HENDRICKSVILLE, Ind. -- When sports statistician Jeff Sagarin arrives at the two-room Rose's Diner here most Monday mornings at 7 a.m., his watch reads 6:14 a.m.

That's perfectly logical, he says. But convincing the rest of Indiana he's right is proving a challenge.

The Hoosier state has never been a simple place to tell time. Of its 92 counties, 77 have been on Eastern Standard Time year-round, ignoring daylight-saving time. That means they're off an hour from adjacent states like Ohio, but only for about half the year. An additional five Indiana counties change their watches each spring and fall along with Eastern states, while 10 others keep Central time along with Chicago.

Vowing to end the clock confusion, Indiana's state Legislature voted earlier this year to put the whole state on daylight-saving time. That law will take effect starting in April 2006. But Indiana's legislators created a confusing new wrinkle: it was left to individual counties to decide what time zone to be in, Central or Eastern.

Enter Mr. Sagarin, a number-cruncher known for his sports-team ratings published in USA Today. He has reams of data to prove his case that Central time is better for Indiana. He got into email exchanges with Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, provided statistics for Central time proponents to use at county commission hearings, and joined calls for a statewide referendum on what time it is.

Mr. Sagarin's main argument is astronomical. In theory, the sun should be overhead at noon. But under Eastern Daylight Time, the sun wouldn't reach its highest point in parts of Indiana until as late as 2:01 p.m. some days during the summer. That's because the state is so much farther west than seaboard states like Massachusetts or North Carolina. In Central time, clocks read an hour earlier.

"It's geographically wrong and the net result is that you're out of sync with the sun," says Mr. Sagarin, who has pressed his campaign from Rose's red and white dining room, which also doubles as a shrine to nearby Indiana University's men's basketball team.

Mr. Sagarin's research hasn't swayed many state business leaders, who say Indiana conducts more business with companies on the East Coast than in the central part of the country, and should stick to Eastern time.

"I haven't gotten into this 'How the World Turns' argument," says Kevin Brinegar, president of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. "Three states around us, directly north and south, are also in the Eastern time zone and we think it would be better to be in sync with them."

A graying, 57-year-old who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Sagarin is a life-long sports fan who developed a mathematical formula in 1971 to rank sports teams. His formula took into account the difficulty of each team's schedule and factors such as home-field advantage. USA Today began printing his men's basketball ratings in 1985, and he now earns a living ranking everything from professional hockey to women's college volleyball for several publications.

Mr. Sagarin says his logical mind cannot accept Eastern Daylight Time for Indiana. "When people try to defy physical reality and claim they're right, that bothers me," says Mr. Sagarin, whose 2000 Sugar Bowl watch has been set to the precise solar time for his longitude since April, even though that means he's 46 minutes behind his neighbors. "It offends my sense of right and wrong mathematically."

One of Mr. Sagarin's first moves was to join forces with a drive-in movie-theater owner who had started a grass-roots-campaign called "Hoosiers for Central Time." The theater owner, David R. Kinney, worried that late sunsets could cut into his nighttime business.

Together, they distributed Mr. Sagarin's data to localities mulling a time switch. Mr. Sagarin calculated sunrise and sunset times for each area of the state. During Eastern Daylight Time, he showed, the sun wouldn't set in Muncie until 9:15 p.m. on July 4. That helped fuel concern among restaurant owners who said people might not want to eat dinner so long before nightfall.

Mr. Sagarin also used U.S. Census Bureau data to show that slightly more Americans now live west of Indiana as east of it. He even measured how much of the state's border is adjacent to Eastern time zone states versus Central time zone states. (Central won 394.4 miles to 393.3 miles.)

"He calls me more than my girlfriend," says David Crooks, a state representative and radio station owner from Washington, Ind., who has also been pushing for Central time.

Hoosiers have been dickering over changing their clocks since 1918, when Congress first enacted daylight-saving time to conserve fuel during World War I. Some Indiana farmers argued clocks shouldn't be moved because it would be "unhealthy for cows," according to the Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly, published in 1987.(

In April, Indiana residents hoped their chronological headaches might be over. Following a contentious debate, state lawmakers voted 51-46 to adopt daylight-saving time throughout the state, moving clocks ahead one hour starting next spring.

But lawmakers didn't act on the touchy issue of Central versus Eastern. Instead, they asked the Department of Transportation in Washington to decide where the boundaries should fall. The agency, which holds jurisdiction over time zones, said any Indiana county that wanted to switch time zones had until Sept. 16 to file a petition requesting a change.

Thanks in part to Mr. Sagarin's efforts, 18 counties in the western part of the state asked to switch to Central time. If federal officials approve all the requests, it may soon be possible to drive along the western edge of the state, from Gary south to Evansville, and switch time zones four times.

Other municipalities have decided to stay put. "We ought to be Central. There's no doubt about it," says Mike Yoder, a dairy farmer who sits on the Elkhart County Commission. Despite his own beliefs and those of many of his neighbors, Mr. Yoder voted to remain in the Eastern time zone to avoid creating a Central time peninsula across the northern part of the state. "I've managed to make just about everyone mad," he says.

Now Mr. Sagarin says he wants a statewide referendum to settle the question. That idea "didn't get serious consideration" in the Legislature's last session, says Jay Kenworthy, a spokesman for Indiana Senate Republicans, since lawmakers' priority was getting Indiana onto daylight saving.

Gov. Daniels also privately told Mr. Sagarin his goal for one time for Indiana wouldn't fly. "Brute reality is, just like many states, we are never going to one time zone," he wrote in an August email.

In an interview, Gov. Daniels says he thinks Mr. Sagarin "makes a good point." But, he adds, "Someone once said to me it's the only topic where five people can hold different viewpoints and all end their arguments with 'You see, it's a no-brainer.' "