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Abstract


Major League Baseball currently employs a rather bizarre method of scheduling games, so that its 30 teams must fit into 6 unbalanced divisions to fit MLB's scheduling criteria. Some experts have proposed a method of realigning MLB divisions and scheduling MLB games. This website points out the implementational issues of the currently popular idea floating around and attempts to make a new proposal to fix MLB's scheduling.

Introduction


Since the advent of interleague play, Major League Baseball (MLB) has had a number of problems devising scheduling methods for its 30 teams. Part of the problems lie in its organization. The 30-member league is divided into 6 division, 3 divisions in each league. There are 4 divisions of 5 teams, 1 division of 4 teams and 1 more division of 6 teams. Thus the American League has 14 teams and the National League has 16 teams. With such inequity in the league it becomes a daunting task to try to make a scheduling format where everybody plays 162 games, nobody has to go consecutive days without a game, and everybody has a fairly balanced schedule.

Thus the task at hand is to devise a scheduling formula where all of these problems can be addressed.

Previous Work


The solution offered by a number of experts asks the league to move one National League Central team to the American League West, or at least make a series of moves so that all of the divisions have 5 teams. This leads to 15-member leagues, which means that there will always have to be at least one interleague series going. The next part of the solution is dividing the 162 games for each team. This becomes a much simpler task with balanced divisions. Each team will play its division members 24 times for a total of 96 games. Then each tem will play its remaining league members 6 times each (60 games). This leaves 6 games, which can be filled with a home-and-home series with its interleague rival.

At first glance, this solution seems to solve MLB's scheduling problem, however it contains a number of oversights. First, dividing the entire 162 game season into 3-game series means there will be 54 series. MLB currently uses a schedule format where a team plays 2 series a week -- a weekday series and then a weekend series. To maintain MLB's scheduling format, a team would have to play 27.5 weeks (including the all-star break). There are 26 weeks and one day between April 1, and September 30. One only needs to look to the 2003 Orioles-Indians snow-opener, or imagine a November World Series to see the problems with this idea.

The other oversight of this schedule system is far more damaging to its feasibility, however. To have 15-team divisions, there must be at least one interleague series being played at all times. There are 54 slots for series in this scheduling format. Counting the number of interleague series reveals that there are only 30 interleague series all season. Schedule makers would run out of interleague games to play by mid-July. Some teams would be left taking 3 or 4-day holidays. And the season would only grow longer.

The previous solution, while mathematically correct, contains a number of implementation errors.

A New Approach


One of the basic points of this exercise is to simplify the scheduling process. This is best achieved by balancing the divisions. Although this introduces a variety of other issues (as introduced earlier), these issues a far easier to deal with that the issues surrounding unbalanced divisions. With that in mind, the first step is to move the Milwaukee Brewers from the National League Central back into their original division, the American League Central. Next, to fill the AL West, the Kansas City Royal are moved from the AL Central to the AL West.

With the divisions now balanced, we can proceed to try and fill 162 games.

One of the important aspects of MLB is that of divisional play. Since divisional opponents are competing with eath other, they should have ample opportunity to play each other directly. Out of 162 games, we ideally want roughly half, or 81 games to be against divisional opponents. We begin by rounding this number down to 80, so each team plays its divisional rivals 20 times each. This is split into 4 3-games series (2 home and 2 away), and 2 4-games series (1 home and 1 away). This also greatly lowers the probability of a team winning its division and going to the playoffs despite a losing record (as the Texas Rangers almost did in the strike shortened 1994 campaign).

Now there are 82 games remaining. We can copy the preexisting idea and have each team play a home and home 3-game series with all of its other league rivals. This contributes 60 games, leaving us with 22 games to distribute.

Doing the math for the games we've assigned reveals that each team currently plays 32 games against teams who finished in a different place than a given team the year before, and only 12 games against teams who finished the same. A team that finished 4th in their division last year currently has to play 32 games against teams that finished 1,2,3 or 5, but only 12 games against other teams that finished fourth. The remainder of the schedule needs to fix this inequality.

To begin assigning the remaining 22 games, we begin by adding another 6 games against the teams in their league that finished the same place, but in other divisions. 3 of these 6 games will be home games against one team, while the remaining 3 games will be against the other team. Since those two teams will also play each other, their series can be used to balance the number of home and away games.

The remaining 16 games can be used for interleague play. They are split into 4 4-game series against teams who finished in the same place in their division but in the opposite league. The team in the same division but opposite league will have a home-and-home tradeoff, while for the other 2 series, one will be at home and the other will be away. A team that finished second in the AL East will play a 4 game series at their NL East counterpart and either their NL Central or NL West counterpart. That team will also host a 4-game series against their NL East counterpart and whichever of the other two teams they didn't play at.

