Working on my first schedule...custom-balanced MLB...a few questions

[Echo127]

I'm making this schedule for my own personal league--it's basically the MLB done my way. One of the main changes is that I want a schedule that is more evenly balanced (based on my opinion of what balanced means ). All teams/divisions match the MLB.

And before I get to my actual questions I think I should explain what my goals are/were:

1. Keep a 162 game schedule
2. Keep typical 3-game series length
3. Play every team every year
4. Play equal amount of home/away games vs all opponents
5. Play divisional opponents 2x as often as intra-league opponents, and intra-league opponents 2x as often as inter-league opponents
6. Play all divisional opponents the same # of times. Ditto for inter/intra-league.

Following the last two of the above guidelines gives me a 153-game schedule (12 games vs divisional opponents, 6 vs intra-league, 3 vs inter-league). Obviously it is not possible to play an even # of home/away games vs inter-league opponents in this scenario, so I needed to make a concession--I chose to alternate the home/away matchups for inter-league opponents every year.

I'm still 9 games short of 162, so I decide to add some more divisional matchups--2 more vs each team. I decide to turn these matchups into a bit of an 'event'--at the very beginning and very end of each season every team plays each of it's divisional opponents in a pair of double-headers at a hypothetical neutral site. For example, my Brewers would play Cubs/Cards day 1, bye day 2, Pirates/Reds day 3, bye day 4, then the rest of the season is normal.

Now I'm at 161 games. I decide to add 1 more more inter-league game and call it a rivalry series. i.e., my Brewers will play 2H/2A vs the Twins every year, and play 3H one year 3A next year vs all other inter-league opponents.

Did you follow all that? Good :-). Now, I've already got a start on putting this together: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_q...ew?usp=sharing
On the "Matchups" tab I've got all of the home-series matchups laid out for each team. The "Game Schedule" tab can be ignored. I've only got my year-beginning/ending divisional doubleheaders in there so far. On the "Series Schedule" tabs (which look beautiful, IMO) I've got all of the series matchups laid out in a perfectly functional order (which I need to randomly shuffle around, yet). All series matchups in each column will be played at the same time--I considered doing it more MLB-like with bye dates at different times, but that seems like it would be impossibly difficult. For easier viewing, black #s are divisional matchups, blue are intra-league, red are inter-league. The series schedule does not include my divisional-double-header games. Hopefully you experienced schedule-makers can follow my work.

Now we can finally get onto my questions:

1. Does there exist a 153 game schedule matching what I described above? If so it might be easier for me to just edit that than finish what I'm doing. I looked in the schedule master list, but I didn't find one like I'm describing.
2. If you look at my two "Series Schedule" tabs, you'll see that I ran into a bit of a hiccup in my first one, and had to add a bye series for each team in the second tab. Anyone have any clever ways fix up the schedule and elminate the bye week? Long shot, but I might as well ask.
3. How does OOTP randomize schedules year-to-year? Per the manual, "the pattern of games will be identical, but the matchups will be different from season to season". When it says 'matchups', does it really mean 'matchup order'? If no, how does it determine which team #s to switch around? If yes, does the game have any safeguards in place to prevent too many home/away series in a row?
4. Related to the above, should I be concerned about the game messing up my divisional-double-header events by a. moving them to a different time in the season or b. playing the same team 2x at season-beginning instead of 1x at season-beginning and 1x at season-end?
5. Similar to the above, would the game mess up my inter-league rivalries by changing the team that it's played against on a yearly basis?
6. If I want to alternate home/away games vs inter-league opponents on a yearly basis, I'll need to create a second (similar) schedule, correct?
7. Do you see any glaring errors in my approach that might screw me over when cranking this out game-by-game in OOTP's needed format? Or anything else I might be overlooking that could mess up my perfectly-planned schedule once I've got it in-game? I've never done this before, and I don't want to waste more time than I already have.

Thanks!

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Echo127

Following the last two of the above guidelines gives me a 153-game schedule (12 games vs divisional opponents, 6 vs intra-league, 3 vs inter-league). Obviously it is not possible to play an even # of home/away games vs inter-league opponents in this scenario, so I needed to make a concession--I chose to alternate the home/away matchups for inter-league opponents every year.

That last is going to give you some problems because you have 15 opponents in the other league. That's 45 games, split either 24-21 home-away or 21-24 home away. So from interleague play a club is going to have a surplus or deficit of 3 home games, and you'd have to account for that in league games.

The alternative is to have one interleague opponent played 4 or 6 times instead of 3—those can be split equally as 2-2 or 3-3 home-away, and as a result you won't have to have a surplus or deficit of 3 home games in your assortment of league games.

[joefromchicago]

1. Does there exist a 153 game schedule matching what I described above? If so it might be easier for me to just edit that than finish what I'm doing. I looked in the schedule master list, but I didn't find one like I'm describing. If it's not on the list, it doesn't exist.
2. If you look at my two "Series Schedule" tabs, you'll see that I ran into a bit of a hiccup in my first one, and had to add a bye series for each team in the second tab. Anyone have any clever ways fix up the schedule and elminate the bye week? Long shot, but I might as well ask. Sorry, can't help.
3. How does OOTP randomize schedules year-to-year? Per the manual, "the pattern of games will be identical, but the matchups will be different from season to season". When it says 'matchups', does it really mean 'matchup order'? If no, how does it determine which team #s to switch around? If yes, does the game have any safeguards in place to prevent too many home/away series in a row? The first year that you use a schedule, numbers are assigned to teams alphabetically. After that, the team numbers are randomized, so, for instance, if Albuquerque was team 1 in the first year, it might be team 5 in the second year.
4. Related to the above, should I be concerned about the game messing up my divisional-double-header events by a. moving them to a different time in the season or b. playing the same team 2x at season-beginning instead of 1x at season-beginning and 1x at season-end? No, games won't be moved to different times in the season. The schedule stays the same, it's just the team numbers that get scrambled.
5. Similar to the above, would the game mess up my inter-league rivalries by changing the team that it's played against on a yearly basis? Yes.
6. If I want to alternate home/away games vs inter-league opponents on a yearly basis, I'll need to create a second (similar) schedule, correct? Yes.
7. Do you see any glaring errors in my approach that might screw me over when cranking this out game-by-game in OOTP's needed format? Or anything else I might be overlooking that could mess up my perfectly-planned schedule once I've got it in-game? I've never done this before, and I don't want to waste more time than I already have. As LGO pointed out, you have a problem with balancing home and away games because you have teams play every other team in the other league. Leagues with an odd number of teams are always going to cause scheduling headaches.

