Schedules in OOTP 2007

[jbsnadb]

How well is the new version going to deal with non-traditional league setups?

With 2006, I set up two 12 teams sub-leagues with the hopes of each team playing all the other teams (with an emphasis on teams playing within their own "conference" of course), much like the old NHL schedule - before this new unbalanced abomination - but I digress.

Will this type of thing be possible, without having to settle for the previously available, limited interleague play option?

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by jbsnadb

How well is the new version going to deal with non-traditional league setups?

The game's built-in schedule generator is the same as last year. So if you have unique schedule needs, you'll most likely need to go hand-created, use Stickware, convert something available for OOTP6/2006, or wait for a possible new schedule creation utility.

Originally Posted by jbsnadb

With 2006, I set up two 12 teams sub-leagues with the hopes of each team playing all the other teams (with an emphasis on teams playing within their own "conference" of course), much like the old NHL schedule - before this new unbalanced abomination - but I digress.

I'll digress too.

NHL 1992-93 schedule format (the only year in which the NHL had two conferences, each consisting of two 6-team divisions):

37 games inside the division (9-7-7-7-7)
21 games against the other division of the same conference (4-4-4-3-3-3)
24 games against the clubs in the other conference (2 games against each)
82 games total.

There were also an additional two neutral site games played by each club, bringing the total number of games for the season to 84. These two additional games were distributed more or less at random against opponents outside the division.

[txmudcat]

LGO, In another post you mentioned you had the schedules for the 1880s and 90's. Will these be included in the game's loaded schedules, and if not, could they be? I realize that the "official" stance is the game cannot load anything prior to 1901, but last year many of us used workarounds to begin our Historical season at 1871. By far the biggest beating was building schedules that were playable.
Regardless, as someone who rarely posts but has been around for a long time, just want to say that your schedule work for the community has been wonderful!

Chris

[jbsnadb]

I must admit, I find it puzzling the sheer amount of customizability available in the game, but the scheduling is so excrusiatingly limited. It's a damn shame if you ask me.

LGO, I would owe you big time of you could create a comparable sked for the game.

[battists]

Originally Posted by jbsnadb

I must admit, I find it puzzling the sheer amount of customizability available in the game, but the scheduling is so excrusiatingly limited. It's a damn shame if you ask me.

LGO, I would owe you big time of you could create a comparable sked for the game.

We've gone around on this a number of times before, but I'll throw it out there again. Scheduling is a vastly complicated process, to the extent where the major leagues, who have (more or less) the same structure and scheduling rules every year, have to write their schedules manually, because there's no software program written that can do it well enough. Or so I've heard. I'm hardly in the know.

That said, the "boys" have put a lot of effort, IMHO, into the scheduler, but with limited time and development resources, there's not much more they can do to improve the scheduling (and still add things like FaceGen and improve other existing features). A lot of their effort was spent in making it so that people could import their own schedules, or those created by others, too.

I think, as with many features, this comes down to return on effort. How many hours do Andreas/Markus spend on schedules before they reach the point of diminishing returns, when they could be doing other things to improve the game?

I'm not saying I feel it should be one way or the other, but for now the answer seems to be that they feel their time is better spent in other areas, unfortunately for some customers...

[Craig Scarborough]

Will 2007 work with Stickware?

Why not license the scheduler from him? Has that ever occurred?

[Curtis]

I was planning to start my own thread for this, but I think it fits this topic nicely.

In my Federal League universe, I have seven minor affiliates for each major team — one each of the full season A, AA and AAA, and two each of the Short Season A and Rookie leagues. The reason I double the short season leagues is so I can run 'early' (pre-draft) and 'late' (post-draft) schedules.

Will 2007 allow me to run one league on two schedules? Effectively that would be like playing two short seasons in a year. I could see where the same might be applied to a league that had 'Spring' and 'Fall' or 'Fall' and 'Winter' schedules.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by txmudcat

LGO, In another post you mentioned you had the schedules for the 1880s and 90's. Will these be included in the game's loaded schedules, and if not, could they be?

I don't believe so, since officially the game does not support pre-1901 seasons. There is also the question of what to do with the three tricky seasons (1884, 1890, 1891), and I don't think there's any consensus on the best approach.

At the very least, if I can ever get them converted over, I'll post the pre-1901 schedules in a thread on the forums.

Originally Posted by jbsnadb

I must admit, I find it puzzling the sheer amount of customizability available in the game, but the scheduling is so excrusiatingly limited. It's a damn shame if you ask me.

I agree, but only to a point.

Schedule making is actually hard. There's a reason it takes six months or more for the annual MLB schedule to get created. Granted, OOTP doesn't have nearly the same number of contraints to deal with as MLB does, but the basic principles still apply. Also, "realistic schedule" means different things to different people, complicated by the fact that scheduling practices in the real world have varied quite a bit over the years. What was acceptable in 1940 is different from that in 1970 or in 2000.