This solution adds up to 162 games, and each team plays 50 series. There are also 60 interleague series, which means there are enough interleague series to always have one going.

Implementational Issues


Playing 50 series means that there will be 25.5 weeks needed (counting the all-star break) to play the schedule. Generally, MLB seasons start on a Monday and end on a Sunday, so we want to play an odd number of series. This way, adding the all-star break makes our number of series even, and lets the season conclude on a Sunday. This step is fairly simple. A number of 4-game series could be split into 2 2-game series. In fast this only needs to be done to 15 series and the task is accomplished.

Sample Calculation


To illustrate this further, I've made a schedule format for 2004 based on the 2003 results.

2003 MLB Standings

American League

National League

East

East

1
NY Yankees
1
Atlanta
2
Boston
2
Florida
3
Toronto
3
Philadelphia
4
Baltimore
4
Montreal
5
Tampa Bay
5
NY Mets

Central

Central

1
Minnesota
1
Chi Cubs
2
Chi White Sox
2
Houston
3
Cleveland
3
St. Louis
4
Milwaukee
4
Pittsburgh
5
Detroit
5
Cincinnati

West

West

1
Oakland
1
San Francisco
2
Seattle
2
Los Angeles
3
Kansas City
3
Arizona
4
Anaheim
4
Colorado
5
Texas
5
San Diego

Now since I'm an Orioles fan, lets use the O's as a sample team to conjure up a schedule. The Orioles finished fourth in 2003, so they will play a fourth place schedule. The Orioles will play:
  • 10 home games and 10 away games against the New York Yankees.
  • 10 home games and 10 away games against the Boston Red Sox.
  • 10 home games and 10 away games against the Toronto Blue Jays.
  • 10 home games and 10 away games against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Minnesota Twins.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Chicago White Sox.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Cleveland Indians.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Detroit Tigers.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Oakland Athletics.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Seattle Mariners.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Kansas City Royals.
  • 3 home games and 3 away games against the Texas Rangers.
  • 3 home games and 6 away games against the Milwaukee Brewers.
  • 6 home games and 3 away games against the Anaheim Angels.
  • 4 home games and 4 away games against the Montreal Expos.
  • 4 home games and 0 away games against the Pittsburgh Pirates.
  • 0 home games and 4 away games against the Colorado Rockies.

Benefits:


In the past six year there have been many complaints about Major League Baseball's scheduling format. This idea is an attempt to fix those issues.

In 1997, the players union complained because the original interleague play format caused too many 2-game series, and too much traveling. This format only has 2 2-game series for each team. And with only 50 series a season, the traveling burden is much smaller.

Another issue has been schedule inequality. In this format, each team plays 32 games against teams who finished in a different position in their respective standings. And they play 34 games against teams that finished the same. Except for a small inequality of 2 games, this is as balanced as possible.

Another hot topic in baseball is interleague play. Traditionalists hate it, but most love it. This schedule format keeps interleague play, but reduces it to 16 games, which is a little less than 10 percent of the entire schedule. Currently interleague play accounts for 18 games of most schedules. These numbers are roughly close.

Criticism:


The schedule format presented here does away with many issues, however it causes some new problems.

The first major issue is having an odd number of teams in each league. This raises the necessity to have interleague play always going. The issue with this is that some teams will have to spend their traditional opening day game playing an unknown interleague foe. Others will have to finish their season doing the same thing. Of course there is no solution to this in a balanced division format.

The next major issue is the lack of regional rivals. In balancing the strength of schedule, we assign all of the interleague games, which means there is no guarantee of a Cubs-White Sox series or a Yankees-Mets classic. First of all, these series only have impact for certain teams. For every Dodgers-Angels grudge match, fans must be subjected to a Mariners-Rockies snorefest (only dubbed a snorefest because it lacks any rivalry aspect). So the importance of these series is overdrawn. But these teams can face of if they finish in the same place in a given year.

Imagine the chaos in Chicago if the Cubs and Sox both somehow manage to win their divisions one year. The anticipation will grow for a Cubs-Sox World Series, but once they are done choking, at least the 8 games they play the following year will be a consolation prize. And it will mean something since they will both likely be good teams.

Conclusion:


The expansion and misorganization of MLB has led to scheduling inequalities that have complicated the game severely in recent years. This scheduling format is an attempt to return the game to its simplified format when MLB had only 26 or 28 teams.

While not every issue with MLB scheduling has been resolved, and some new issues have been created, it is my opinion that these new issues are far less a threat to the format of the game than any other scheduling format.

This schedule manages to provide balanced divisions, have fair schedules, cut back traveling, while preserving the current Weekday-Weekend series format, and keeping the season to its current bounds of months where baseball is playable.