Commentor Chris_L takes a look at the Timbers' travels this season and gives us an interesting breakdown of the frequent flier miles that the Timbers and several other teams will be accumulating this season.

Here's a map and total distance of Travel for the Portland Timbers for their MLS schedule. I assumed they would come home between away trips unless the two matches were less than a week apart. This was only the case for the RSL & LAG matches at the end of the season.

I also did the Seattle Sounders, Vancouver Whitecaps, Chicago Fire, and Toronto FC for comparison.

Timbers' Flight Plan = 41,448mi (74%)

Whitecaps' Flight Plan = 45,661mi (79%): This is the most mileage of the few teams I've checked. That is even with probably flying straight from Toronto to LA since the matches are only 3 days apart.

Seattle's Flight Plan = 40,114mi (72%): Seattle has slightly less, but it seems like 40k is about the norm for PNW teams

Fire's Flight Plan = 27,434mi (80%): I check Chicago since they are roughly in the "middle" of MLS. If anyone would like to do a weighted average to find the "center of mass" of MLS, I'd be curious.

Toronto's Flight Plan = 26,466mi (71%): I checked Toronto first because I was curious if having 7 road matches to start the season would change anything, but they have similar numbers to Chicago. I'll be curious how they compare to Montreal or New England.

I'll get to more teams as I have time. If you'd like to help, post the flight plan search string in the comments. Click on any of the above links to see the format.

Of the few teams I've looked at, no one has a clear scheduling advantage. It'll be interesting to see if any of the eastern conference teams never travel to the left coast or if any teams get to play NYCFC and NYRB back-to-back to shorten travel.

Updates:

I've also calculated the miles flown if there was a balanced schedule of 19 away matches assuming the teams always return home between matches. This would be 2 more away matches than the MLS schedule, so I'm including a percentage after each mileage. The percentage is (MLS Mileage*19) / (Balanced Mileage*17) *100. A lower percentage shows a favorable away schedule.

Orlando's Flight Plan = 43,803mi (89%): Similar to the PNW teams. It sucks being down in the corning of the country all by yourself. They also get the least benefit of the unbalanced schedule at 89% of full.

NYRB's Flight Plan = 26,759 mi (65%): As pointed out by richard.hamje in the comments, NYRB only travel to the west coast for two matches and Orlando once, but they still don't quite beat out Toronto for the fewest miles. They are currently the team most benefitting from the unbalanced schedule at 65% of full.

NYCFC's Flight Plan = 28,738 mi (69%): To compare two teams whose airport's are only 21mi apart, NYCFC will travel ~2,000mi further than their barely-out-of-state rival.

Union's Flight Plan = 28,171 mi (70%): Less than 100mi from Newark and JFK, the Union have very similar mileage. No big surprise here other than to point out how NYRB got a really great travel schedule.

Crew's Flight Plan = 26,837 mi (76%): Nearly as short as the NY teams. They have a couple short-stop away matches where they can fly directly to the next match on short rest. If it weren't for flying to Orlando twice, they'd probably have the fewest miles.

The Maps

...more to come.