One of the more interesting pieces of baseball news this week was a study on jet lag and how it affects performance in MLB.
The study was performed by Alex Song, Thomas Severini and Ravi Allada and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzing 20 years (1992-2011) and 46,535 games of data. Specifically, they were interested in teams that traveled at least two time zones, and the immediate effects on performance.
A summary:
Accounting for potential differences in home and away performance, travel direction, and team confounding variables, we observed that jet-lag effects were largely evident after eastward travel with very limited effects after westward travel, consistent with the >24-h period length of the human circadian clock.