Home (sports)

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In sports, home is a term referring to both the city and stadium, arena, or field where an athletic team plays games at their venue, whilst when the team plays elsewhere then they are considered the away team. The home term can refer to either the sponsoring institution or the place where it is franchised.^[1] Most professional teams represent cities and amateur sports teams often represent cities or academic institutions. Each team has a location where it practices during the season and where it hosts games. This is referred to has the home court, home field, home stadium, or home arena.^[2] When a team is serving as host of a contest, it is designated as the "home team". The event is described as a "home game" for that team and the venue that the game is being played is described as the "home field."^[3] In most sports, there is a home field advantage whereby the home team wins more frequently because it has a greater familiarity with the nuances of the venue and because it has more fans cheering for it, which supposedly give the players adrenaline and an advantage.^{[citation needed]} The opposing team is said to be the visiting team, the away team, or the road team.

In baseball, sometimes, when teams are playing a makeup game from an earlier game postponed by rain, the game may have to be made up in the other team's stadium. An example of this occurred on September 26th, 2007, with a game between the Cleveland Indians, who were the "home" team, but the game was played vs. the Seattle Mariners in Safeco Field, with their fans, etc.^[4]

A spectator can often tell which team is home by looking at the field of play. Often a home team logo, insignia or name is in the middle of the field at center ice, midfield, or center court. Also, the logo, insignia or name may be found atop a dugout in baseball or in the end zone in American football.

Additionally, in baseball and basketball, the home team will typically choose to wear the lighter colored version of its uniform. In fact, many teams have a home uniform which is mostly white and referred to as the "home whites".^{[citation needed]} The road team will generally wear a version of its uniform with one of the darker of its official colors as the main color, or in baseball with a grey main color referred to as the "road greys". In American football and hockey, the home team tends to wear uniforms that feature their team colors, whereas the visiting team will wear white or a lighter color.^{[citation needed]}

A television viewer will also have the aid of the team positions in the screen where the visiting team is listed first, either to the left of or above the name of the home team on the score display during the telecast. In the United States, the same positional indication is standard convention in sports broadcasting such as SportsCenter and sports reporting ESPN BottomLine and general box scores (especially the line score portion of the box score), such as those found in newspapers. In baseball the scorekeeping/reporting convention is so prevalent that innings are divided into top and bottom halves to distinguish the team's offensive output throughout the game.^{[citation needed]}

Typically, the home team not only hosts its opponent, but also the media and the officials (referees, umpires, etc.).

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