Travel is an inevitable part of baseball’s long 162-game season. In 2018, the Royals will leave Kansas City 12 times, covering a total of approximately 26,600 miles, more than enough to circumnavigate the equator. However, the Royals will travel the eighth-fewest miles of all MLB teams, according to this fun mapping project, which estimates the Mariners’ seasonal travel at over 40,000 miles.
In addition to the inherent time/resource use involved in travel, the accompanying jet lag can have a very real effect on player performance, according to this 2017 post from Science Magazine.
In fact, jetlag’s effects can even cancel out the home field advantage for some teams returning from away games…The effects were almost always worse for teams going east, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.