How to force a schedule?

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by SC_Dawg

I would like to just set one of my teams as the "traditional" opening day host team and have the game rotate through a set number of schedules that I copied from the MLB schedules in the schedule folder while maintaining that "traditional" opening day host.

You could do that, you just have to match up the actual schedule which has an opening date that you want with the team you want.

Here's how it looked for the 1946-49 and 1957-58 seasons:

1946: No early openers. All teams opened on the same day, Tues. Apr. 16. In the NL, Cincinnati, New York, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis opened at home.

1947: The AL had the sole season opening game, New York at Washington, on Mon. Apr. 14. The remaining AL teams and the NL opened on Tues. Apr. 15 (in the NL, Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn opened at home).

1948: Three early openers to start the season on Mon. Apr. 19. In the NL, the lone game scheduled was Pittsburgh at Cincinnati. In the AL, Philadelphia was at Boston for a doubleheader (since that date was also the Patriot's Day holiday in Boston), and New York was at Washington. The remaining teams in the leagues got underway the following day.

1949: Two early openers to start the season on Mon. Apr. 18, one in each league. In the NL, Philadelphia was at Boston, while in the AL Philadelphia was at Washington. All remaining teams began their seasons the next day (in the NL, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Brooklyn opened at home).

1957: One early opener, in the AL. The season kicked off with Baltimore at Washington on Mon. Apr. 15; all remaining teams in both leagues opened their seasons the following day (in the NL, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Chicago opened at home).

1958: One early opener, in the AL: Boston at Washington on Mon. Apr. 14. All other teams opened on Tuesday (in the NL, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and San Francisco opened at home).


One important thing to note if you're using historical schedules to fill in for other years/leagues: in the real schedule, holiday doubleheaders were the standard during the 8-team league years. These holidays were May 30th (Memorial Day*), July 4th (Independence Day), and Labor Day. Because the first two are fixed date holidays, that means the day of the week they fall on will slide through the week as the years go by. The majors accounted for this in their schedules, but if you use the force weekday start option (which you should so that series will always start and end on proper days regardless of the date/day of the week combination for any calendar) this means the fixed date holidays will not fall on the proper fixed dates.

You'll either have to accept all teams playing a doubleheader on a few days even though they won't line up to the fixed date holidays, or you have to very carefully select your schedule files so that fixed date doubleheaders fall on a Saturday or Sunday for example, in which case the twin bills can be rationalized as special events.

Or just imagine that the holidays are falling on different dates than is the case in the real world... that's probably the easiest thing to do.

*Memorial Day was a fixed date holiday, falling on May 30th of each year (or May 31st if May 30th was a Sunday), up until around 1971. The holiday was then changed to be the last Monday in May.

[thbroman]

Originally Posted by SC_Dawg

From GMO's original primer on schedules:

If there are multiple files with the same format in your schedules folder distinguished only by the comment at the end of the filename, the first in alphabetical order would be used at league creation then the game would move through the list as years progressed. If there were 3 such files named like below for a league created in 2006, the game would load them automatically for the league like this:

2006 - ILN_BGY_G162_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_A
2007 - ILN_BGY_G162_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_B
2008 - ILN_BGY_G162_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_C
2009 - ILN_BGY_G162_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_A
2010 - ILN_BGY_G162_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_B.. .

Now if I am reading this correctly and I were to have 5 different schedules that I wanted to rotate through and I want to start a league say in 1931 here is the order my schedules would be used

1931 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR1 OF5
1932 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR2 OF5
1933 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR3 OF5
1934 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR4 OF5
1935 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR5 OF5
1936 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR1 OF5
1937 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR2 OF5
1938 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR3 OF5
1939 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR4 OF5
1940 - ILN_BGY_G154_SL1_D1_T4_D2_T4_SL2_D1_T4_D2_T4_C_YR5 OF5

And so on.

Pretty easy actually

It was. I renamed 5 schedules from the 1970s for my 24-team, 2-league, 4-division game, posted them in the schedules folders and everything seems to be going swimmingly. Thanks a ton to Le Grande Orange and gmo for the advice!

[Nukester]

Wow thats some confusing ****

[thbroman]

Originally Posted by Nukester

Wow thats some confusing ****

But it really isn't. The name that you put on the schedule is effectively a description of the kind of league you have.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Nukester

Wow thats some confusing ****

It only looks that way at first glance. Like thbroman said, the name is basically just a listing of the particulars of the league that schedule file belongs with. Once you understand what the numbers are referring to, it's actually quite simple. And understanding the numbers is pretty easy.

[SC_Dawg]

Originally Posted by Nukester

Wow thats some confusing ****

I have found the confusion for myself was just an initial shock at the amount of detail that GMO went into to explain the schedule XML files and how they interact with the game.

If you haven't read it I cannot urge strongly enough that you read this thread:

Schedules for use in OOTPBB 2006

The actual XML files are quite easy to create/understand once you get over that shock.