close

No simple formula for making Frontier League schedule

11 min read
article image -

It is the most analyzed, criticized and scrutinized part of every season in the Frontier League, the 12-team independent baseball league that includes the Washington Wild Things.

No, it’s not the umpiring or the league’s age limit or its sometimes confusing roster rules.

What gets the players, coaches, owners and even fans in an uproar each year is the schedule. Everybody complains about it. Everybody is sure their team is more travel-weary than their rivals because of the schedule, that the opponent has made fewer eight- or 10-hour bus trips through the night and that more favorable home dates would help get additional fans in the seats.

Scheduling 12 Frontier League teams to play 96 games in 116 days and taking into account each team’s special requests sounds like something that could easily be handled by utilizing a computer-based algorithm.

“We’ve looked at computerized programs, but all of them build schedules for youth leagues that play all their games at one complex. We have yet to find a program that factors hours of travel and when a team wants to be at home or on the road,” said Frontier League deputy commissioner Steve Tahsler, who is in charge of overseeing and the making of the schedule.

So for the Frontier League, it is spreadsheets, pens, pencils, erasers and mileage charts instead of a computer program.

A four-member committee of Wild Things assistant general manager Tony Buccilli, Windy City assistant general manager Mike VerShave, Gateway general manager Steve Gomric and Florence manager Dennis Pelfrey are in charge of designing drafts of the schedule and submitting them to Tahsler. They must consider a multitude of factors, such as travel times, while also guaranteeing competitive fairness. It is a way to sift through four potential schedules to find one that pleases the most and infuriates the least.

“Making a schedule for this league is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Buccilli admitted.

Making the schedule

You have just been made a member of the scheduling committee and here is your assignment: design a 96-game schedule with two six-team divisions. Each team plays four three-game series against its division rivals and a home-and-home series against each team in the opposite division. Also, a team can have no more than one nine-game road trip – for some reason, Traverse City has three this year. Sounds easy, right?

The scheduling process for a season starts in August of the preceding year and typically takes months to complete. By Aug. 15, each team must submit to the league a list of specific dates it wants to be at home and others on which they’d like to be away. Each team can list six sets of dates for home games and six for road games and must prioritize them. Typically, only the top two requests are guaranteed.

“We had eight teams that requested to be on the road for the opening series this year,” Buccilli pointed out. “That’s obviously wasn’t going to work.”

According to Tahsler, that’s not unusual.

“Our clubs have so many dates when they can’t host a league game because of other events they’re hosting,” he said. “Washington hosts the WPIAL championships, the Mid-American Conference has a long-term contract to play its tournament at Lake Erie, a Division III regional is played at Gateway in May. Most of our fields host high school tournaments, too.”

The most difficult team to schedule is Evansville, because historic Bosse Field is owned by the local school district and gets scheduling priority over the Otters.

The schedule-makers also consider requests that have nothing to do with baseball.

“If Normal can do a country concert presented by Ford, then it’s not in our right to say no you can’t do a concert because we have you scheduled for a home game that day, so why don’t you move the concert to a date that the performer or sponsor might not be available?” Buccilli explained. “We understand these venues are not just for baseball anymore. We’re probably one of the pioneers on that front with the high school and college games, tournaments, the concert series, the wrestling event. If you have an opportunity to host an event for a community, we would be naïve to just wipe it under the rug.”

Traverse City, due to its northern location, often requests to be on the road for much of the season’s first two weeks because it’s cold and it wants to be at home in July during the city’s Cherry Festival. In places like River City, where the temperature often soars to 100 in July, the Rascals will request to be on the road for much of the dog days of summer.

Another rule for the schedule-makers is no team can have more than nine weekend series at home and no fewer than eight. Those teams that have eight weekend series at home one year will get nine the next and vice versa.

“With weekend home series, the crowds are generally bigger, you’re making more money. Having that extra weekend home series is a bonus,” Buccilli explained.

“The first thing you do when the schedule is released is count the number of weekends you have at home,” said Southern Illinois manager Mike Pinto, who also is the Miners’ chief operating officer. “This year, we have good schedule from a business standpoint but a terrible baseball schedule – too many three at home and then three on the road and back home.”

Oh, and another rule to consider is that no games are scheduled on Mondays unless a team requests such a contest. The league adopted the no-Mondays rule for the 2013 season and it has helped with scheduling. It also made the league more appealing to players. Evansville manager Andy McCauley even called the Frontier League the “Club Med” of independent leagues because of its no-Mondays policy.

From the requests submitted each August, the league can determine which dates will be used for interdivision contests, which require the most traveling. The final four weeks of the season are reserved for games against division rivals.

