Circadian Advantage in Major League Baseball

Abstract

Sleep researcher Chris Winter, MD, had just finished compiling “jet lag” and game outcome data for 22,855 Major League Baseball games over a nine-year span. His interest was to see whether jet lag affected which team won/lost professional baseball games. Was the win percentage higher for the team that was less jet lagged? And if it was higher, was the difference significant enough to warrant publication?Students are given an Excel spreadsheet with 43,710 rows of data (each game appears twice, one from each team's point of view), and asked to use these data to answer the research questions. Excerpt UVA-QA-0780 Rev. Mar. 15, 2012 Circadian Advantage in Major League Baseball Chris Winter, MD, breathed a sigh of relief as he scrolled through the 43,710 rows of the recently completed Excel spreadsheet containing nine years of Major League Baseball (MLB) game data. The current director of Martha Jefferson Hospital's Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, Winter had been involved with sleep medicine and sleep research since 1992. In addition to treating patients, directing the center, competing in triathlons, raising three children with his wife Ames, and conducting traditional research, Winter devoted most of his “spare” time to studying how sleep affected athletic performance. The spreadsheet had taken more hours to compile than he cared to admit, but everything looked right. He was about to find out whether “jet lag” affected the outcomes of MLB games. Circadian Time and Circadian Advantage . . .