Home-field advantage exists in all sports, and in MLB it's around 4% (the home teams win 54% of all games). However, baseball has the distinction in that the home offense always gets the last chance (unless they are already ahead, in which case the game ends). My question is whether batting second is an advantage apart from home-field, but in MLB there are never any neutral site games. So, I turned to the College World Series, where all games are neutral site, to try to answer this question.
For the College World Series, I collected data going back 25 years, through 1989. Of these games, the team batting second won 55.53% of their games. However, the higher seeded teams are the teams that get to bat in the bottom half of the inning. So, I went back through 1995 (the first year teams were nationally seeded) and found that the higher seeded team won 54.03% of the time. The difference between these two figures then should be the advantage gained from batting second (from the games in which neither team is seeded): 1.50%.
Extending this to MLB (which assumes that this advantage for batting second is the same at the professional level) means that 2.5% of home-field advantage comes from the home-field itself, and the other 1.5% from batting in the bottom of the inning.
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