OM in the News: Scheduling Major League Baseball Umpires

Here is an interesting scheduling application you may want to share with your class when you teach Chapter 15. Scientific American (Aug.18,2011) reports on how four B-School profs have formulated the “travelling umpire problem” to develop solutions to get umpire crews to every major league baseball game . Given that the Major League baseball (MLB) season lasts 6 months, such scheduling is a daunting task.  During the season, 30 teams play a total of 2,430 games in 27 different cities. The umpires in the league are part of a 4-member group called a crew and each umpire handles about 142 games/year.

Here are some constraints: (1) minimize travel time and distance for the crews; (2) crews should visit each MLB city at least once; (3) they should work each team at home and on the road; (4) they should work no more than 21 days in a row; (5) they should not ump any one team’s games for more than 4 series all year–just to name a few of the rules.

The mathematical model proved successful in generating a high quality schedule in a short amount of time and MLB has used it over the past 3 seasons. Before the profs (who are at U. Miami, Carnegie, and Michigan State) built their computerized method, the schedule was created manually–and took weeks– by a retired umpire. As Scientific American puts it: “That guy is out“!

Researcher Tallys Yunes (at Miami) explains, “We not only reduced the time necessary to create the schedule, we also improved the overall quality of the schedule, in the sense that it better satisfies both the MLB and umpire union rules”.

If you want to provide a humourous side-bar to this class discussion here is a link to a 4- minute video clip about umpiring. It features Leslie Nielson playing a detective going undercover as an ump.

Discussion questions:

1. Why is this an important OM issue?

2. Besides major league sports, what other fields could benefit from math scheduling models like this?