|
I had written up some notes way back when but found them again and realized I never put them here...
Interesting. I had never thought about the offday distribution in that way. It makes sense though now seeing it explained.
The one impression in this area that I had formed over time is that there are a relatively high proportion of offdays very early in the season, i.e., more an average early than across the season as a whole.
My first explanation for myself there was that it was to allow players to more ease into the season. Could also be to make it easier to more immediately make up games - if teams playing an April Mon-Wed series are both off that Thu, then a rainout (or snowout) could potentially be made up right away. Or it might not even be so much for makeups but just because April may be the worst weather month of the regular season so avoid scheduling as many games then.
To say nothing about the reasons I came up with, that impression may be wrong. I have done no analysis. It may be formed merely from the (maybe very new; again, no research) phenomenon of offdays within the very first season series of the season. E.g., March 31, the day after Opening Day this year had only 5 games, and that was a Friday which is hardly otherwise an MLB offday.
How might this affect me as a schedule creator?
First a mention that I am actually playing the game regularly with OOTP24 after having not played much at all in over a decade. I note that only to make the point that the capability of the game to have rainouts and reschedule is a new phenomenon to me. But I have only had that happen once for "my" team in almost 5 seasons because they have a home stadium with a roof. I have noticed a case or two of a game moved to after the originally schedule last day of the season. Anyway, a schedule should not be considered an immutable piece of art.
Will I adjust though? I can see leaning toward slightly skewing offdays more later in the season, but that will not be an easy change to make mentally.
When not requested to have everybody always all off together, I am so keyed into having offdays at least feel spread pretty evenly across the season, though with it being differently uneven among the teams. I like the aesthetics where on a given a day one team has played, e.g., 98 games, another 95, another 96, etc.
The typical current MLB-like 162 games has 14 full weeks pre-All-Star and 11 full weeks post-All-Star. Six 4-game series (and thus six no-offday weeks) fill out the schedule. Now I would probably aim to average 3 of those on each side of the All-Star Break. Since the first half is longer than the second, that means offdays are slightly more common in the first half. I can try to make a point to lean more toward having a median at 4 of those pre-ASG and 2 of them post-ASG, which would slightly lean the offdays to being more common in the second half.
|