Time on their side
Baseball teams adjusted to the time zone may have an advantage
BALTIMORE — There’s no clock in baseball, but teams may do better or worse depending on the timing of their biological clocks.
Teams better acclimated to the time zone they are playing in have a circadian advantage over teams that are not yet used to the time zone, researchers in Virginia report. Examination of a decade’s worth of major league games shows that teams with this circadian advantage won 52 percent of the time. Those results were presented Tuesday, June 10 in Baltimore at SLEEP 2008, the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
The outcome of only a few games is affected each season, but “even if it’s small, small makes a difference,” at the level of professional and elite sports, says Cheri Mah, a researcher at the Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory. Mah was not involved in the study but has worked with athletes to see how sleep affects their performance.
“Every year there’s one team that misses the playoffs by one game,” says W. Christopher Winter of MarthaJeffersonHospital’s SleepMedicineCenter in Charlottesville, who led the study. “When the stakes are that high, this small advantage gets magnified. If this were any other industry, it probably wouldn’t matter.”