Request: 32 Teams 162 Games (2SL / 4D / 4T) with Interleague Rival

[Trot]

Hello,

I am designing a schedule for my custom fictional league. I've put quite a lot of thought into this but have never made a schedule before and so I'm hoping someone with more experience can help me out (Or I mean actually creating the schedule would be great as well but I worry I'm asking a bit too much)


What I have in mind is a league semi modeled after the NFL but with a twist that each team will have a designated inter league rival they play every year. I think it would be fun to open the season with a series against the rival and have the final series before the All Star break or the first series after the All Star break be the other rival series. That way in theory the biggest rivalry year would see you play your interleague rival 3 times, at the beginning of the season, at the midpoint of the season, and at the end in the World Series.
Some other random things I'd like to accommodate is having every opening day April 1st, Every All Star Game on July 4th, and every season end by October 1st. The playoffs and spring training I think it's easier to schedule in game but I also know how I would like those to line up as well.


What I figure is easiest is to split the 162 games into 54 3 game series, play 6 series against division teams (3 home and 3 away) 2 series against teams in your same sub league (1 home and 1 away) 2 series against your division rival (1 home and 1 away) and 2 series against 5 other teams from the other sub league (1 home and 1 away)
With this in mind I need at least 3 schedules to rotate through the interleauge opponents, which becomes 6 when you rotate Home/Away.
I also am being difficult in that I like variety in the schedule so I would like 5 different layouts of the standard schedule (what I mean is that imagine in the first year you play against your league opponents in one order, I would like 4 other orders as well so you don't see the same opponents in the same times of year every year)


That gives a grand total of 30 schedules. I also think it would be neat to have 32 different schedules to match the 32 teams and would like to add a more 'balanced' schedule every 16 years (so two more schedules)
The format for the 'balanced' schedules would be 4 division series (2 home and 2 away) 2 series against teams in your subleague (1 at home and 1 away) 3 series against your inter league rival (1 at home or away and 2 at the opposite) and 1 series against each other inter league opponent.
When you rotate for Home/Away this becomes 2 more schedules which when added to the first 30 gives 32 individual schedules.


I apologize if this has been confusing (this is also my very first post so I'd like to say Hello, and if I made any mistakes or came across as rude please let me know I don't want to step on any toes or come across as over bearing)


I understand this is quite a lot to ask and I'm not expecting anyone to step up and create all of this for me, but even making a template or offering me some advice would be very much appreciated.
I have begun the process of making the schedule myself, spent the better part of the last two weeks filling out a spreadsheet which contains the series matchups for the first iteration of the schedule...but then I discovered that I had made a mistake because I did not understand how OOTP assigns team # to the schedules.
My current understanding is they are assigned alphabetically from top to bottom going D1 -> D4 then SL1 -> SL4


The full list of (City) teams I want to have is listed here, in the order I believe the game will assign their team names in


Brooklyn
New York
Philadelphia
Washington


Atlanta
Dallas
Miami
New Orleans



Chicago
Green Bay
Kansas City
St. Louis


Las Vegas
Los Angeles
Portland
San Francisco


Boston
New York
Pittsburgh
Toronto


Memphis
Phoenix
Tampa Bay
Texas


Cleveland
Denver
Detroit
Minnesota


Anaheim
Hawaii
Oakland
Seattle


Given this information, the inter league rivals are (by my reckoning)
Brooklyn - Boston (1 - 17)
New York - New York (2 - 18)
Philadelphia - Pittsburgh (3 - 19)
Washington - Toronto (4 - 20)
Atlanta - Phoenix (5 - 22)
Dallas - Texas (6 - 24)
Miami - Tampa Bay (7 - 23)
New Orleans - Memphis (8 - 21)
Chicago - Detroit (9 - 27)
Kansas City - Cleveland (11 - 25)
St. Louis - Denver (12 - 26)
Las Vegas - Hawaii (13 - 30)
Los Angeles - Anaheim (14 - 29)
Portland - Seattle (15 - 32)
San Francisco - Oakland (16 - 31)

Thank you again for reading, and please let me know if I can clarify anything for you.
I plan to continue working on this in my spare time but feel quite discouraged as I feel I haven't much progress at all after 2 weeks of more or less working on this as much as my free time allows but I hope to have this worked out either on my own or with the help of some friendly forum poster I've yet to meet. Assuming no one steps in to offer any help you can expect me to post my solution somewhere around Christmas time...or at least by the start of the 24 season I'd hope haha
Cheers!
Trot

[gmo]

Apr1 to Oct1 (inclusive) is 184 days. Current MLB is 187 days (though I usually go with 186), but it was only several years ago that it was 183. So the timeframe seems reasonable.

Locking in on the specific dates means days of the week will become meaningless in terms of layout. I.e., the usual (at least in MLB) thing of two series a week, one early week and one on the weekend ending Sunday, will not be the case. The 54 three-game series factor into that too. Series would be laid out from the start date with offdays falling in places to get the All-Star break at its time and the end at its time.

It took some time, but I think I see how the interleague matchups would work. There are 15 interleague opponents besides the rival, and you play against 5 of them in a season, so in three years you cover all 15. I need to think more on how to make sure everyone plays everyone in those 3 years though.

