SEATTLE — Five times in these league championship series, the home fans have shown up and done their thing. They scream and shout. They razz the opponents and roar for their heroes. They wave towels in team colors — teal in Seattle, blue in Toronto, yellow in Milwaukee. It looks great on TV, and it’s so much fun in person.
And it hasn’t made a difference. The home teams are winless in the American and National League Championship Series after the latest letdown here on Wednesday, when the visiting Blue Jays thrashed the Mariners, 13-4, in Game 3 on the AL side.
If you’ve been paying attention lately, it’s no surprise. In the MLB postseason, home-field advantage has never mattered less.
Oh, it seems like it does, especially when you’re 24 years old and the first swing you take in an ALCS home game launches a 112-mph rocket into the left field bullpen. That’s how the bottom of the first inning felt for Julio Rodríguez, who gave his team a quick 2-0 lead.
“Through the roof, honestly,” Rodríguez said later, when asked how it felt at (open-roof) T-Mobile Park on his home run trot. “I love playing at home. Just the energy they bring, it’s so special. When they’re cheering for you, it makes it a lot easier.”
On some level, that’s got to be true. The millions of us who’ve never played in the majors can’t really argue the point. But it’s probably more of an intangible feeling than reality. Because reality tells a much different story.
It’s not just the 0-5 start by the home teams in the two championship series. All that did was basically balance out the four division series, where the home teams went 12-6.
Think about the World Series. Pick any snapshot of victory for the last 10 (excluding the neutral-site postseason of 2020). Unless you’re looking at an image from 2022, when the Houston Astros clinched at home against the Philadelphia Phillies, you’re seeing a lot of gray pants.
In 2014 — just as they’d done in 2010 and 2012 — the San Francisco Giants won the title on the road. The Kansas City Royals did it in 2015, then the Chicago Cubs, the Astros, the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Nationals. Since the pandemic, the Atlanta Braves, the Texas Rangers and the Los Angeles Dodgers have all partied in another team’s building.
In the last 60 World Series games played before home crowds, the home teams have gone 26-34. That’s a .433 winning percentage — worse than such 2025 juggernauts as the Pittsburgh Pirates and Los Angeles Angels.
It’s counterintuitive, to be sure. But it’s so appropriate for this charmingly absurd sport.
It’s like Yogi Berra said: “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.” Berra, of course, earned a record 10 World Series rings — and won six of those titles as a visitor. No shock there: historically, more World Series have been clinched by the road team than the home team.
Maybe, said Seattle starter Bryce Miller, it does make sense. In the opener of this series, Miller wobbled at first, then unplugged the raucous Rogers Centre on his way to a 3-1 victory. The Blue Jays, with the roof closed and their fans ready to burst, had no hits after the second inning.
“I think you get a little extra when everybody’s yelling against you,” Miller said on Wednesday. “I don’t know, you have adrenaline either way pitching in the postseason, obviously every game matters. But you kind of have a little more edge being on the road, warming up in the bullpen, everybody’s screaming at you, telling you how bad you are, compared to a place where you’re comfortable.”
The Mariners are comfortable at the corner of Edgar & Dave, where they went 51-30 in the regular season. Their style of pitching — relentlessly pound the strike zone — works well in a ballpark where the thick air depresses doubles and triples.
A raucous home crowd couldn’t do much to help Mariners starter George Kirby in Game 3 of the ALCS. (Steven Bisig / Imagn Images)
But in the limited engagement of October, every team is strong enough to upend expectations. George Kirby has now made four postseason starts at home, and the Mariners have lost three. Kirby has pitched very well in three of those games. In the other, on Wednesday night, he gave up eight earned runs to tie a single-game postseason record.
Does Kirby block out the atmosphere or try to channel it to pitch better?
“It’s a little bit of both,” he said after Game 3. “I kind of like to embrace it all, walking out for warmups. I like to take that all in. And then game time is kind of tunnel vision. I hear the crowd, but it’s just me and Cal (Raleigh) and the batter.
“I mean, the crowd’s been awesome, and I do feel that, and that does energize me and a lot of the guys, so I hope that they just keep bringing it.”
Postseason baseball in Seattle is a blast. For a franchise that has never reached the World Series, the Mariners’ alumni club packs serious star power. Ken Griffey Jr. hyped up the crowd before the division series finale. Randy Johnson tossed the ceremonial first pitch on Wednesday.
Lou Piniella has been here this month. Jay Buhner, too. All of them helped build this place by sweeping the New York Yankees at home in the franchise’s first playoff series in 1995. A week or so later, though, the Cleveland Indians celebrated a pennant on that same Kingdome turf.
When the Mariners made it back to the playoffs two years later — the only season in which Griffey, Johnson and Alex Rodriguez were all healthy, impact players — they lost both their home games to the Baltimore Orioles. At their current park, they’re 6-8 in the playoffs.
It’s never an indictment of the fans. In 2019, when the World Series came to Washington for the first time since 1933, the fans flocked in force to see the Nationals lose three dismal home games, scoring one run each night.
No matter. The team won all four World Series games in Houston to earn a parade in D.C.
“The fans come out, they make noise, they really bring the energy and they’re loud,” Mariners right fielder Victor Robles, who played for the 2019 Nats, said through an interpreter on Wednesday. “But as a batter, you go in there and you tune everything out. It’s just you and the pitcher and you’re just trying to focus on that.
“And it’s baseball. Things are happening because that’s the way they’re supposed to happen.”
The 2019 Nationals aren’t even the foremost road warriors of the last few years. The 2023 Texas Rangers lost here on the final day of the regular season, which forced them to fly across the country and start the playoffs on the road against the Tampa Bay Rays.
No problem: the Rangers promptly swept through Tampa Bay, Baltimore, Houston and Arizona, going 11-0 on the road to win their only championship. On their World Series rings, they engraved the first letters of their opponents’ names – Rays, Orioles, Astros, Diamondbacks.
ROAD.