Scheduling the Valley Baseball League

Abstract

The Valley Baseball League is a collegiate summer baseball league with 11 teams playing 42 games between June and August. Producing a schedule has proved challenging for league management, because of the odd number of teams as well as a large number of league mandates and team-specific requests. As an amateur league with limited financial resources, there is pressure to best leverage the league schedule to maximize revenue for each team. A schedule generated by mathematical programming was enthusiastically adopted for the 2020 season and significantly outperformed previous manually produced schedules.