Joe Morgan on why he prefers the format of alternating home-field advantage for the World Series between the AL and the NL, versus using the teams’ records to decide:
That’s not a fair solution, though, because each league has unbalanced schedules, and there’s no way to ensure that each World Series team will have played a comparable schedule. Therefore, it’s virtually impossible to assess fairly whether one team deserves home-field advantage over another based solely on their won-loss records.
True, schedules aren’t perfectly comparable, especially in an AL-NL game (at least in the Division Series and Championship Series, you could argue that even with unbalanced schedules and interleague each side has mostly played the same teams). But we make do with imperfect comparisons in the DS and CS. Heck, we even make imperfect comparisons to decide who enters the playoffs: the Sox’s interleague schedule isn’t quite the same as the Y*nk**s’. Imperfect means of comparisons still strike me as preferable to pure randomness - which is essentially giving up of all comparisons. Last year, the Marlins would’ve had home-field advantage under the old format. I think, for the sake of fairness, it was right that New York had the advantage: should a wild-card team that went 91-71 have home-field advantage over a team that went 101-61 in winning its division? It was right that New York had home-field (even though the means through which that happened wasn’t right), just as it was sweet to watch the Marlins clinch the Series in the Bronx.
I sense some NL-got-gypped sentiment on Mr Morgan’s part.