Projo Fantasy Sports Blog

By Michael Salfino

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) says baseball teams that have "synchronized" with their time zones are more more likely to win when playing a team that hasn't had at least one day to adjust for every time zone crossed.

Major League Baseball funded this study of "circadian advantage" after a more limited one in 2004 suggested it impacted the outcome of games.

This doesn't necessarily mean that teams traveling to the East Coast from the West (or vice versa) are at a disadvantage. Sometimes, as was the case last night when Arizona visited New York and thumped the Mets, the visiting team actually has the advantage. The Mets were traveling back from San Diego while the Diamondbacks had been on Eastern Standard Time since June 6.

The AASM looked at teams traveling across more than one time zone between 1997 and 2006, finding 5,046 instances. Teams traveling two time zones won 48 percent of the time. And when teams traveled three time zones with less than the three days needed to adjust, they won just 40 percent of the time.

While that seems like a slam dunk, 3,681 of these games combined home-field advantage with circadian advantage. The author of the study, Dr. Chris Winter of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Va., told the L.A. Times that, "It is important to realize that the home-field advantage, as it has been defined in the past, probably includes a fair amount of circadian advantage."

However, the winning percentage declines dramatically when looking at only games where the visiting team had the circadian advantage (wins in 619 of 1,365 games). Ideally, we'd isolate games where road teams had a three-time-zone advantage (like the Diamondbacks last night) and see if that .450 winning percentage moves closer to the .600 we see overall. However, that data is not included in the study.

This study does provide a reasonable basis for expecting the performance of teams and players to suffer when they are at a three-time-zone disadvantage and for that decline to last until "synchronization" has taken place (up to three games later).

The sleep academy says athletes can overcome these effects by readjusting their sleep schedule before traveling (by going to bed earlier). That does not seem like a reasonable request for young, jet-setting millionaire athletes, especially when combined with the recommendation to "avoid rigorous exercise within six hours of bedtime." How is a baseball player supposed to do that when games sometimes end past 11 p.m. local time? That means going to bed at 5 a.m. local time and waking up well past noon. So forget about day games after night games.

Usually I make related recommendations here. But avoiding guys the first day or two after they travel multiple time zones isn't forward looking enough for our format. So let's take this opportunity to make more general recommendations.

Buy

Curtis Granderson, OF, Tigers: He's hitting .240 on balls in play (not including homers). Average is .300 and he hit .360 last year. Bet he's being monumentally unlucky.

Pedro Martinez, P, Mets: He's hitting 93 mph on the gun. He's made hitters look silly in the high 80s. The shoulder is fine. If everything else stays healthy, he will be a monster going forward.

Ryan Franklin, P, Cardinals: More proof that closer is the most overrated role in baseball. Franklin is far from dominating but can manage three outs without yielding multi-run leads and thus will continue holding off ingénue Chris Perez.

Hold

Aaron Harang, P, Reds: Fly-ball and line-drive rates are way up, meaning more homers and hits. Normalize the batting average allowed on balls in play, and his E.R.A. is 3.78. Instead it's a half run higher. Expect improvement, but don't buy a guy allowing seeds 25 percent of the time.

J.D. Drew, OF, Red Sox: He's converting 18 percent of fly balls into homers, double last year's rate but in line with 2004 and 2005. He's getting fat pitches hitting in front of Manny Ramirez as long as David Ortiz (wrist) is out (perhaps all year).

Ryan Ludwick, OF, Cardinals: All big leaguers are in the 99.9th percentile of baseball ability. Ludwick has never gotten a real chance before, so we don't know that this is a fluke. There's been plus power in past years over small sample sizes. His home park is not friendly, but he's even slugging .580 there (.736 on the road).

Sell

Brett Myers, P, Phillies: He's always allowed an inordinate amount of homers. His rate this year of 18 percent of fly balls landing over the wall is not significantly higher than past seasons, and he's in the wrong park for a correction.

Joba Chamberlain, P, Yankees: Take all reliever stats and inflate everything about 30 percent when they go into a starting role. He has to learn to pace himself and mix in more secondary stuff to hitters seeing him three and four times a game. This takes time.

Milton Bradley, OF, Rangers: His power spiked last year and he's held those dramatic gains in '08 -- homers on 24 percent of flyballs. He's in the right park for that. But the .380 on balls in play is unsustainable; so expect a big average correction.

Justin Verlander, P, Tigers: He's allowing 36 percent of baserunners to score instead of the 30 we'd expect. But the declining K-rate is very troubling. Only 12 percent of his strikes are swinging, which is below league average. Seize the first selling opportunity.

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