Will Time of Day Affect An Athletes Performance?
Background Material and Methods
• My problem goes back to my love of the sport baseball for
the past nine years of my life. As I have grown up, the
logistics of the sport of baseball has sparked an interest in
me; the statistics, science, etc. When pondering
mathematical projects relating to baseball, I had a memory
of being so relieved when hearing the great news that my
next game would be during the night opposed to the day.
The reason being that playing in the hot sun in the hottest
part of summer was very exhausting and was tougher for
me to focus on success. So that’s what made me wonder,
do professional athletes have the same issue? I decided to
go through the statistic of every MLB MVP candidate and
record how they did every game of the 2021 season and
decide if the majority performed better during night or
day. Coming into this I expect to see more data leaning
towards better performance during night, although it
might be neutral based on a study by scientists Elise
Facer-Childs, Sophie Boiling, and George Balanos who
stated: “results provide evidence to support the notion that
‘night owls’ are compromised earlier in the day” (par. 5).
This information could help these players and other
athletes around the world figure out if they should prepare
more for day or night contest.
Objectives
While recording my data for each of the six
players, I had four things in mind that I planned
to solve with all the data that pertains to the
player base and to each individual player:
⬜Determine their H/AB* in each Time-
of -day.
⬜Determine whether it was close or if
the athletes play was noticeably
better in day or night.
⬜Point out any possible outliers in the
data.
⬜Come to a conclusion whether the
majority of the population of players
is better during a select time of day.
*Hits per at-bat
Results continued
Materials
● Computer
● Access to internet access
● Office 365
● Six excel Spreadsheets
Method(s)
1. Set up each excel spreadsheets with the following
sections: player name, H/AB, time of game and date of
game.
2. Load the website www.baseball-reference.com for access
to each game of the season that the specific player
played in.
3. Record how many hits he had for each at-bat (H/AB) as
well as what time the game was, and the date it was
played.
Results
• The results show that most of the players
are very equal in skill when it comes to
whether they perform better during day or
night which is expected of a professional
athlete. Below and above this are a bit of
the data collected. Along with this I have
the remaining data for the other players
included in other excel spreadsheets.
Results for F. Tatis Jr.
(
Below are some data pulled from the
spreadsheet.
Effects of time-of-day training preference on resistance-exercise
Facer-Childs, E. R., Boiling, S., & Balanos, G. M. (2018, October
This is data recorded that helped
with the conclusion that skill is not
too heavily affected by the time of
day.
Conclusion
• My research proved my hypothesis to an
extent. I hypothesized that there would
be a drastic skill increase during the
night, and ended up concluding that it is
pretty neutral and that it is not fully
dependent on time of day. This
conclusion is backed up by another
similar study done by scientist
Christopher Ballmann where he
observes: “ time-of-training preference
did not largely influence resistance-
exercise performance" (par. 1). It is good
to know that my conclusion was
reasonably backed up by another study.
My only issue with the data collected is
that it is always going to be different
based on the type of person evaluated.
This study could easily be extended
simply by testing athletes of different
age, level and from different sports.
References
performance. Taylor & Francis. (n.d.). Retrieved September
16, 2021, from
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02701367.2020.
1751032
.
24). The effects of time of day and chronotype on cognitive and
physical performance in Healthy Volunteers - Sports Medicine.
Open. Retrieved September 16, 2021, from
https://sportsmedicine-open.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186
/s40798-018-0162-z
.