The best bet is always to adapt from real-world schedules. For minor leagues, given how many have existed over the years, this works reasonably well because there is a fairly wide range of league sizes, alignments, and schedule lengths which were used at one point or another. I can, for example, immediately think of four different versions of a minor league schedule for a single division, 8-team league playing 154 games (145 days, 6 series per opponent; 145 days, 8 series per opponent; 152 days, 6 series per opponent; and 152 days, 8 series per opponent). A 140-game schedule can come in 132, 136-137, 140-141, and 144 day long versions.

The problem is the major leagues, because the only model to draw from is MLB, and it has existed in relatively few alignment and length variations... unfortunately...

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Curtis

Will 2007 allow me to run one league on two schedules?

No, it can't do that.

But you could theoretically mimic the effect by running the league with the split-season format and then put in a lot of off days between the first and second halves. To avoid having playoffs between the first and second half winners, you can turn off the playoffs for that league.

An alternative would be to run two separate leagues and give one an early-season schedule and the other a late-season schedule.

[Curtis]

Originally Posted by Curtis

In my Federal League universe, I have {snip} two each of the Short Season A and Rookie leagues. The reason I double the short season leagues is so I can run 'early' (pre-draft) and 'late' (post-draft) schedules.

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

An alternative would be to run two separate leagues and give one an early-season schedule and the other a late-season schedule.

That's what I'm doing now; I was hoping to get around it (two fewer rosters to manage). I'll try your split-season suggestion. I don't have minor league playoffs anyway. Thank you.

[jbsnadb]

I was running a 24-team league made up two, 12-team "Conferences". If I ran it as a single league of four divisions, the playoffs would never work right. If I used two sub-leagues, the twain never met until the finals unless set it to allow interleague play, but with the current MLB limitations.

Is there a happy medium, where it is possble to set the number of games played against teams of the other league?

I know how complicated scheduling can be, I used to make my own 162-game schedules when I played the old Micro League Baseball. Technology has come a long way since then. I know it's possible to create your own schedule, but the process is beyond tedious.

Why can't there be a balanced interleague option?

[Ktulu]

Originally Posted by Curtis

Will 2007 allow me to run one league on two schedules?

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

No, it can't do that.

Just to clarify, does this mean that two subleagues can't use two different schedules?

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by jbsnadb

Is there a happy medium, where it is possble to set the number of games played against teams of the other league?

You can choose to have interleague games or not, and you can choose to have a balanced schedule or not. Beyond that, the game does its thing to calculate the schedule.

Originally Posted by jbsnadb

Why can't there be a balanced interleague option?

Considering the almost unlimited number of possible league alignments, how would the schedule generator even know where to begin? It's possible to have so many teams in the other league that you'd wind up with very few games inside the league. The best bet is for a generator where you could input some of your parameter directly and then have it create the schedule, but that's some complicated stuff.

In your case, with six team divisions, you could use real NL schedules from between 1977-92 as a starting point. Keep the intradivisional games where appropriate and add interdivisional and interleague games as desired. At least you're not having to create the entire schedule from scratch.

Originally Posted by Ktulu

Just to clarify, does this mean that two subleagues can't use two different schedules?

Do you mean schedule lengths, formats, or actual files? You can have one subleage playing one number of games and the other playing a different number. You can set up the league schedule file with different schedule formats for each subleague if you wanted; i.e. one subleague plays a balanced schedule while the other plays a divisional schedule.

[Ktulu]

Do you mean schedule lengths, formats, or actual files? You can have one subleage playing one number of games and the other playing a different number. You can set up the league schedule file with different schedule formats for each subleague if you wanted; i.e. one subleague plays a balanced schedule while the other plays a divisional schedule.

That answers my question, thanks.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Ktulu

That answers my question, thanks.

Just to clarify my response, it was about manually created schedules. If you create one from scratch you can give whatever length and format you want to each subleague (though there is an issue with improper calculation of magic numbers in the subleague playing the shorter number of games since the game only has one field for entering the schedule length of a league).

When the game itself generates a schedule, it uses the same principles for both subleagues.

[swampdragon]

I hope the game can include the as-played schedules for pre-1901.

[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."

[Comedian2004]

Here is another article...

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?...=.jsp&c_id=mlb

[Ktulu]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Just to clarify my response, it was about manually created schedules. If you create one from scratch you can give whatever length and format you want to each subleague

Yup, I assumed it could only be done manually. Thanks

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by swampdragon

I hope the game can include the as-played schedules for pre-1901.

I don't think that's going to happen. But if there's enough interest in those I can try and put them together and post them up after the game is out. It'd mostly be a matter of editing the Retrosheet game logs to remove the tie games and any tiebreaking playoff games.

The problem with as played schedules, mostly for earlier years, is that clubs will often be playing a differing number of games, so the magic numbers won't be calculated correctly since it uses the number of games specified in the league setup.