MLB gets new schedule makers
PITTSBURGH (AP) – One of baseball’s longest streaks will end in January when schedules for the 30 major league teams are released. A small company outside Pittsburgh made it to the majors after attempting for eight years to unseat longtime schedule makers Henry and Holly Stephenson, a husband-and-wife team from Massachusetts that has been doing the Major League Baseball schedule for nearly a quarter century.
“What they’ve done is remarkable and they should be commended for it,” said Doug Bureman, co-founder of the Sports Scheduling Group. “It’s too early to think about it, but it would be great if we could do the same thing.”
The Sports Scheduling Group was awarded the contract last month.
Henry Stephenson, 64, said he and his wife are already getting ready for next year.
“I’m a little surprised myself that we’ve been doing it this long and for that matter, not quite finished,” he said. “We’re working on a schedule for 2006. We’ll see whether it takes.”
The Sports Scheduling Group connected this year by avoiding what are referred to as “semirepeaters,” an irritant for club managers where the same teams play in back-to-back series at home and then away, MLB officials said.
Semirepeaters give batters more time to figure out pitchers and vice versa. With more emphasis recently on divisional rivalries, it has become an even more important issue.
MLB officials would not discuss the criteria of a winning schedule, but say that the process has become increasingly complex with new divisions, interleague play, extended playoffs and more demands from cities with scheduling conflicts.
More and more scheduling groups with academic ties have become involved in sports, said Katy Feeney, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president of scheduling and club relations.
The schedulers’ tactics are not far removed from work done with large corporations that wrestle with international supply and demand.
Bureman, who worked for the Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates, teamed up three other people including Michael Trick, a professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, and George Nemhauser, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech.
“It was either the programming or the refinement of programing that Bureman and Trick had done, or attempted to do over several years,” Feeney said. “They got close to putting together something that would work and were nearly selected in the past. This year they were.”
Neither the Sports Scheduling Group nor the Stephensons would talk about the technology they use.
Major League Baseball accepts a limited number of proposals to make schedules and those groups are given a rough outline of what the season will look like, MLB officials said. From that short list, one proposal is chosen and that group begins an extended back-and-forth between the MLB, the players union and a myriad of other interests with schedule requests.
Stephenson and his wife have used computers since their first year with MLB in 1981, but said human interaction is inevitable in scheduling, as is human conflict.
“I think each team looks at the schedule from its own perspective and there is without exception a lot of points of view,” he said. “There will never be a day when everyone sits down and says, ‘This is great.”‘
Praise for those who work for as long as six months piecing together the complex schedule should not be expected, said Stephenson.
Asked if there were ever a magical season when every team was satisfied with the schedule, Major League’s Feeney said, “No, there has never been a year like that.”