MLB Schedule
 

From my understanding of real life scheduling the opposition that each team faces in Interleague play change each year. For example this year the Padres and other NL West teams will play the AL East teams in Interleague play. Last year it was the AL west teams I believe. However in OOTP this doesn't seem to change from year to year. Why is that? If I play a 10 year save as the Padres in OOTP19 they will play the AL West every year. Why doesn't it change from season to season to rotate around the three AL divisions?

The way OOTP works is that it reuses the same schedule file for subsequent seasons, but swaps around teams within the schedule match-ups, within some limitations. So if the schedule has Cleveland at Detroit, the next year that match-up slot in the schedule might have Kansas City at Minnesota, as OOTP swaps around teams in the Central Division within the match-up slots.

In OOTP, the real 2019 schedule will be used for the included MLB league. But when you advance it into its next season, since the real 2020 schedule hasn't been made yet, the game will reuse the 2019 schedule in the manner described in the first paragraph, and will continue to do so as you advance to the next season in that MLB league, until you manually decide to generate a new schedule or import a different schedule file.

So it would work for OOTP to use the 2017 schedule for 2020 and the 2018 schedule for 2021, which would provide the right rotation.

Thanks for this explanation. I know nothing about programming but surely rotating around the interleague play each year to a new division shouldn't be to hard?

Probably, although I haven't looked at the distribution of match-ups to see how comparable they actually are. There may be small variations.


It is hard. Scheduling is actually a complex mathematical question. But as mentioned by swampdragon, you can import an MLB schedule from an earlier season.

The trouble with schedule rotation is that there has yet to be an AL East vs. NL Central (et al) schedule on the new 186-day calendar.

With the early start of the season in Japan this year, do future years (2020) start at the expect dates? I don't want to have every season start early when they may not in real life.

Just a pet peeve of mine.

Good point, I forget about that aspect.


OOTP can't recreate early overseas openers, since in real life those overseas openers use special roster rules and spring training games continue for the clubs involved afterward. So usually schedules involving such early openers have the schedule edited to put those games later in the season.

I distinctly remember OOTP 15 (or was it 16?) playing the games early, which led to trouble in later years. I doubt this problem will be repeated.

It's best to move early openers to later, at least until OOTP becomes capable of recreating them properly, because otherwise spring training will be truncated early for clubs, leaving a large gap before the remainder of the regular season commences.

Hopefully someday OOTP will be able to properly recreate overseas openers. The roster rules for them are relatively straightforward (and offer options which would be beneficial in other areas).

Probably one year the whole issue of Spring Training should be addresed. Things like split squad games, free agent non-roster invitees, minor league camps, early overseas games etc etc

There are definitely a few things about ST that can be more immediately fixed.

I'm very curious about player usage in spring training games in OOTP versus that in real life. To that end, to have real-life reference, I've archived all the MLB box scores for the 2017 and 2018 spring training seasons, and am in progress with 2019. (Will be grabbing all minor league box scores again this season, having already done so for the 2018 season.)

Is there one spot to get the minor league boxes? If so, how far back does it go?

The only place minor league box scores exist, to my knowledge, is on the MILB.com website. All leagues are covered, from Triple-A, including the Mexican League, all the way down to the AZL and GCL. The boxes go back as far as 2005, but from I saw when doing some quick checks, box scores for the 2005 and 2006 seasons were missing for some games, as well as some lacking the line score portion.

I toyed with the idea of starting with 2007 and begin saving the box scores manually, but it is really time consuming (and dull) due to the sheer number of games. It's easier to save box scores as a season unfolds, since the effort is spread out over the five months of the season. (For 2018, it took about an hour to save all the box scores for a day's games, longer when the short season leagues started up.)

I saved all box scores for the 2018 minor league season, including the four main independent leagues. I'm gearing up to save all the box scores for the 2019 season.

Am I correct that the only places to go for the old historical minors are Sporting News/Sporting Life archives?

That would be a good place. If your library has digital newspaper collections, you can also look up the hometown newspaper for a club and get that team's box scores that way.

ETA: I just did a count of the box scores I saved from the 2018 season. Including All-Star and post-season games, there were a total of 11,884 box scores for the affiliated leagues, including the Mexican League but excluding the DSL. A further 2,041 box scores were saved for the four main independent leagues. For the 2018-19 winter league season, across the six leagues, there were a total of 1,137 box scores. As if all that weren't enough, for the three Asian leagues, I recorded the basic line score (i.e. the number of runs scored in each inning plus the total number of runs, hits, and errors) along with the length of games in both outs as well as hours and minutes, and also the attendance, for all games.

At some point I'll contact Baseball-Reference to see if they'd be interested in using the data for their website, as well as some of the data I recorded for a few prior seasons.