Figuring out how to juggle the matchups so that, except for the interleague rival, games against opponents do not fall always on the same dates will take some more thought too. I have concerns about getting that to work out with reasonable effort.

Five variations time the three years to cover all interleague opponents gets to 15 years. Flip the home/away, and that gets to 30.

The balanced is "just" another schedule. I see how to get the 54 series. Flip the home/away for the second version. That is the 30 + 2 = 32 years.

I think you have it for how the schedule ids match to teams, but there might be things that throw it out of whack. I would recommend making a simple test schedule that is nothing but the interleague rival series and checking if the matchups come out as expected in the game. Anything like 31 & 32 should be flipped is not difficult, but better to have the schedule ids correct in the first place.

[gmo]

#
# 32 team schedule, 162 games
# Designed for the following configuration:
# 2 subleagues, each with 4 divisions of 4 teams
#
#
# 18 games against 3 other teams in division (9H/9A)
# 6 games against 12 other teams in subleague (3H/3A)
# 6 games against 1 "rival" interleague team (3H/3A)
# 6 games against each other team in other subleague (3H or 3A)
#
# This is one of a 30 of sibling schedules
# There are two sets of 15 the same but with home-away flipped for every matchup
#
# In each set of 15 there are three subsets of 5 that mix when matchups occur
# Each subset involves the same 5 non-rival interleague opponents
# The 5 versions in each subset mix when the matchups between teams occur
#
# Naming convention involves end of filenames having:
# - "1", "2", "3" for the three subsets of same interleague opponents
# - "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" for the variations on the matchups in subset
# - "x" indicates version with home-away flipped compared to otherwise same name
#
# Rival matchups are first series of season and last season before All-Star break
# 5 non-rival interleagure opponents are all 4 teams from one other division plus
#  one other team from the same division as the rival
#
#
# All game in 3-game series
# Offdays on average about once every three series
# 
# No homestands or roadtrips longer than 12 games
#
# Teams play as many as 12 consecutive days without offday
#
# Game times set at 7:05pm
# Exceptions 1:05pm getaway days (where both teams play elsewhere next day)
#
# Season begins April 1st
# Season ends September 30th
# Season spans 183 days
#
# All-Star Game July 4 (day 95)
#
# Built 2023-08-29
#

[gmo]

#
# 32 team schedule, 162 games
# Designed for the following configuration:
# 2 subleagues, each with 4 divisions of 4 teams
#
#
# 12 games against 3 other teams in division (6H/6A)
# 6 games against 12 other teams in subleague (3H/3A)
# 9 games against 1 "rival" interleague team (3 or 6H/3 or 6A)
# 3 games against each other team in other subleague (3H or 3A)
#
# This is one of a pair of sibling schedules
# Other simply has the home-away flipped for every matchup
#
#
# All game in 3-game series
# Offdays on average about once every three series
# 
# No homestands or roadtrips longer than 12 games
#
# Teams play as many as 12 consecutive days without offday
#
# Game times set at 7:05pm
# Exceptions 1:05pm getaway days (where both teams play elsewhere next day)
#
# Season begins April 1st
# Season ends September 30th
# Season spans 183 days
#
# All-Star Game July 4 (day 95)
#
# Built 2023-08-29
#

[gmo]

I tried to explain the naming convention in the comments in the post and in the files. Let me know if you have questions.

I reviewed things and thing I accomplished what the descriptions say. But I cannot rule out there being mistakes. That is always the case with individual files, but with so many files here, it is that much more room where something might not have come out right. Maybe after importing a schedule for a season, look it over and check the reports to make sure it is what it says.

One additional note I would make is to manually choose an order to use the files. You could alternate between the "x" (flipped home-away) and not year-to-year. The first can be whatever, but peak inside to make sure to pick something that does not have the second year with the league opponents being played that the same time as the first.

[Trot]

Holy moly gmo! Thank you so much! I see now that the Hall of Famer accolade is well deserved. I really wasn't expecting this at all but it's exactly what I had in mind (and in fact much nicer than anything I would have come up with)

Sorry for taking so long to reply, I actually noticed your first message some days ago but did not fully understand it (I thought you were giving me suggestions rather than asking for clarification) and then I did not check this forum as I was busy with work. What an incredible surprise!

I ordered the schedule the way I wanted, re-named them and then copied the folder into data/schedules and loaded up a quick test league and can confirm that the interleague rivals are correct (at least for the first schedule I loaded which is _na1x)
I will do more testing as time permits and make a post on this thread if I notice anything.

I now realize you are the person who wrote the fantastic blog about making schedules which I found a great resource when I was trying to do this all on my own. Correct me if I'm wrong but you created a piece of software to help you create these, right?
If you are willing to continue helping other and sharing your work I think the software would be very useful if you were to open source it on Github or a similar code hosting site. Not only would you make it available to a wider audience but it's also possible that friendly contributors could help to improve it and possibly even make an easy to use GUI style schedule generator so you don't have to be bothered by requests as complex as mine lol

Regardless thanks again you have really made my week and I cannot wait to use these schedules in the league I'm setting up to help tide the 6 months without baseball coming up.

Cheers!
Trot