Home Field Advantage

It's approaching summer. With the NBA and NHL playoffs in full swing, it's just days until baseball is the only game in town.

Like cricket, baseball is as much a cultural ritual as it is a sport. Its minutiae have been analyzed and over-analyzed to no end. Baseball attracts statistics-minded people like no other athletic endeavor, and they find endless joy in dissecting the odd numbers of the game.

I'll spare you a broad discussion of these details. Here's a single aspet of baseball that I find enchanting: I can think of no other game in which the basic layout of the field varies wildly from venue to venue. Rob Neyer discusses these geographic quirks and how they can dramatically affect the outcome of a baseball game.