Believable 154 game schedule

[Teflon Skies]

I am looking for a decent 154 game schedule to use with a typical 16 team - 2 league association - but am having little luck. Typical problems with schedules I've downloaded or generated are:

Excessive consectuvive home or road games (have seen as high as 25)

Random days off causing all teams to be idle on some Saturdays and Sundays throughout the season regardless of what day the opener is aligned to.

Last week of season always being a hop, skip, and a jump of 6 or 7 single games to make the schedule round out.

I have begun fiddling with some Access applications to create a 154 game schedule that works - but am unfortunately limited to my lunch hour at the office. (Don't have Access at home) I have the groundwork for a good patern involving three 3-game series and a 2-game series versus each opponent home and away combined with some two 4-game one 3-game sets home and away. It boils down to 22 games per each opponent, 11 home and 11 away for a decent 154 game schedule with believable days off. The problem I'm having is finagling the match-ups to avoid the large strings of consecutive days on the road or the herky-jerky three home-three away, three-home three-away occurrences. Before I spend the next month at trial and error with this I thought I would just ask if anyone has a good schedule already. The ones I've downloaded touted themselves well but were disappointing.

[Tiger Fan]

Here you go.

154 game sked. Make sure you go to the schedule editor and delete the allstar game then re key it in for the proper date (July 7th I believe). Also make sure you change the season starts on date to the day the first game is listed in the schedule (Apr 14th I think.)

This will work for any 2 league 8 team each season as long as you replace your schedule.dat file with this file after spring training and just prior to opening day.


The file also includes usable 20,24 and 26 team skeds.

[Le Grande Orange]

I see my services as resident MLB schedule expert are needed again.

Originally posted by Teflon Skies
Excessive consectuvive home or road games (have seen as high as 25)

This is NOT unrealistic; indeed, in the real MLB schedules prior to around 1930 or so you will routinely find road trips and home stands of this length.

Originally posted by Teflon Skies
Random days off causing all teams to be idle on some Saturdays and Sundays...

Again, not really unrealistic. Prior to 1934, various eastern cities were legally not allowed to play professional baseball on Sunday, and thus teams could not schedule games for that day. There is also the occasional Saturday off, but this was usually late in the season when the stadium was instead used for a football game.

As well, off days in the 16 team era were often scattered pretty well throughout the week. Not only that, but teams often had 2 or even 3 off days in a row during the season, particularly late in the year. Mondays and Fridays tended to be the most commonly used off days, but Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were also used.

Here's the history of Sunday games in MLB since 1901: Detroit started allowing Sunday games in 1907; Cleveland in 1911; Washington in 1918; New York and Brooklyn in 1919; Boston in 1929; and the last cities to legalize Sunday games were Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in 1934.

Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati did not prohibit Sunday games from 1901 onwards.

Originally posted by Teflon Skies
Last week of season always being a hop, skip, and a jump of 6 or 7 single games to make the schedule round out.

This is somewhat unrealistic, though not entirely so. You will find a fair number of 1 game series in the schedules of the MLB 16 team era (indeed, even in later years), particularly in years when some cities prohibited Sunday baseball.

Teams would travel to another city to play on Sunday and then travel back to their own, They would do this because weekend playing dates were far more lucrative (due to much higher attendances) than were weekday games. Thus, teams would take advantage of every weekend date available, if the travel distance wasn't too far.

For example, Brooklyn might be playing in Pittsburgh on Friday and Saturday, the teams then travel to Brooklyn to play on Sunday, and then travel back to Pittsburgh for games on Monday and Tuesday.

Originally posted by Teflon Skies
I have begun fiddling with some Access applications to create a 154 game schedule that works...

Tiger Fan has already directed you to a good source, but if you want another option, I can pass along a text file of the schedules created by the old "Front Page Sports: Baseball Pro '98" game for a classical 16 team alignment. These schedules are 154 games and look very much like modern schedules, with off days only on Mondays and Thursdays, and with the relatively short road trips and home stands that are typical today. The only drawback is that the schedule is only 24 weeks long, which means that teams will only have 14 off days for the entire season, and 3 of those are in the All-Star Break.

However, if you feel you want another idea/alternative, I can send them along.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

[seth70liz76]

I still keep my Miller Associates/APBA computer game loaded because the Sked gen is a heck of alot better than the OOTP one. If I knew how, I'd post some (like the 16 team/4 div set up).

[Teflon Skies]

I appreciate the background on the historical aspects of the nature of baseball schedules. I guess with those details, I could probably actually rationalize the generated schedule in OOTP.

A schedule reflecting the abscence of Sunday baseball in some cities for certain years due to their blue laws seems a little era-specific for what I want, though. With that much detail, a person should almost then have a collection of schedules - to also account for things like the addition of night games in 1935 or the All-Star game not existing prior to 1933, or the Brooklyn Dodgers pioneering air travel in 1940. I'm just looking for something plain and serviceable that is also relatively believable over a period of years. I have an old copy of Front Page Baseball '98. Perhaps I'll give it a look-see. Thanks for the info, though.

[Le Grande Orange]

Seth,

In what kind of format does Miller Associates/APBA computer game output its schedules in? Is it in a separate text file or something like that, or is it only readable/viewable in the game itself?

Originally posted by Teflon Skies
With that much detail, a person should almost then have a collection of schedules - to also account for things like the addition of night games in 1935 or the All-Star game not existing prior to 1933, or the Brooklyn Dodgers pioneering air travel in 1940.

Well, that's exactly what I started doing around a year ago - collecting EVERY single original MLB schedule, from 1876 through to today.

And that's what I've done. I have the original schedule for EVERY MLB season (well, minus a couple of years between 1876-1882 when no full schedule was published prior to the start of the season, and of course the 1871-1875 NA, which had no fixed schedule at all. But I have the as played schedules for all of these and will eventually produce full schedule versions from them).

This is why I know as much as I do about past MLB schedules.

The idea behind doing all of this was to allow historical simmers to be able to play on the real schedules MLB used - after all, if you're going to use real players, why not use the real schedules too?

The drawbacks to this at the moment are: 1) the lack of a schedule importer so that all this schedule info can be easily brought into OOTP, and 2) the lack of "official" doubleheader support in OOTP. There are A LOT of doubleheaders in earlier MLB schedules (they only really died out around 1985 or so), and while OOTP can do twin bills, they aren't officially supported so the AI handling of them may be a bit wonky.

I have hopes that eventually both of these drawbacks will be addressed.

Anyway, take a look at the FPS 98 schedules, if Tiger Fan's aren't quite what you're looking for. I printed out the FPS ones for each league alignment a long while back because I intended to edit them for my own use. But later on I ended up deciding to go for the real MLB ones instead.

[ctorg]

Le Grande Orange, you always end up posting such interesting facts. Thanks for deepening the collective baseball knowledge on the board!