LGO: Someone took your dream job

[Brick]

Pittsburgh Business Times
November 15, 2004

Striking it BIG
Local firm lands Major League Baseball scheduling contract
Maria Guzzo

BUTLER -- After 24 years of using the same vendor, Major League Baseball has chosen a tiny Pittsburgh-area company to create its 2005 regular season schedule.

Butler-based Sports Scheduling Group, a four-person firm with ties to the Pirates and Carnegie Mellon University, landed the six-figure contract last week when MLB announced next season's schedule.

Michael Trick, a Sports Scheduling co-founder and a professor at CMU's Tepper school of Business, said he and his business partners don't have immediate plans to grow their four-person firm as a result of the contract, but he said it's a good boost for the region's image.

"We're definitely a small company," Mr. Trick said. "I would not expect us to suddenly be a 3,000-person scheduling company. But the aura this sort of work provides is as a good regional asset. It solidifies the aspects of the city's high-tech reputation."

Stepping to the plate
Mr. Trick and co-founder Doug Bureman first met in the early 1990s when Mr. Bureman was senior vice president of business operations with the Pirates. Mr. Trick was part of a task force from Carnegie Mellon that was completing a study on the economic impact of the team on the region. He also specializes in researching business operations, such as scheduling order flow for steel plants. Mr. Bureman had been involved in baseball scheduling on a team level when he worked in several positions for the Cincinnati Reds and was a member of the National League Schedule Committee during his Pirates tenure.

"I felt there was an opportunity there with the advent of technology," Mr. Bureman said.

Major League Baseball lets companies submit proposed schedules and chooses the best one. Mr. Trick said Sports Scheduling has been trying to get the contract since 1996, but has been making its most serious attempts at the job since 2002.

"I thought, 'how hard could this be?'" Mr. Trick said. "It turned out to be very hard."

Scheduling is complicated not only because there are 30 teams, playing 162 games each, but also because schedulers have to take into consideration the All-Star break; the days when the teams' stadiums are used for other events; individual team demands; and myriad other factors.

"There are hundreds of pages of requests and requirements from each team," Mr. Trick said. "We have to keep travel reasonable. Then most teams like to be away just before the All-Star game, if they're hosting it, in order to get everything in place. Ideally, you want to have teams play two or three series at home and two or three series away."

Nailing the home run
Initially, the men landed small contracts with MLB.

They related to expansion and realignment and what potentially the season could look like," Mr. Bureman said.

They continued to work on the entire regular season schedule and submitted them to MLB over the past few years.

But MLB's longtime scheduling contractors -- Henry and Holly Stephenson, a husband and wife team from Massachusetts -- had been scheduling the games for 24 years and continued to land the job. But not this year.

"We're working on a schedule of our own for the '06 season," Mr. Stephenson said. "We'll see what happens after that."

Katy Feeney, MLB's senior vice president for scheduling, said the exact reason for Sports Scheduling Group landing the contract over the Stephensons was tough to pinpoint.

"The scheduling process is very difficult," Ms. Feeney said. "The one thing they did have for 2005 was fewer semi-repeaters, (periods when a team plays one team for a few days, then plays a different team and then plays the first team again), and they also had somewhat awkward travel, but the ownership committee decided to go with Sports Scheduling Group this year."

The contract is for one year, and neither MLB nor the Sports Scheduling partners would disclose its size.

"I can't say," Mr. Trick said. "But we don't get paid as much as a weak-hitting utility shortstop."

As an example of the range in which that contract may fall, Pirates utility infielders Freddy Sanchez, Bobby Hill and Jose Castillo made $300,000 each last season, and infielder Abraham Nunez made $625,000 in 2004, according to the USA Today baseball salary database.

Expanding to new markets
While working on the baseball schedule, Mr. Trick, a Georgia Institute of Technology alum, gave a presentation there about his plight to conquer the MLB schedule.
George Nemhauser, a Georgia Tech professor of industrial and systems engineering, attended, and challenged Mr. Trick to consider scheduling Atlantic Coast Conference basketball, which includes Georgia Tech, Clemson, Wake Forest and Duke. With nine teams playing 16 games each, at the time, the schedule was a snap, and they landed the ACC scheduling contract on their first try in 1998. Later, they landed the ACC football and baseball schedules.

In 2002, Mr. Trick said they began to get serious about landing the MLB contract.

"Up until then, we had been doing it part time, but that was not going to get us over the top," Mr. Trick said. "In addition to my professor duties, I was spending nights and weekends on this. Everyone needs a hobby."

So the three men became partners in Sports Scheduling Group and hired the firm's only other employee, chief scheduler Kelly Easton. Ms. Easton received her doctorate in industrial and systems engineering this year from Georgia Tech. She works out of her home in Kansas.

The entire company is virtual, with the professors working from their schools and Mr. Bureman working from his home in Butler.

In addition to the MLB and ACC contracts, Sports Scheduling's clients include the Mountain West Conference for women's volleyball, the Southland Conference for men's basketball and football, the Colonial Athletic Conference for men's and women's basketball, and the Mid-American Conference for men's basketball.

Mr. Bureman said the business is profitable, but he declined to discuss total revenue. He said they may begin marketing Sports Scheduling's technology internationally -- possibly scheduling European soccer. Mr. Trick said at the moment they're not hiring, but that could change.

"We'd like to do more college work," Mr. Trick said. "So, eventually, if we can get some more contracts, we will be hiring."

MS. GUZZO may be contacted at mguzzo@bizjournals.com.

[UngratefulDead]

2005 Schedule, the Pirates face the Devil Rays four times in interleague play...

[Jeremy Weimer]

The Pirates will face the Devil Rays 160 times next season. The other two games will be played against some team called TBD.

[Le Grande Orange]

Brick, thanks for the article. Interesting stuff.

I didn't know that MLB opened up its schedule contract each year, I had thought the Stephensons had a multi-year contract with them. I still find it interesting how, after 24 seasons of being satisfied with one company, they then switch to someone else.

By the way, I think gmo may be a better fit for job; he cranks out schedules at an amazing rate in the fictional OOTP schedules thread! I do better in researching them rather than creating them, at least so far...

[Kaline]

You two should have wrote MLB and said you'd do it for free