How is the major league baseball schedule developed?

Answer 1

I saw a show on the Discovery Channel several years ago where they showed the process of developing the schedule for an MLB season. They may do a significant portion of this by computer now. But, at the time, it was a completely manual process.

First they figure out how many times each team is going to play each other throughout the season. Then they figure out how many times the games will be home or away for each match-up. They also factor in holidays or other conflicting events (like football games in multi-use stadiums) and note those dates.

They then take a giant white board and put a grid on it that shows every day of the season (across) by every possible game for a given day (16 rows down). They then take 162 team-color-coded icons with magnets for each MLB team and, using the data they originally collected, fill out the matrix until all of the icons are assigned to a spot on the grid (two to a given square to show a particular game - of course, not all squares will be filled out, because of off days and travel days for the teams). They then assign game times to each game based on requests from the teams, broadcast companies (like ESPN), etc.

They did this manually instead of by computer, because they wanted to have a visual representation of the entire schedule in front of them for verification. Maybe a significant part of the process is started by computer with certain algorithms (like the fact that each team plays the other teams in their own division x-amount of times). But, the complexity of fleshing out the entire schedule is something that has to be done manually.

Answer 2

They paint rabbits each one with a different teams colors. Then they let them loose in a field painted with squares like a calendar. And whichever rabbits poop next to another teams rabbits on a certain day, well then those two teams play that day.

Answer 3

i think it has something to do with rabbits but im not sure.

Answer 4

Yeah, that's how.