the craft of major league baseball scheduling – a journey from 1982 until now

Grantland and ESPN has a short video [12:25] on the couple who created the major league baseball schedules in the pre-Mike Trick era (1982-2004). The husband-and-wife team of Henry and Holly Stephenson used scheduling algorithms to set about 80% of the schedule. They found that the their algorithm could not come up with the entire schedule because the list of scheduling requirements led to infeasibility:

“It couldn’t do the whole schedule. That was where the big companies were falling apart. We analyzed the old schedules and found that none of them met the written requirements that the league gave to us. It turns out it was impossible to meet all of the requirements. So the secret was to really know how to break the rules.”

Watch the video here. The end of the video acknowledges how scheduling has evolved such that the entire schedules can be computer generated using combinatorial optimization software (the Stephensons even mention having to compete with a scheduling team from CMU). The video uses baseball scheduling as an avenue to illustrate how decision making and optimization has evolved in the past 30 years. I would highly recommend the video to operations research and optimization students.