Do you root, root, root for the home team?
If you did last night …
Congratulations! Your team won.
Because last night, for the first time in baseball history (well, actually for the first time in any history), all 15 home major league baseball teams won their games.
And, for the first time ever, all 15 away major league teams lost.
(Stupid Baltimore.)
Because math is not my thing (in the same way that algebra, calculus, and trigonometry are not my things, inasmuch as they are math and, as I said, math is not my thing), I could not add up all the games that have ever been played to determine the average win percentage for home teams.
But, like always, I don’t need math. Because, Baseball Reference has already done all the mathy things required and found that, if you’re the home team, you are slightly more likely to win than lose your game. Home teams win about 54 percent of the time.
It’s just not likely that all you home teams will choose to do it on the same day.
All 30 major league teams actually playing on the same day doesn’t happen every day – because of off days and travel days and rain-out days and winter, not to mention the many decades when there were not 30 major league teams at all.
If your team won last night, please stop reading now. The rest of this post is not for you.
***
Dear Everybody Else, this is to cheer you up after your loss.
(Hey, winners, I knew you’d keep reading.)
One of the things that makes baseball spectularly better than any other sport is all the stuff there is to do when the game is at a break. Between innings there are songs to sing, games to play, mascots racing, trivia contests, and fan cams. So much to do!
There is the old favorite cap game. At Camden Yards in Baltimore it’s the Old Bay “Crab Shuffle”.
I just discovered that baseball has kindly put its cap game online so we no longer need to wait for a break between innings to play. Please forgive baseball’s abhorrently awful decision to use the Toronto Blue Jays cap. Play here.
Baseball’s popular cap game is a family-friendly version of the old street con Three Card Monte. Funny thing … Three Card Monte is expressly illegal in Canada.
So, I assume, is this cap game.
So, if you’re a Blue Jays fan in Toronto, please don’t play this game. (Also, if you’re a Blue Jays fan, your team won last night, why are you still reading this?)
The Baseball Bloggess 
I was going to look to see if the Cubs won last night but the odds are they were having an away game.
Take that bet, Gloria, because the odds-man was wrong! The Cubs were home last night and handily beat the Brewers 6-3. They also are comfortably holding the second wild card spot in the National League … still two months of ball left to play, but they are looking awfully good!
The Blue Jays are making themselves a story.
Ahhh, you’ve got on to my plan to out the Blue Jays for taking part in an illegal 3-Card Monte scheme. It’s illegal in Canada, and probably the best punishment would be for the Blue Jays to forfeit all their home wins this season. What’s that you say? That would put the Orioles back in the Wild Card race (and maybe even the AL East race)? Well, how about that!
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate plan b to keeping Josh Donaldson and the others off the bases.
Yes! I am the Lucy Ricardo of Plan B’s! :)
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I looked up the moon cycle calendar and August 11th was almost the dark side with only a hair of a crescent remaining. What a wild night or home sweet home. I forgot to check if there were multiple walk offs? I suspect the cap game’s origins were beads under a coconut shell Mesazoic, but the hey day had to be on urban street corners. Bil Veeck would love this post. A baseball game as more than baseball, as entertainment too.
Four of the 15 were walk-offs, including those pesky Mariners who stuck it to the Orioles in 10.
I was at the Orioles game and was enjoying the “Crab Shuffle” on Saturday night, (yay! I win!) when a friend mentioned that the last time the Red Sox played at Camden Yards they did a second Crab Shuffle on the scoreboard in very slow motion for Red Sox fans. OK, I sort of smiled.