OOTP Developments Forums - 52 Team / 162 game request

Further below are the schedules themselves. No need to actually read about them, but one might want to know what one is getting into.

One immediate thing worth mentioning is that in both cases the interleague matchups are the same - division 1 vs division 1 and division 2 vs division 2. That would not change year-to-year using one of these. To alternate those, there would need to be another schedule file. The problem though with have just two is that they would repeat every other year. Maybe there could be a bunch of file variations to provide some randomization. So if mixing up the interleague matters, say so, and something can be worked out.

Onto the commentary... Odd number of teams per division adds to the difficulty, because you cannot have strictly division games occurring at any time. Then the so few games per opponent does not allow for much swapping in manual tweaking.

=== A ===

The games break down most obviously into 50 series -> 12*2 (intradivision, one 3-game and one 4-game per opponent) + 13 (interdivision) + 13 (interleague). Each series is a halfweek. Current MLB standard for 162 games is 52 halfweeks, so this path takes away 7 offdays from that MLB standard by cramming the games into a week less. But I want to run with it.

The first week starts on a weekend, and the week of the All-Star game means another case of a weekend without a series in the early week immediately before. So there are 26 weekend slots and 24 early week slots. That works great for making the layout in a particular way.

There are 26 division series, of which half will end up being 4-game series. I am going to put all those in the 26 weekend slots. Then the 24 early week slots will hold the 12 interdivision and 12 interleague matchups. With only one division series possible per week, that means you will never end up with two 4-game series trying to be crammed into a 7-day week.

You may be thinking - how are there 26 division series when there are only 12 division opponents and 12*2=24? The extra pair comes because each team takes a turn being the odd one out while the other 12 are all playing division games against each other.

The fact that there are 2 such slots like that works perfectly with the playing the whole other division in the subleague and one whole other division in the other subleague. You can fill those two "open" slots in each case by matching the odd team out with the corresponding team from the other division. E.g., the two series when 1 is free, it plays 14 and 27. With the same team slot in each division the odd one out in each case allowing them to line up against each other, all 4 divisions can use the exact same format for the layout.

So this solution works out fairly conveniently mathematically though it is rather awkward with never playing consecutive division series. After the layout was made, spreading out the four-game series and sprinkling around the interdivision and interleague matchups, the analysis showed it was not terribly brutal. I made some manual adjustments and it came out okay for what it is. Even with so relatively few offdays, no more than 4 straight weeks without an offday (granted, that is a lot, but it could be worse). The travel profiles are not terrible with not tons of single nor very long series homestands and roadtrips.

=== B ===

What about the solution of stretching it out to a current-MLB 52 halfweeks? To do that, the 4-games series against two of the division opponents were split into a pair of 2-game series to go from 50 to 52 halfweeks.

Remember though that with the uneven number of teams per division, there is an odd team out. At the time of those 4-game series being split there are teams playing 3-game series against interdivision or interleague opponents. Not wanting to split those up, it means than there are 4 teams in each of those two instances who are left out of one of those halfweek additions. So a total of 8 teams have a half-week when they are off for four straight days. Those cases happen in two weeks in the latter half of the season.

The matchups are laid out generally with divisional matchups in pairs, on a weekend then the beginning of the following week. The subsequent weekend and beginning of the next week are then an interdivision series and an interleague series, in either order.

Depsite the more offdays, there are still cases with more than 20 days in a row without an offday for teams. The travel profile is worse with more single and 4 or more series homestands & roadtrips.