I worked up something for you - is your configuration 4/4/4 and 4/5/5 in the two leagues? Tell me whatever it is and I can rearrange it into that and post it for you.
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Originally Posted by genghisdunn
If nothing, any recommendations/guidelines to follow that might help me out? ... After about 30 hours of work, though, the best schedule I could come up with had clumped offdays and too many 20+ games stretches without time off.
For those who have done it, what's the best way to create a manual schedule by hand? Start with one team and schedule it all the way through, then move to the next, etc.? Or do the whole schedule one day at a time?
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Sounds like from your precise layout scheme and how far you say you got (done, just not pretty enough) you did a very good job considering especially the 14-team league is a tough configuration.
I do it by series rather than individual games. I start by determining how to layout all the series for one team, then lay out everything else off that. The first key is figuring how to fit the right number of games into a reasonable number of series and keeping home/away and overall splits even or as desired.
For three 4-team divisions I can do that one team, then all the division games can fall off from automatically. When that one is playing another division team, at the same time the other two division teams can be playing each other.
1vs2, 3vs4
1vs3, 2vs4
1vs4, 2vs3, etc.
If there are more teams, there are more options for laying out those more matchups, but they are still routine to do.
Likewise for interdivision and interleague games when that one is playing some other teams, I can matchup teams in that same division in a similar manner.
1vs5, 2vs6, 3vs7, 4vs8
1vs7, 2vs8, 3vs5, 4vs6, etc.
When there are odd numbers of teams in divisions like the 4/5/5 that forces interdivision and intradivision games to occur at the same time, which adds difficulty into the process of laying out the games. The ordering described below has to at least sort of go on while the layout is occurring.
Once all the matchups are schemed out into complete blocks where every team is accounted for I start ordering them - stuff like putting more division games toward the end of the season, trying to keep from having teams play against each other in series too close together, trying to clump homestands and roadtrips but not make them too long, trying spread the offdays around, etc.
After I get the order, then I begin the fine tuning. I have spreadsheet stuff I can set up to show how many games in a row a team is set to have overall, home, and away. If I need to open an offday maybe I move a game from one series to another matchup of the same teams in the same place, e.g., make a 4-game set of 1@2 a 3-game series while making a 3-game series somewhere else in the schedule the new 4-gamer between the teams. Too many home or away series in row or too many 1-series homestands and roadtrips - then I can flip series around, e.g., reverse a 1@2 series to a 2@1 series while elsewhere in the schedule reversing a 2@1 series to a 1@2 series.
That trial-and-error fine tuning can sometime take quite a while. Once I get everything (stuff like the standard current MLB things like no more than 20 days without offday and limited homestand and roadtrip lengths) apparently met that I want to, or at least as close as I can muster, I have a few final checks I have to do after I convert those series into all the individual games. I also can bump series around by a day to put some (more) variety in where the offdays fall.
The process seems hard to explain (compared to just doing it) and probably generally tear-inducingly boring. But if you were interested in more details I could surely oblige. If you were simply interested in getting the schedule and being done with it though, I more than understand.