That's assuming the road team scores....as they still have the advantage of knowing exactly how many runs they need.
That said, there are a lot of games where they end up in the front of the pen eventually and give up massive crooked innings or just give up 3-4-5 and the home team is sunk psychologically.
From 1957 to 2007 in MLB, home teams won 54% of games but just 52% of extra inning games, for example.
Thought this Quora comment from 2020 season was pretty prophetic...
"I think it’s yet one more terrible idea by commissioner Rob Manfred, a person who clearly does not really understand, appreciate, or care about the game of baseball.
All he seems to care about is speeding up the game, simplifying it, and homogenizing its unique characteristics to make it more convenient and less interesting, partly for financial reasons I presume, and based on the “crackpot” theory that more young fans will flock to the sport if it can become more like other sports that take less time, involve faster-paced scoring, and have less complex rules.
I don’t think butchering the game with the kinds of “innovations” he’s mostly been proposing are going to improve the game in any way, nor attract new and younger fans. Instead, the changes are just frustrating existing fans and devaluing the game for those who truly understand and love it
I guess I can kind of understand the rationale of trying to speed up the conclusion of extra-inning games in a shortened season. But just starting with a runner on second who didn’t earn his way on there seems so artificial and arbitrary.
Why not have the catchers just arm wrestle for the win after the 11th inning? Or shorten innings after the 10th or 11th to just two outs each.
I don’t think this shortened season should count as a regular baseball season anyway. There won’t be enough games to determine meaningul division leaders and playoff winners. I think instead it should be played as a special “exhibition season” which will have its own playoffs and championship series at the end. However the results should forever be listed separately, as a different class if achievements during an oddball special case season, rather than pretending that AL and NL pennants and a World Series trophy earned this year count the same as those earned in any other regular season.
From this point of view, if they want to use some cockamamie special rule to shorten extra inning games just this year, I guess it’s not the absolute worst option. But I’m pretty sure if they do it will just be used as a “back door” way to shove the same “innovation” down everyone’s throats in an upcoming regular season as a permanent change.
I’m not one of those people who say nothing about baseball can ever change. It’s changed before and will change again. But a lot of Manfred’s ideas for “improving the game” to give it broader appeal are just idiotic “time-savers” that dilute the game and introduce more randomness to the outcomes, without yielding appreciable benefits of any kind."