[Comedian2004]

Hard to cover all bases when creating schedule
Michael Trick teaches operations research, specializing in "computational methods in optimization," at Carnegie Mellon's graduate business school. So his first reaction to helping make the Major League Baseball schedule wasn't to feel intimidated.
"I figured how hard could that be?" he says. "I figured I'd pull out a couple standard approaches and come out with it quickly."

Then Trick discovered MLB scheduling was far more difficult than many other statistical challenges.

As a partner in the Sports Scheduling Group, a Butler, Pa., firm that created MLB's soon-to-be-released 2005 schedule, Trick found the math almost heartless.

"I promised myself I'd have a Pittsburgh home game on my birthday. But it was so hard to have any extra constraints, I couldn't even do that."

Henry and Holly Stephenson, a married couple in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., could have told him that.

For 23 seasons they made MLB's schedule until SSG won the 2005 contract.

Stephenson was an architect who worked as an urban planner for the New York City government before a chance meeting with NBA executives led to the couple making NBA schedules from 1978 to 1984.

While nobody "thinks they'll be a schedule-maker when they grow up," he says, the pair saw it as a way to start a business and get out of the city. They began working on a suitcase-sized PC.

The Stephensons want to make a comeback and, like SSG, will start this month to work on MLB's 2006 schedule hoping to win a contract.

Neither side will say how much the job pays or how they approach it. While Trick says "nobody can look at our schedule and backfill what we did," methodology is hard to protect. "It's unusual to patent algorithms, and that's the heart of what we do."

The basics are easy. Take 2,430 games over 26 weeks. Factor in interleague play, dates when stadiums aren't available, keeping road trips short and restrictions such as keeping teams from playing more than 20 consecutive days.

Then, avoid "semi-repeaters," where two teams play each other back-to-back in home and away series.

And, Stephenson says, TV's needs have taken on more urgency — "although broadcasters don't see games in terms of the physical reality of players having to travel."

Doug Bureman, an SSG partner and ex-Pittsburgh Pirates executive, says the bottom line is simple: "Don't let the schedule determine who wins."