Bradley Lanier
3/29/16
Jet Lag Effect on Baseball
This article discussed how Jet-Lag could ultimately effect a major league baseball game. The researchers suggested that, given the data, a team that has to cross three time zones to play a game has a 60% chance of losing. The collected data used in this study spanned over 24,121 MLB games from 1997 to 2006. The researchers suggested that it takes a person about one full day to acclimate to a change in time. With that being said when a team is on an all road stretch of games it’s very difficult for the players to get adequate time to acclimate their body to the changes. The main reason why this is so important when talking about advantages in baseball is, because of the season length in the MLB teams are constantly on the road and constantly playing. The difference between the MLB and other professional sports is within major league baseball a division spans all over the country and isn’t centralized in one specific region. Many teams are forced to travel through a multitude of different time zones throughout the entire baseball season meaning that the home team does have an advantage over the away team if that team is in a different time zone. A silver lining from this research is that throughout all the games studied, only 16 games out of 24,121 were played where a team travelled through all three time zones to reach their opponent. Although there are a finite amount of games in which the away team had to travel this distance those games could still play an important role in determining whether or not a team makes the playoffs or falls short at the end.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/out-of-the-zone-jet-lagge/
EnviPhys 