WEDNESDAY, June 9 (HealthDay News) -- If you're a baseball
coach, you might want to find out whether your pitchers consider
themselves to be morning larks or night owls, because a new study
suggests that their sleep preferences may affect their
performance.
The researchers found that people who say they're at their best
in the morning had a slight advantage in overall performance. But
those morning types don't perform as well at night as they do in
the morning. And night owls seem to have an advantage at night
games that just isn't there when they play earlier games.
"We showed that there was a tendency for morning-type pitchers to pitch better in the morning, and evening pitchers did a little better at night," explained study author Dr. W. Christopher Winter, medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Va.
"Overall, M-type [morning] pitchers are better pitchers. From a baseball perspective, if you're out scouting, someone who tells you that they're a morning type may be a better prospect," said Winter.
Winter was to present his findings Wednesday at SLEEP 2010, the
annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in
San Antonio.
Winter said the idea for this study came from previous work he
had done looking at the effects of traveling across time zones on
performance. That study found that teams traveling from West to
East were more likely to win than teams who traveled from East to
West.
The current study included 18 Major League Baseball pitchers
from the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies,
San Francisco Giants and Tampa Bay Rays.
The researchers determined through a questionnaire whether or
not the pitchers were morning or evening persons, which is called a
chronotype. Ten of the pitchers had an evening chronotype and eight
had a morning chronotype.
Using player statistics from the 2009 season, the researchers
analyzed 728 early innings and 845 late innings. Late games were
those that started after 7 p.m.
For early games, the earned-run average (ERA) for morning-type
pitchers was 3.11 compared to 3.49 for evening types. In night
games, the evening types had better ERAs (4.07) compared to the
morning types (4.11), the investigators found.
And although the study didn't have enough pitchers to definitely
conclude that morning types were better overall, the researchers
said there was a trend towards morning-types pitching better
overall.
"Sleep can really affect your health and performance," said Dr. Carl Boethel, medical director of the Scott & White Sleep Institute in Temple, Texas. "What's interesting about this study is, what are the implications for baseball? Will coaches test to see who's a morning type? And will it affect the way managers and coaches schedule players?"
But, he added, this is a very small study, and there are a lot
of variables that might have affected pitching performance, such as
sleep quality and duration.
For people who aren't Major League Baseball pitchers, this study
also has implications. "How we gear things in terms of the quality
of our work may be affected by the time of day. If you have to do
an important presentation, try to gear the presentation toward the
time of day you know you're at your best," Boethel suggested.
Winter said that he thinks many people "gravitate towards their
chronotypes in their work without even thinking about it. I don't
know anyone in my medical school class who was a morning lark," he
said.
But, sometimes people do have to work against their chronotype
and both Winter and Boethel said that sleep medicine doctors can
help people make the adjustment, whether it's temporary, such as
for business travel, or permanent, such as for shift work. Using
the sleep hormone melatonin, and bright lights, sleep doctors can
help shift the times you enter certain phases of sleep.
More information
The National Sleep Foundation explains how much sleep you really
need, and how you can try to work with your body's
sleep clock.