Two more options for 2023-style MLB schedule

[cheo25]

MLB will switch to a format in 2023 where the games against division opponents drops from 19 to 14 each, 6 games against the other 10 teams in the league, and that teams will play every team in interleague play (3 against 14 teams, and 4 games against an "interleague rival." Kirby Paquette put together 10 versions of the 2023-style MLB schedule in another thread, which you can find here.

But I put together two more versions of this format. These 2 versions are essentially the same version of each other but home and away are reversed so that the NL Central team isn't always visiting the AL Central team in the lone interleague series of the last series of the season.

The other differences with these two schedules I did from from Kirby's batch is that intradivisional play is played exclusively in April/early May and then late August to early October in my two versions. I'm a fan of the way MLB did schedules from 1969 to 1992 in the four-division alignment where teams played almost exclusively in the division in the first month of the season and in September. You can't do it exclusively with odd-numbered divisions, but you can get close. In these two schedules, a team goes home and away with every team in its division, and then when it's the odd team out in its division, one series against another odd team out home and away in April/May, and another series home and away against another odd team out in late Aug/Sept/Oct..

Again, Kirby's schedules for this format are great, especially because opponents seemed to be spaced out pretty well and do a good job of avoiding repeat opponents so close together. I avoided 1-week turnarounds with the same opponent. But really I just wanted to come up with something that focused on intradivisional play early and late. I did not equal out the weekend home game distribution, which is the main thing about which I'm not happy with my version. There is also a rule that a team is not supposed to play more than 20 days in a row without a day off. I ignored that to fit in the heavy divisional game distrubutions early and late in the season. I could have tweaked it, but I also figure in fictional OOTP of 2022, these teams can handle a future extra days without a day off, especially with the money they make.

And I had some "interleague rivalry" series that fell on a weekend so most teams got one Friday or one Sunday off during the season. We've seen some two-game interleague series fall on the weekends a few times in real life in recent seasons. The interleague rivalries (Mets-Yankees, Cubs-White Sox, etc.) are the ones you would expect if you keep the current MLB divisional alignment. However, it's no guarantee to stay that way in future years because the game randomly rotates some team ID numbers in scheduling as your league progresses from year to year. I changed my divisional alignment in testing and found some interleague rivalries changed.

I also may come up with a few more versions of these two schedules down the road so that the last interleague matchup of the season is not always NL Central vs. AL Central. I may make an NL East-AL East version, and an NL West-AL West version with home and roads switched to create essentially four more versions. But no promises on that right now because I enjoy actually playing the game too much.

[dawg1isclear]

these are great but wondering if you could update the interleague rival games from 4 to 6?

[bwburke94]

This isn't as simple as it first appears, because the schedule is designed around having only 4 games against the rival.

The more obvious concern is that the Athletics moving out of Oakland screwed up the AL West team order.