MattInTheCrown wrote:
They don't have to worry about marquee matchups in the airline industry, nor do they have to worry about what times busses and trains are travelling. There's nearly limitless unique factors that sports teams have to account for.
This has the stink of something freshly pulled from your ass.
The times are pretty much set by the venue anyways. If it's a day game it starts at 1:10 for the Cell, and if it is a night game, it starts at 7:10. The buses and trains don't matter because the venue already dictates the time. It's not like the system has to put a game on at 3am.
It's quite a trivial system, even when you start to add in advanced features like distance tracking to keep road trips short and putting in extra rules like (Chicago vs. Chicago needs to be after May 25th on a weekend). A summer intern at IBM could create the whole system in less than a month. There are companies all over Chicago that have more complex scheduling mechanisms than would be needed.
In fact, MLB could just drop $129 on this!
http://www.galactix.com/tsss/leaguescheduler.html