The baseball season started a few minutes ago with Atlanta playing Philadelphia. I’ve been working with Major League Baseball for more than a dozen years, and my (along with partners, of course) company, The Sports Scheduling Group, produces the schedules for MLB (our chief scheduler Kelly Easton does all the hard work, but I do the final day assignments), as well as for the umpires (which I do, based on some fantastic work done a few years ago in a Tepper School MBA project, further developed in Hakan Yildiz‘ dissertation). The start of the season is always a time of anxiety for me (not strong anxiety, but a gnawing fear): what if I forgot to put in a game? What if Philadelphia shows up tonight, but Atlanta’s schedule has them in Los Angeles? It is a rather silly worry, since thousands have people have looked at the schedule at this point, so it is unlikely that anything particularly egregious is happening.
Still, I was happy tonight to see Brett Myers toss the first pitch to Kelly Johnson (a ball).
And know that he did so because of operations research.
On this subject – I have been wondering, as the Midwest is digging out of half a foot of snow today, is there a deliberate attempt made to schedule early April games is warmer climates or in domes?
Nope. Fairness and other issues get in the way of that. And let’s see where the snowstorm is next week (since no team wants to begin the season with 2 weeks on the road).