Coaches, managers, players and fans all scrutinize and complain about the ‘fairness’ of scheduling. Professional sports leverage different technologies and human expertise to create these schedules. Organizations ranging from the NBA (click here to read about the NBA process) to the MLB (click here to read about the MLB process) have fascinating scheduling techniques. However a team’s schedule is only a part of what it takes to plan a sports season.
There are very strict rules for assigning umpires to MLB games. An assistant business professor at Michigan State University, Hakan Yildiz, along with a team of researchers, decided to tackle this complex scheduling process with the aid of technology. The result? The MLB has used their proposed umpire schedule 5 of the last 6 seasons. Scheduling 4 umpires for 2,430 games is nothing short of a complicated process. This is especially true considering a slew of restrictions including union-mandated vacations, the rule that umpires must travel to all 30 ballparks at least once every season all while avoiding any one umpire disproportionately umpiring any given team.
Yildiz’s team began designing and testing their scheduling methods by first examining the top key constraints (like the rules listed above) and overlooking less critical ones (like an umpire’s preferred vacation days). From this they leveraged their technology to test various test data. Once tested, they determined the fairest schedule for the umps, all restrictions considered. While specifics about this and other scheduling technology are kept pretty secret, it is clear that scheduling a season for teams and umpires is no easy task. Ref. espn.com, sciencedaily.com, sports.espn.com
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