Jet lag proved to impact games - MLB

[RolandDeschain]

I'm fine with the theory, but it's weird to say that "hard, accurate, unbiased science isn't fashionable" in the context of this thread, as the actualy findings of the study under question contradict your theory.

Remember, the finding is that east coast teams returning from a west coast game suffer a small performance penalty in their next home game on the east coast.

It doesn't contradict my theory. There's another reason. What happens when you fly a few time zones to the west? You go to sleep a little bit later, but you still get a full night's sleep in terms of how many hours later your alarm goes off. What happens when you fly east? You can't get to sleep at your normal time, stay up later, but wind up having to get up at that same hour on the clock which is less actual sleep for you. It's very simple. However, they've also found that maximum physical performance for people comes in the late afternoon. Another factor in sports, obviously.

If your theory about air pressurization was having an effect they would find a performance penalty for east coast teams when they play on the west coast, west coast teams when they play on the east coast, west coast teams in their next home game after returning to the east, and so on (add north and south, although I don't know if they tested that).

The effect is more exacerbated for the reason I just mentioned above when going west to east. Also, it's not "my theory," it's a fact - and now that you challenged me on it, I decided to hunt it down. Here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17611205
502 people tested in hypobaric chambers at varying altitudes of pressurization up to 8,000' feet.

Now, tell me why NFL teams aren't flying their players at lower pressurization? Because overcoming popular opinion is a surprisingly difficult task, despite hard science; and a lot of people intersperse science with belief, which is just plain frustrating; and that goes just as much for people on both sides of the political spectrum.

In this thread the closest thing we have to a "hard, accurate, unbiased" study is basically being ignored because nobody wants to move off their priors.

Check the information I've just provided and get back to me on this one.

(all that said, to reiterate, I still have major doubts about this study, which are entirely about the effect they found, not the wide array of non-effects they found -- they have data from 48,600 games, if there was an effect going on they'd be picking it up, and I strongly suspect they're just slicing up their data in convoluted ways to save their study and have a finding they could publish on).

Yeah, meta-studies are becoming increasingly popular but people (and scientists!) are putting too much faith in them in some ways, or reading too much into them; probably as a compensation mechanism because of how large of a sample size they can get, so they inaccurately judge the accuracy of some of the conclusions they draw.

 

[AVL]

I just don't see how you can justify a visiting team dictation the time a game should be played. Hell, the home team doesn't even have any say. No one travels west and demands the game be played at 10 a.m., do they?

 

[Popeyejones]

It doesn't contradict my theory. There's another reason. What happens when you fly a few time zones to the west? You go to sleep a little bit later, but you still get a full night's sleep in terms of how many hours later your alarm goes off. What happens when you fly east? You can't get to sleep at your normal time, stay up later, but wind up having to get up at that same hour on the clock which is less actual sleep for you.

Remember though, they found no effect for west coast teams playing on the east coast.

The effect is only for east coast teams playing a home game after returning from the west coast.

They try to explain this away with the (pretty clearly, IMO) post-hoc hypothesis that west coast teams aren't effected by playing on the east coast because schedules are more regimented when you're playing one the road, but the findings of this paper do not support the theory you're forwarding.

That doesn't mean it's wrong, but there's no evidence to support it in this analysis.

(just to reiterate and be clear though, I strongly, strongly suspect they're just p-hacking, and the real result of this paper is that in these 20 years of data there's no jet lag effect -- they just salvaged the project through data dredging, which unfortunately happens pretty regularly, IMO).

 

[AgentDib]

I do agree that taking anything from a study like this as a fact is dubious as their incentive is always to provide a result of significance. Nobody gets tenure for saying there were too many degrees of freedom and thus the result was inconclusive. That being said, the study makes sense to me in the context of MLB where east coast players will just have spent 3-7 nights on the west coast slightly wrecking their sleep schedules, and their west coast trips are infrequent enough that this effect can be overlooked.

 

[RolandDeschain]

Remember though, they found no effect for west coast teams playing on the east coast.

The effect is only for east coast teams playing a home game after returning from the west coast.

Huh? Where does the link say that?

