Baseball undermined by schedule

Well, we’re right in the middle of Major League Baseball’s Interleague Play, one of the key reasons the season isn’t as good as it could be. The other reason is the so-called “imbalanced schedule”—in which teams play their division mates 18 or 19 times in a season and others in their league as few as six times. Combined, these two factors (with others, such as the designated hitter and the All-Star Game winner, determining home-field advantage in the World Series) have greatly undermined the game’s natural flow.

Interleague Play has watered down the importance of the World Series, a game in which there was only one chance in any given season to play a club from the other league. Teams could go decades without facing off—unless each gained entrée to the Fall Classic. Now we have the “Subway Series” between the Mets and Yankees every year; now the Cubs and White Sox go at it six times a season. And, if that isn’t bad enough, the Interleague monstrosity has as one of its main tenets and objectives: to create new rivalries for this weekend’s nail biters. These include: Arizona at Baltimore; Atlanta at Cleveland; San Francisco at Boston, Washington at Toronto; Milwaukee at Minnesota and our two Missouri teams, Florida at Kansas City and St. Louis at Oakland. Can’t wait, can you?

Opposing Interleague Play has nothing to do with purism or the current American League domination of the National League; in the age of free agency, that’s cyclical anyway. So, too, Commissioner Bud Selig and the owners can all talk about attendance increase and giving the fans what they want as much as they like. True, the first round of 42 Interleague games, played this season in mid-May, drew an average of 36,704 fans—a 22.7 percent jump on the average attendance of 29,904 for Interleague games to date. The problem is this: In the process of selling their souls, they have unrepentantly disrupted the season.

Baseball’s higher-ups are all smiles about Interleague play, saying it’s good for the game, yet Selig and team owners hide behind integrity and principle when discussing steroids, cheating or wondering whether Barry Bonds should have one or two asterisks next to his name. They are concerned about whether Hank Aaron and/or the commissioner should be present when the game’s pariah breaks the home run record. Under the guise of protecting the game, this same collection of know-what’s-best-for-us people decided that former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who works for the Boston Red Sox (speaking of integrity, isn’t this a “conflict of interest”?), should have free reign to unofficially “blackmail” the likes of Jason Giambi, who, in a moment of stupidity and guilt, opened his big trap to USA Today about performance-enhancing drugs.

But, the most egregious—and arrogant—assault on baseball’s natural fiber is the creation of the imbalanced schedule, which is exacerbated by Interleague Play. The Mets, for example, play as many games against the Yankees as they do against the Cardinals.

So, who came up with this crazy schedule, and, in the computer age, how does it get done? Surprisingly, given that we are talking about Major League Baseball, until recently the methodology to achieve the master blueprint remained relatively low-tech.

From 1982 through 2004, the Long Island-based husband-and-wife team of Henry and Holly Stephenson held the contract to produce the annual schedule. Prior to that, it was a part-time, in-house job that fell under the watch of Harry Simmons, an employee of the Commissioner’s Office. Gradually, scheduling major-league teams became a full-time job. Simmons prevailed until 1981; that’s when he turned it over to the Stephensons, who held teams’ fates in their hands until 2005. Now the small Butler, Pa.-based Sports Scheduling Group (SSG) is in charge.

Throughout their tenure, the Stephensons used computers, but there was “still a strong dose of the human element,” says George Nemhauser, a partner in SSG who is a professor at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech University, which produces a number of the world’s most-skilled schedulers. The Stephensons “were not really computer savvy,” noted Nemhauser, an expert in the field of “discrete optimization” (a critical subject in relation to scheduling).

According to SSG, here are the primary factors considered when laying out each team’s schedule:
• Each club plays 162 games and 52 series, including 13 at home on weekends.
• Games within each month and during summer dates should be reasonably balanced between teams.
• Single-series and four-series home stands and road trips should be minimized; two- and three-series home stands and road trips are preferred.
• No more than four series home stands or road trips should be scheduled
• No doubleheaders in original schedule.
• Considerations must be made to the miles traveled by one team during a season. No team should travel in excess of 50,000 miles over the course of the season.
• Three game series are optimal (minimize number of two or four game series).

Even with the aid of computer science, note the surprising use of relative terms.

Do away with Interleague play, have the same number of teams in each league (15) and each division (5), and divide the 162-game schedule in the following manner: Play the other four teams in your division 18 times, accounting for 72 games, splitting the total as home and visiting games. Then play the five teams in each of the other two divisions nine times (three home-and-home series or mix in a two-game and four-game series; alternate who plays the extra series in their home park each year). Such a formula accounts for the remaining 90 ballgames and cumulatively 162 games.

One final note: As for the season’s length, it could be easily shortened by a full week. Schedule seven double-headers for each team.

Jon W. Poses is executive director of the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series. His baseball-related articles have appeared in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and other publications.