professional golf.5

A HOME CHOKE IN THE ALL-STAR GAME?

Could poor performance by hometown players in baseball’s All-Star game be another example of the home choke? After all, other than world champion, what could be a more “desired identity” for a baseball player than being an All-Star? Could the self-consciousness caused by the pressure of having to live up to that label in front of a large group of people who expect and desire you to do so lead to the kind of choking that Baumeister and his colleagues have found in their research? It is difficult to say, because the .238 batting average for hometown All-Stars is a stand-alone statistic. It cannot be interpreted without reference to some standard of comparison or control group. Fortunately, a comparison group is readily available: visiting players. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the performance of hometown players in All-Star games—in particular, their overall batting average—is indeed “un-All-Star-like.” That is, the goal was to see if their hitting is particularly poor in the context of baseline levels of performance in the All- Star game.

METHOD AND RESULTS

All-Star game box scores from 1933 through 2000 were examined. Box scores through 1986 were available in Lenberg’s Baseball’s All-Star Game: A Game-by-Game Guide (although a few errors in team affiliations were detected and corrected); the rest were gathered from newspaper reports. The number of at-bats and hits for each player appearing in those games was recorded, as was his status as a hometown or visiting player. Overall, hometown players came to the plate 422 times and were credited with 102 hits for a .242 batting average. The com- parable numbers for visitors are 4,470 at-bats, 1,100 hits, and a .246 average. If we exclude pitchers, as Kaplan generally did,6 both of these averages (not surprisingly) increase. Hometown position players have hit for a .244 average in the All-Star game (100 for 409), while the visitors’ batting average is .250 (1,083 for 4,334).

Overall, hometown players through the year 2000 were slightly less likely to hit safely than were visitors, but the difference is very small and not even close to being statistically significant when examined with a chi-square test (the appropriate test for comparing the frequencies of events). In addition, if one redefines hometown players as being only those playing in their team’s actual home park (e.g., a New York Giant playing in the Polo Grounds or a member of the Red Sox playing in Fenway), the difference between them and the visitors almost entirely disappears (.245 for hometown players vs. .246 for visitors, all players; .251 vs. .249 excluding pitchers).

An alternative analysis in which only a player’s first All-Star game appearance was counted was also run. Arguably, this is a more appropriate approach for testing for the home choke, because the first appearance is when a player would first be assuming his new identity as an All-Star, and the point at which he might feel the most pressure to prove that he was worthy of that title. In addition, it would help control for the possibility that individual players might be having a disproportionate influence

on the results; for example, Hank Aaron appeared in 23 All-Star games as a visitor (and only once as a hometown player). Finally, restricting the analysis to first-time players yields data that are closer to meeting the formal assumptions of a chi-square test (in particular, the independence of observations). This approach, however, did not result in a very different pattern of results. Thirty-two hits have been recorded for hometown players in their first All-Star games, and those players came to bat 142 times. Visitors in this category came to bat 1,095 times and got 244 hits. The resulting batting averages, .225 vs. .223, are nearly the same. If pitchers are included, the gap widens (34 hits, 149 at-bats, a .228 average for hometown players; 254 hits, 1,172 at-bats, a .217 average for visitors), but the difference is not even close to being statistically significant. That should not be surprising; if the hometown players had hit safely just two fewer times, their average would be even lower than the visitors’.

It should also not be surprising that (as readers have no doubt already noticed) when only first-time players are included, the batting averages sink. The group of first-timers includes a higher proportion of players who appeared only once in the All-Star game, like Richie Scheinblum and Billy Grabarkewitz—although Billy did just fine in 1970, getting a key hit in the 12th-inning rally that led up to Pete Rose scoring the winning run with his notorious slide into Ray Fosse.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, when hometown players’ All-Star Game performances are evaluated with a proper baseline, there is nothing particularly “un-All-Star-like” about them. They have just as much success at the plate as do the visiting players. Of course, batting averages of the kind reported in this paper are quite low for a group of hitters that includes a disproportionate number of Hall of Famers, but one must keep in mind that All- Star games also feature the very best pitchers! If batters (like American Leaguers in the 1966 All-Star game) had to face Sandy Koufax, Jim Bunning, Juan Marichal, and Gaylord Perry in every contest, there would be few if any .300 hitters in baseball history.

It is unclear why there was no evidence for a home choke in the particular situation studied here. As already noted, other researchers have occasionally reported difficulty replicating Baumeister and colleagues’ findings, and the variables that either enhance or undermine the effect are poorly understood. Even if results consistent with the home choke hypothesis had been found in this study, a compelling alternative explanation would have to be ruled out. It is possible that All-Star team managers, out of a desire (conscious or unconscious) to please the fans who will actually be in attendance at the game, adopt less stringent criteria when choosing players from among the host team’s players. If such a bias in fact existed, one would expect hometown players for that reason alone to generally turn in poorer performances. After all, if they are not as good as the average visitor to begin with, then why would we expect them to play as well in the All-Star game? The fact that no such difference was found suggests that if anything, hometown players might be turning in even better performances than might otherwise be expected.

Either way, the evidence is fairly clear. A hometown player in the All-Star game is just as likely to be left with memories as pleasant as those of Sandy Alomar Jr. in 1997 or Ted Williams in 1946 (4 for 4 with two home runs at Fenway) as he is to have to deal with the nightmare that was Pee Wee Reese’s 1949 appearance (0 for 5 with a crucial error at Ebbets Field ). Hometown heroes in the All-Star game have nothing in particular to fear.