Making Your Own Basic Schedule
A very simple look at how it can be done
Making Your Own Basic Schedule
Sometimes the official Major League Baseball schedule doesn’t quite cut it.
Take the 1919 season, for example. In part because of concerns that the country wasn’t ready for professional sports, the owners decided to limit the season to only 140 games. Even worse, some teams — such as the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees — only played 139 games that year.
Or take any modern season. Maybe you’re like me and don’t like interleague play. Maybe you don’t like the imbalanced schedule, which caused the 2024 Dodgers to play 13 games against the awful Colorado Rockies, but only 6 games against the Philadelphia Phillies.
Maybe you want to do a totally different idea, or a totally different concept. Maybe you want an evenly balance schedule in a 20 team league, for example. Maybe you want over 200 games. There’s a lot of things that could lead you to wanting to create a different kind of schedule.
I discovered some interesting instructions for tackling this kind of project in the February 1968 edition of the APBA Journal:
The Gaydos brothers were trying to solve a pretty basic problem. They wanted to play through a full schedule, but didn’t quite have the time to play 162 games per team. Additionally, they occasionally wanted to use fewer than 10 teams in a league — or, sometimes, they wanted to use as many as 12 teams.
And so they came up with the idea of a “schedule unit.” It’s pretty simple, actually. They created a chart listing all possible combinations of the different numbers of teams, and then called these a “section.”
Here are their sections:
The basic idea is that a single “section” means two games — one home and one away. Naturally, you could then adjust the number of games in a “section” to create a “series” more akin to what schedulers in real life actually use.
They then went on to describe a system that allowed anybody playing through a schedule like this to see each team’s results at a glance:
Again — you could make a few modifications of this chart if you wanted to fit the size and nature of your own league. This does give you an idea of what is easily possible with some paper and a little bit of time.
In fact, if you want to create your own schedule using Excel (or similar spreadsheet software), it’s actually pretty easy.
In fact, Wikipedia’s article on round robin schedule creation is really helpful. I recommend looking at the “circle method:”
This is actually quite similar to the method the Gaydos brothers used, except that it allows you to make sure that all teams are scheduled to play on the same “date.” In other words, this method allows you to create a schedule using a calendar instead of just game numbers.
You wind up with patterns similar to these, which I created for a 16 team league:
And so on. Once you get through every “round,” you can then flip the home and away team assignments and use the same schedule again.
Now, if you want to figure out how many games in a series you want, it’s not too hard to do the math. For an even schedule with 16 teams, for example, you get 165 games total if you have every team play every other team 11 times (15*11=165). Of course, you probably want an even number of games to keep the home and away totals equal. 12 games would mean two sets of 3 game series at home and away, and would give you 180 games (15*12=180). Alternatively, you could keep it at 10 games total, which would be one series of 2 games and one series of 3 games at home and the same total away. That gives you a 150 game schedule (15*10=150).
Once you’ve got a basic schedule outline, it’s not too hard to stick in an All Star Game break, put in some doubleheaders, and have some general fun.
Do you have any other bits of advice for those looking to create their own custom regular season schedule?