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Devising a Cost Effective Schedule for a Baseball League

In this paper, we discuss the problem of devising a cost effective schedule for a baseball league. Sports scheduling is a notoriously difficult problem. A schedule must satisfy constraints on timing such as the number of games to be played between every pair of teams, the bounds on the number of consecutive home (or away) games for each team, that every pair of teams must have played each other in the first half of the season, and so on. Often, there are additional factors to be considered for a particular league, for example, the availability of venues on specific dates, home-game preferences of teams on specific dates, and balancing of schedules so that games between two teams are evenly-spaced throughout the season. In addition to finding a feasible schedule that meets all the timing restrictions, the problem addressed in this paper has the additional complexity of having the objective of minimizing travel costs. We discuss some structural properties of a schedule that meets the timing constraints and present two heuristics for finding a low-cost schedule. The methodology is used to develop an improved schedule for the Texas Baseball League.