In Major League Baseball they hire a team of mathematicians to produce their regular-season schedules

Husband-wife team out bid after 24 years

Associated Press | December 1, 2004
PITTSBURGH -- One of baseball's longest streaks comes to an end in January when next season's schedule for all 30 major league teams is released.

A small company outside Pittsburgh, the Sports Scheduling Group, has been selected by Major League Baseball to draw up the 2005 schedule, unseating the husband-and-wife team of Henry and Holly Stephenson, who have been doing it for 24 years.

Each year, Major League Baseball accepts competing scheduling proposals from outside groups. The Sports Scheduling Group won the contract in part because it did a better job of avoiding "semi-repeaters," in which the same teams play in back-to-back series at home and then away, said Katy Feeney, MLB senior vice president of scheduling.

Baseball has been outsourcing the job for decades.

Harry Simmons, who at one time worked in the commissioner's office, used to make the schedules each year, mostly by hand. It became such an extensive task that Simmons eventually left the office and devoted himself almost entirely to scheduling.

"As the number of games and the number teams changed, it just became more and more complicated," Feeney said.

After Simmons quit, the Stephensons were hired in 1981. They use computers, which have made the job easier but have not entirely eliminated the human element.

"I think each team looks at the schedule from its own perspective and there is without exception a lot of points of view," Stephenson said. "There will never be a day when everyone sits down and says, 'This is great.'"

Each team plays 162 games, half of them at home, half away. League officials would not discuss the criteria of a winning proposal but said the process has become increasingly complex, with new divisions, interleague play, extended playoffs and more demands from cities with scheduling conflicts.

As a result, scheduling has become much more of a science and academics now play a larger role, Feeney said.

In fact, Doug Bureman, co-founder of the Sports Scheduling Group, teamed up with a business professor from Carnegie Mellon University and a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech to put together the winning proposal.

Bureman would not talk specifically about what kind of technology his group used. Nor would he say how much his group is being paid.

As for the Stephensons, they are already working hard to get their job back.

"I'm a little surprised myself that we've been doing it this long," Stephenson said. "We're working on a schedule for 2006. We'll see whether it takes."

The schedule is a Major undertaking
There's more than 2,400 games and only 181 days to play them
By Tom Singer / MLB.com | 04/05/06 8:00 AM ET ...

Scheduling has become a more topical issue recently only because different outfits have landed the contract to do it. While the job has long been up for annual bids, for more than two decades it had been a mom-and-pop operation. Literally. Henry and Holly Stephenson of Massachusetts got the job in 1980 and kept pushing their pencils for 24 years.

Then a small Pittsburgh firm, Sports Scheduling Group, was chosen to compile the 2005 schedule.

Yet another outfit landed the job for the current 2006 schedule. The reason for the latest switch is not known, but if name-propriety had anything to do with it, SSG certainly would've kept the job: one of its co-founders is Michael Trick, which is what the assignment turned out to be.

As Trick noted after finally turning in the 2005 schedule, "I thought, 'How hard could this be?' It turned out to be very hard."

Feeney chooses not to reveal the newcomer's identity, for no reason other than the fact innovations in technology have made the pursuit of the MLB scheduling gig more competitive.

"The last several years," Feeney says, "we've asked a limited number of firms to provide us with something that indicates their capability. It's a luxury to have a choice. We give to all of the candidates the format, the Interleague rotation, special requests, some broad issues and they submit a sample schedule before we award the actual contract."

LA Times
"Major League Baseball's schedule reflects a maddening mapping"
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
The master timetable for 30 clubs results from a months-long process involving special software, input from teams and television, compliance with union rules and much, much more.
April 12, 2012|By Jim Peltz ...

Baseball contracts with the Sports Scheduling Group, a Butler, Pa., firm that provides the computer skills that consider all the variables and delivers constantly refined drafts of the schedule.

"The biggest challenge is that the thing is just so big," said Doug Bureman, the company's coordinating partner. "There's just so much going on here in terms of the number of teams, the number of games." ...

Bureman, whose company also does the scheduling for several major-college conferences, summed up the job this way:

"We're kind of in the business of seeking perfection, knowing that you're never going to get there."

Computers are far, far superior to people at tasks like this, but it's not surprising that the hidebound no-replay MLB would take as long to figure this out as it did.

Because nothing's more exciting than standing around twiddling your thumbs for five minutes while you wait to find out whether or not you won the game.

Because nothing's more exciting than standing around twiddling your thumbs for five minutes while you wait to find out whether or not you won the game.

Yeah, and that might happen, damn, like twice per season! Because all 2,430 games all have exciting endings currently.

People already ##### about how baseball games are too long. The pace of the game is a legitimate concern for casual fans. Yet you want to introduce even more delays and interruptions! You might as well hire Steve Trachsel to handle replay reviews, and be done with it.

Just because you can point out some flaw with something doesn't mean you should toss out the whole idea.

Losing a game that you won because the umpires are incompetent boobs is incomparably worse than a few short delays.

The arguments against instant replay are all specious.

Too many games - and championship games - have been decided by some fat fool blowing a call and no one having the guts to overrule it.

You're worried about time? Great. Enforce the 30-second pitch rule, which is already on the books. We'll cut a half hour off of game time even WITH instant replay.

So even if games were on average 40 minutes shorter than they are now, you would still imagine that replay would make games unbearably awful by making them on average 2 minutes longer than that.

Managers arguing with the umpire is entertaining, and a part of the culture of the game.

If you honestly believe that watching fat managers slowly waddle to the mound and arguing for minutes before slowly waddling back is fun and worth keeping over getting calls right then we simply can't even have a conversation as we occupy entirely different realms of time-space.

I don't know, reading the lamentations of Braves fans when the umpires screw them out of a post-season triumph is pretty damn exciting.

If you honestly believe that watching fat managers slowly waddle to the mound and arguing for minutes before slowly waddling back is fun and worth keeping over getting calls right then we simply can't even have a conversation as we occupy entirely different realms of time-space.

Losing a game that you won because the umpires are incompetent boobs is incomparably worse than a few short delays.


No, it's not. A great game that was unfairly stolen from you is still a great game.

You're nuts.

I love fun. I'm the guy who would randomize the divisions every year just cause it'd be fun.

Manager arguments are absolutely fun.

Losing traditional rivalries is fun?

Manager arguments are absolutely fun.

Sorry, but I see fun in things that are different from how it's been done for the last 100 years.

And when the manager goes for broke, then it's definitely a big time waster. You can't lose your #### in under a minute.

Losing a game that you won because the umpires are incompetent boobs is incomparably worse than a few short delays.

The losing team's fans hate it, and the winning team's fans get to hear about how it was a tainted win for the next, oh, 40 years.

I love fun. I'm the guy who would randomize the divisions every year just cause it'd be fun. Manager arguments are seldom of any entertainment and serve nothing but to delay the game.

It's amazing listening to the anti-instant-replay rants. Were you dinosaurs against night games as well?

And they like it because it's just so great to see teams robbed of wins and titles they have earned by blundering, inattentive fools who cannot be overruled, even though everyone who can see the scoreboard replay or has a TV is instantly aware that a giant, heart-breaking, unjust blunder has been made by baseball's bungling umpires...yet again.

Getting a call right is neither stupid nor pointless.

Haven't any of you ever seen a football game?

Am I the only one who hears #38 in the voice of Tom Smykowski from Office Space?