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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed that the MLB, with ~2X the number of games, manages to travel less than the NBA. I wonder if it's a venue availability issue or a better traveling salesman algorithm.

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Baseball teams tend to play multiple games in a row against the same team--I'm guessing this is why they travel fewer miles.

And when they do have to travel in a way that would impact their performance, it's major news (in the baseball world) for days. I remember when the Detroit Tigers had 4 games within 48 hours in different timezones [1] and the MLB got some serious criticism for it. The Tigers had to pull some of their best (and highest paid) players due to lack of sleep.

[1] https://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2017/05/26/det...

Twice last season, the Giants had to play in Denver (5200 feet altitude) traveling from other cities with no off day. One of these was a day game immediately following a night game in Chicago.

Well off the top of my head, most of the time baseball teams play 3-4 games in a series in the same place.

In basketball, lets say you're an east coast team, they'll usually schedule a tour of all 4 LA teams, but you have to play every Western team once, but not all at once.

  all 4 LA teams

How many NBA teams are there in L.A., again?

Baseball is a very local sport, you play the teams nearby you considerably more than you play any other teams. Also, as others mention, they’ll play multiple games in one location.

MLB teams generally play three-game series, so for scheduling purposes you have approximately 162/3 = 54 "games".

And half of those are home matchups with no traveling!

That's true, but the same is true for the NBA.

Mostly just that the MLB plays series of games.

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