I recently took a trip to Europe - an amazing time - but with the long flight to and from the West Coast, found my body really paying the price in terms of jetlag.
One of the nights after my return to California, as I lay awake at 5 am, body still mostly on Spain time, I realized that professional sports teams are doing a small-scale version of this every few days: flying from Oakland to Houston to Seattle and back, then hitting the road again.
With the physical/mental costs of travel clearly apparent in that moment, and with research continually highlighting how important sleep is to athlete performance, I thought it might be interesting to identify the most-traveled teams in baseball, which seem likely to have a natural disadvantage in sleep quality relative to their peers.
Take a peek at the visualizations below to compare the different teams and divisions across the MLB!
Mapping Travel Distance
Visualizing Travel by Division
Trending Travel by Team over the Years