Eastward travel was linked to pitchers allowing more home runs, both at home and away. The difference came to roughly one home run every 10 games.

Eastward travel "away" would not be east coast-based teams.

They try to explain this away with the (pretty clearly, IMO) post-hoc hypothesis that west coast teams aren't effected by playing on the east coast because schedules are more regimented when you're playing one the road, but the findings of this paper do not support the theory you're forwarding.

That doesn't mean it's wrong, but there's no evidence to support it in this analysis.

I think you may have misread part of the article. Read what I just quoted above and read the article again and come back to me? Pitchers were worse traveling eastward, period - home or away.

 

[Popeyejones]

^^^ convert that back into the real world though And it equals to home run every 2 1/2 years.

They found no effect for the litany of other ways they tried to eek a finding out of their null effects for west coast teams traveling to the east coast.

When traveling to the east coast why are batters unaffected for singles, doubles, triples, and home runs? Why are pitchers unaffected for single doubles triples and walks?

Why are teams unaffected for wins?

The problem with testing a litany of things and getting no effect is that when you finally do eek out an effect the basic conclusion is still that you find a data anomaly within the sea of non-effects (particularly when the effect is a pretty meaningless one in the real world).

 

[RolandDeschain]

This isn't even a study; I don't like the fact that meta-analysis of other peoples' work even gets called a "study" nowadays. I showed you proof of sustained elevated air pressure having an effect on people, and gave a logical explanation regarding the time zone differential aspect, though I'm not aware of any studies that have studied solely that part of it, excluding the other effects of jet lag.

 

[RiverDog]

You know how you fix that...you beat Arizona at home, perhaps not lose to Tampa Bay, make a field goal in OT in Arizona Or score even ONE touch down against the Rams, you know the same team the Niners beat 28-0 the week before. Any of those scenarios would basically have locked the #2 seed. So yeah I'm not pointing to jet lag as some unfair reason the Hawks couldn't get to the SB.

Jet lag is an excuse losers use to justify their poor play. Teams have always had to travel, and it's far easier today than it was in the past when teams had to ride on trains and busses for two and three times as long than they do nowadays on planes. Additionally, we tend to forget that there were teams from the east coast that spent the entire week away from their homes in hotels out here rather than travel back and forth. Carolina, for example, played the Raiders in Oakland, spent the week out here, then came up to Seattle to play us. They lost both games.

Having said that, I don't see why if the league can cater to the whining of teams like the Steelers and Giants, who don't like traveling to the west coast, why they couldn't create a scheduling criteria for the 5 teams located in the Pacific time zone to where they would not be placed in the 10:00 am PT time slot when they play on the east coast. We're not talking about that many games.

 

[Popeyejones]

This isn't even a study; I don't like the fact that meta-analysis of other peoples' work even gets called a "study" nowadays. I showed you proof of sustained elevated air pressure having an effect on people, and gave a logical explanation regarding the time zone differential aspect, though I'm not aware of any studies that have studied solely that part of it, excluding the other effects of jet lag.

This isn't a meta-analysis, though.

It is a study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/ ... e7c9fdc8d1

You and I disagree about the usefulness of meta-analyses, but this ain't one.

As for if what you're saying is true or not, I am (honestly) not making any evaluative statement about that -- it's well beyond what I have any knowledge about.

We can conclude, however, that there's no evidence of what you're talking about having a real world effect in the 20 years of MLB data they analyzed.

That doesn't mean it's not true, it just means that there's no evidence of it having a real world effect in these data (or rather, there's very scattered and contradictory evidence for it, which makes me suspect these guys are p-hacking).

 

[RolandDeschain]

You and I have a core disagreement about what a scientific study is, then. Zero original research, zero original evidence gathering, zero attempts at reproducing something to try and verify you get the same results...Not a study.

Hell, by the definition you're calling this a study for, I can just read five other studies, list my own conclusions based off of them, and I did a study. Wow, it turns out my forum posts about other peoples' studies have been studies of my own for years around here. Where can I get published?

 

[Largent80]

One doesn't need a study to know that flying East is tougher, it's been proven for decades. Another thing proven for decades is the ridiculous NFL refusing to change it up for the few teams it affects.