Does Air Travel Adversely Affect Team Performance in Major League Baseball?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47611/jsr.v12i4.2269Keywords:
Major League Baseball, air travel, linear regressionAbstract
Previous studies of the effects of air travel on team performance in baseball focused on jet lag, namely, teams that traveled across at least two time zones between games. But baseball teams that travel extensively up and down either the West or East Coast do not cross one (let alone two) time zones. For the years between 2019 and 2022 (including the COVID-19 pandemic-shortened 2020 season), the authors relate the difference between a team’s season-long winning percentage at home less its winning percentage on the road to the total regular season-long number of miles traveled for the 15 teams in each league. Save for a pair of teams in the American League in 2020, the authors find that there is no statistically discernible relationship between the number of miles traveled per season and the difference between home and away team win percentages.
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A. Song, T. Severini, and R. Allada, “Jet Lag Impairs Major League Baseball Performance,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 7, 2017, Vol. 114, No. 6, pp. 1407-1412.
Baseball Savant at https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/visuals/map for 2019 through 2022.
TeamRankings at https://www.teamrankings.com/mlb/trend/win_trends/is_home and
https://www.teamrankings.com/mlb/trend/win_trends/is_home?sc=is_away for 2019
through 2022.
A. Gonzalez, “Athletics Have Begun Las Vegas Relocation Process, Rob Manfred Says,”
ESPN, July 11, 2023 at https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/37995930/athletics-begun-las-vegas-relocation-process-rob-manfred-says.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Ciro Diaz, Luke T. Hannan, Jesus Pedroza, Kenneth Sanchez; Paul Martin Sommers
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