[Echo127]

Thanks, guys.

In regard to the un-balanced inter-league H/A schedule, I did cover that here:

Now I'm at 161 games. I decide to add 1 more more inter-league game and call it a rivalry series. i.e., my Brewers will play 2H/2A vs the Twins every year, and play 3H one year 3A next year vs all other inter-league opponents.

^^That's not a new series I'm adding--I'm changing one of the 3-game series to a 2H/2A series, as LGO suggested as a solution. Unless I'm misunderstanding?

Follow-up questions (in response to joe's answers):
3. I assume that the game is smart enough to only exchange team #'s that are in the same division? e.g., Team 1 could only swap with team 2,3,4, or 5?
4. It sounds like part B of my original question could be an issue?
5. Is there any way I could tell the game to *not* shuffle the matchups around? For example, could I create, say, 2 or 4 schedules that repeat exactly every 2 or 4 years? Actually, answering my own question, I suppose I could copy paste those schedules ad infinitum, if nothing else, right?

[Le Grande Orange]

As general advice, I would say the first thing to start with when working out a format is to do a little table showing all the series that a club would play. That will give you the total count of series (you'll need this if you want your schedule to stay within typical current MLB parameters), as well as where you'll need to make adjustments in series distributions (i.e. how many are 2-game, 3-game, or 4-game).

For example, your proposed format looks like this:

 H A

33 33
33 33
33 33
33 33

 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3

 2 2
 3
 3
 3
 3
 3
 3
 3
   3
   3
   3
   3
   3
   3
   3

The division games are listed first, then the league games, then the interleague games. You have 52 series in total, and that's a good number. With two series per week, that works out to a 26-week season, which again is good.

BUT... if you want an All-Star break, that means half a week has to be reserved for that. So one series has to be moved elsewhere. You can either extend your season by a half-week, or, as MLB does, move those series games into other weeks. What this means is that some weeks in the schedule will have three series played during the week rather than the usual two. This is done by using two 2-game and one 3-game series. To get those 2-game series, instead of playing a pair of series as 3-game affairs, they'd instead be split into a 2-game series and a 4-game series.

In your proposed format, the only place to do such alternate splitting is with the divisional games. So some of those six games at home or away against an division rival will be split into one 2-game series and one 4-game series rather than two 3-game series.

UNLESS... you are fine with having all those cases of four games against an interleague opponent all happening across MLB at the same time, and having back-to-back, home and away series. Note, however, MLB in real life does not like doing such back-to-back, home and away series.

Assuming you want to mimic MLB's preferences, then you would split two division sets into 4-2 rather than 3-3. The breakdown of match-ups might look like this:

 H A

42 33
42 33
33 33
33 33

 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3
 3 3

 2 2
 3
 3
 3
 3
 3
 3
 3
   3
   3
   3
   3
   3
   3
   3

Another club in the division would have its six games split 4-2 on the away slate, and so on.

However, you are still probably going to have to have at least one interleague home-and-home, back-to-back series since there are 15 teams in each league, and if all the club do their three-series week at the same time, you'll have one left over club in each league.

(It's a bit hard to say how it would work out in practice due to the odd number of teams in each league—that complicates things since you are working with a much larger number of teams than if there was no interleague and an even number of clubs in each league.)

[joefromchicago]

Follow-up questions (in response to joe's answers):
3. I assume that the game is smart enough to only exchange team #'s that are in the same division? e.g., Team 1 could only swap with team 2,3,4, or 5? Correct.
4. It sounds like part B of my original question could be an issue? No, I don't think so.
5. Is there any way I could tell the game to *not* shuffle the matchups around? For example, could I create, say, 2 or 4 schedules that repeat exactly every 2 or 4 years? Actually, answering my own question, I suppose I could copy paste those schedules ad infinitum, if nothing else, right? Yes, you could just re-load the same schedule every year and you'd get the same match-ups. As I said earlier, the first time you use a schedule, the game assigns numbers to teams alphabetically, so if you reload the schedule every year, the game treats it as if it's using that schedule for the first time. If you want the game to load schedules automatically, you can create a "rotation," but you'll need to understand the game's schedule file naming conventions. You can get a sense of how to do that in this post.

[Echo127]

For the sake of simplicity I probably won't be trying to fit the series's (what's the plural of series?) into seven-day segments like in the real MLB. I'm perfectly comfortable going 9 days on, 1 day off, or whatever it takes to get the games done in the right time frame. I don't need to have consistent Monday/Thursday byes like in the real MLB.

And thanks for the help, both of you! I think you've pretty much cleared up my questions.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Echo127

For the sake of simplicity I probably won't be trying to fit the series's (what's the plural of series?) into seven-day segments like in the real MLB.

I would argue it's probably easier to work with week-long segments, as the (nearly always) two series per week arrangement makes it relatively straightforward to work with. You lay out the series, then give the series the proper number of actual games.