Each of the four committee members makes a schedule, two each working on one division. Their four proposals are submitted to Tahsler for approval and tweaking. He selects the version that works best. Then the interdivision games are placed into the schedule.

Gas up the bus

The biggest problem facing Frontier League scheduling is the far-flung league includes teams from seven states, ranging from Washington in the east to Traverse City, Mich., in the north, to Florence, Ky., and the St. Louis suburbs of Sauget, Ill., and O’Fallon, Mo. The closest rival to Traverse City is located in Crestwood, Ill., more than 300 miles away. Only two opponents, Lake Erie, located in Avon, Ohio, and Florence, are within 470 miles of Washington and one of those is in a different division from the Wild Things.

“What would be ideal in terms of scheduling is three divisions of four teams, maybe us, Lake Erie, Florence and Traverse City as a division,” Buccilli said. “That was voted down. I like it because it saves us a lot of travel but change is never easy for people.”

Because of their locations, Traverse City and Washington typically lead the league in miles traveled, usually around 11,000 in a season. Because of their central location, the three Chicago teams, Joliet, Schaumburg and Windy City, usually range from 6,000 to 8,000 miles.

The schedule-makers try to be fair and take travel times into consideration, but oddities stick out each year. Several of those were in 2012, when the league had a team in London, Ontario. The now-defunct Rippers opened the season in Marion, Ill., went on to O’Fallon, Mo., for the next series, then had to bus 700 miles home, with added time for a border crossing, without the benefit of a day off, to play their home opener. Also that year, Florence came out of the all-star break with a series in St. Louis against Gateway, then spent an off day driving 577 miles to Traverse City. After that series ended, the Freedom drove back to St. Louis to play River City the next night.

Several times River City has played a series at Washington that concluded on a Thursday night. The Rascals, after traveling more than 10 hours, played at home the following night.

Sometimes the schedule gives a team an unexpected gift. For example, in 2012, Windy City, based in Crestwood, Ill., did not leave the Chicagoland area during a 24-day stretch in July. The ThunderBolts’ longest road trip during that period was 26 miles. Washington, meanwhile, played seven consecutive series that season that required bus trips of at least 500 miles one way.

Those kind of travel oddities are usually the result of flipping a series on the original draft to satisfy the number of weekend home dates or to fill a request for a team to be at home or away on a specific date. When a schedule is completed, it is submitted to each team for approval. If one team rejects the schedule for any reason, then it is reworked. According to Tahsler, one year there were 26 versions of the schedule before one was approved.

“The accomodations that Steve and all the people involved take, we’re not just throwing whatever we want on pieces of paper There are a lot of factors,” Buccilli said. “The league is saying, yes, we recognize that this is more than just baseball. This is a business for people. Everybody’s region and clientele are different. We want to respect their wishes and not put anybody in a financial burden by not giving them home games in their prime selling times. The league has done a good job of that.”

A better system

When the Wild Things joined the Frontier League in 2002, the schedule format was simpler. When teams played opponents from the other division, they met in two three-game series played in consecutive weeks. One week at Team A’s ballpark, the next week at Team B’s ballpark. That led to two problems. It created the same pitching matchups in consecutive weeks and teams didn’t like playing an opponent twice early in the season and not again for the remainder of the year.

Now, the league requires teams to play at least one series against every opponent before the all-star break in July and once after the break. Everybody likes that guideline.

“Back then, when you played somebody was a big factor,” Buccilli said. “What a team is at the end of the season isn’t what it was at the start. A few years ago, Windy City was something like 20-6 to start the year and crushing people. At the end of the year, it was completely different lineup. There are very few examples of teams like Schaumburg last year or Traverse City in 2012 that can maintain a high level of play from start to finish. Usually teams lose players to affiliated ball or they add guys and get better. Things change fast in this league.”

It could be worse

As much as the schedule is criticized, Frontier League teams know it can worse. Those who have coached or played in the independent American Association, which has teams as far north as Winnipeg and as far south as Texas, know this all too well.

“In the American Association, they have 15-hour bus rides,” Pinto pointed out. “I can use that to my advantage. I can send a player I am trying to sign an email detailing how many miles or hours he’ll spend on a bus in the American Association and how much if he plays for us.

“I had a very good player for us a few years ago ask me, ‘Do you know why I signed with you? I counted all the extra hours I’d spend on a bus in the American Association and realized how much time I could be spending doing something better if I signed with the Miners.'”

CUSTOMER LOGIN

If you have an account and are registered for online access, sign in with your email address and password below.

NEW CUSTOMERS/UNREGISTERED ACCOUNTS

Never been a subscriber and want to subscribe, click the Subscribe button below.

Starting at $3.75/week.

Subscribe Today