In advice to team managers and coaches, Dr. Ravi Allada, from Northwestern University, argues that attention should be paid to coping with jet lag and different time zones if teams wish to improve player performances.
Dr. Allada has found that when baseball players travel in a way that impacts upon their internal 24-hour clock, especially where the natural environment is affected they suffer negative consequences. The biggest impact comes when players miss out on daylight.
In a statement provided to Digital Journal, Dr. Allada said: “Jet lag does impair the performance of Major League Baseball players.” Being an expert on circadian rhythms (which affect the 24-hour cycle that the human body follows), the researcher added: “the negative effects of jet lag we found are subtle, but they are detectable and significant. And they happen on both offense and defense and for both home and away teams, often in surprising ways.”
Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a roughly twenty-four hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness in a person’s environment.
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The findings are based on twenty years of research (1992 to 2011), where the researcher and his team reviewed 40,000 games. Statistical computational methods were used to interpret the data. In studying the games note was taken of the travel itinerary of the players. Factors accounted for included direction of travel; number of hours a player was potentially jet-lagged for; the number of time zones crossed and so on. Jet lagged was defined as a two hour or greater shift in time.
This review produced some interesting observations:
An offense jet-lagged home team is affected more greatly than a jet-lagged away team. Here jet lag from eastward travel has a more negative effect on home teams (after returning from a road trip) and less of an impact upon away teams.
Negative effects on offense related most greatly to base running, particularly things like stolen bases, the number of doubles and triples, and hitting into more double plays.
Both home and away teams suffer on defense in relation to jet lag. This is in terms of giving up more home runs.
There is a clear difference between traveling east and traveling west in the U.S. With this finding, significant jet-lag effects are stronger for eastward than westward travel.
As to how to overcome this time-based disadvantaged, Dr. Allada recommends sending the team to the location where the game will be played at least two days in advance of the contest.
The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it is called “How Jet Lag Impairs Major League Baseball Performance.”
