THE SCHEDULE MAKERS : Team Doing Badly? Blame the Stephensons of Staten Island Like Everyone Else Does

Executives and managers ridicule them. Sportswriters and broadcasters question their intelligence. Athletes use them as scapegoats.

All because Henry and Holly Stephenson, master schedule makers, tell them where to go.

In an upstairs bedroom at their three-story home on a dead-end street not far from the Staten Island ferry landing, the Stephensons draw up the playing schedules for major league baseball.

It’s a thankless job.

“It’s not in anybody’s interest to praise the schedule,” said Henry, 46, laughing at the prospect. “I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘Thanks to our fabulous schedule, we won the pennant this year.’ ”

Despite that, the Stephensons can’t seem to get enough of their work. In fact, they’d like more.

They also draw up the schedule for the Major Indoor Soccer League. They put together the National Basketball Assn. schedule for seven seasons before the league decided to plan the schedule itself a few years ago. They’ve had talks with the National Hockey League. And they’ve drawn up mock schedules for the National Football League.

“It’s a very interesting job,” said Holly, 41, who minored in math at Cornell. “In the computer field, you tend to do fairly boring things, or you concentrate on one aspect of something. This is interesting because we follow through on the whole process--analyzing the system, doing the programming, and working on the schedule and working with the people involved.

“And then we get to go to the games at the end of the process and actually see our work.”

Even with their computer handling about 85% of the work, the Stephensons said their mom-and-pop operation would be hard-pressed to produce schedules for every major American professional sports league. But they also said that it could be done.

They’d like to give it a try, too, probably for the extra money as much as the challenge. Henry would not be specific about their earnings but did say that schedule making was not making them rich. “We make enough to pay the rent,” he said.

Not many people know that the major league schedules are their handiwork and probably lots fewer have any idea what’s involved.

“We’ve found that there are two radically different perceptions of how a schedule is made,” Henry said. “One is that there’s a giant computer system somewhere deep in a mountain and all this complex information is fed in and it spits out a schedule.

“The other perception is, ‘What’s the problem?’ They think it’s a simple thing where these guys just write it down somewhere and go play the games.”

The truth lies somewhere in between.

Although the computer does most of the work, the trouble shooting is left to the programmers.

“You’d be surprised how much has to be done by pencil,” Henry said.

Added Holly: “The computer does the easy part. It will put out a beautiful schedule, but it can’t compensate for problems like an arena not being available.”

Or the Pope visiting Los Angeles.

Pope John Paul II was scheduled to say Mass at Dodger Stadium Sept. 16, right in the middle of a seven-game Dodger home stand.

The Dodgers, scheduled to play the first game of a two-game series against the Cincinnati Reds that day after winding up a two-game series against the Houston Astros Sept. 15, couldn’t trade home series with the Reds because of a Major League Players Assn. rule that requires a day off for a team traveling from the Pacific to the Eastern time zone.

The only solution was for the teams to play a doubleheader Sept. 17, a Dodger Stadium occurrence only slightly less rare than a Papal visit.

Why a computer can’t produce a schedule on its own has a lot to do with variables.

Because any team could theoretically play any other team on any given date, the number of possible schedules is “astronomically large,” said Sidney Port, a professor of mathematics at UCLA.

Ronald Graham, director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., told Smithsonian magazine that it would take even the fastest existing computer thousands of years to “number crunch” a schedule by considering each and every possibility.

“Real-world constraints throw curveballs at what you’re trying to do,” Graham told Smithsonian. “If you look at all the possible schedules, you’ll get a combinatorial explosion that no computer can deal with in a reasonable amount of time. People are necessary to confine the problem. A machine can’t make a judgment call. It can only do what it is told to do.”

Enter the Stephensons, who in the mid-’70s were dabbling at computer work and thinking about starting a home business at the same time the NBA was considering an alternative to the late Eddie Gottlieb as its schedule maker.

Gottlieb, who had used the backs of envelopes and any other scraps of paper he could find to draw up each of the league’s schedules in the NBA’s first 40 years, was in his 80s at the time and ready to retire.

The Stephensons happened to meet George Faust, former director of broadcasting and scheduling for the NBA, whose son had sold them a used car.

Faust told the Stephensons that the NBA wanted to computerize its schedule, but couldn’t find a computer that could handle the job. Five software design firms had failed to solve the problem, he told them. The Stephensons asked if they could give it a try.

Working with Gottlieb, they soon realized that many things about schedules are not quantifiable. “A lot of judgments you have to make on your own,” Henry said. “You have to know an awful lot about the different policies of the different teams and what they want out of their schedules.”

Some teams, for instance, wanted to play as many home games as possible on the weekend, no matter the burden on their athletes, whereas others were willing to play a home game on a less attractive night if it meant a less rigorous trip.

The Stephensons interspersed with the computer findings their own judgments about what made a good trip, and whether or not a certain night would work for a certain team.

“Ultimately, we shifted our attention from trying to write a program that would generate whole schedules to becoming a scheduling service,” Henry said.

They quit their jobs, Holly as a systems analyst, and Henry, who has a master’s degree in architecture, as an urban planner.

Eventually, the North American Soccer League signed on.

Major league baseball, looking to replace Harry Simmons, a 40-year veteran who was ready to retire, hired the Stephensons in 1981.

On April 5, 1982, Henry and Holly drove down to Baltimore and were part of a crowd of 52,034 that braved 46-degree weather to watch the Orioles beat the Kansas City Royals, 13-5.

Since it was the first American League game they had scheduled, it was a glorious day for the Stephensons.

But the next day, the weather turned really ugly. While the Angels opened at Oakland and two teams with domed stadiums, Seattle and Minnesota, played one another in the Metrodome, almost a week of American League games scheduled for the Northeast were wiped out by snow and rain and cold weather.

The schedule makers were blasted from coast to coast.

How could they be so stupid? Why didn’t they have the Eastern teams open the season in the West? Why did Seattle’s Kingdome remain dark at a time when it was needed most?

Two years later--the baseball schedules are drawn up more than a year in advance--the Stephensons concocted a so-called “warm weather” schedule, with almost all of baseball opening the season in the West or South or under a dome.

Alas, the Western teams raised a big stink, arguing that they didn’t draw any better in April than their Eastern counterparts, so why should they be stuck with the less attractive dates because of a freak storm two years earlier?

Pleasing everyone, the Stephensons quickly realized, was out of the question.

“We get far too much blame when things go wrong, and far too much credit when things go right,” Henry said.

Indeed, at the end of the 1982 season, when the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles met in a four-game series at Baltimore on the final weekend for the American League East championship, the Stephensons were lauded as geniuses.

“I thought that happened every year,” Henry said.

The problem with putting together baseball’s 2,106-game schedule, Henry said, is trying to coordinate the unbalanced schedule of the 12-team National League with the balanced schedule of the 14-team American League.

Among the things they must consider is that the teams that share common areas--the Mets and Yankees in New York, the Cubs and White Sox in Chicago, the Dodgers and Angels in Los Angeles and the A’s and Giants in the Bay Area--must have schedules that do not conflict. When one is home, the other should be on the road.

Several teams share stadiums with NFL teams, including all but the Dodgers in the National League West, nobody wants to play doubleheaders anymore and the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown, N.Y., has to be squeezed in.

Also, the players’ association provides specific rules to be followed:

--Teams cannot play more than 20 days without a day off and, conversely, cannot have three days off in a seven-day period.

--Unless it is played within a 90-minute flight of where the previous night’s game was played, a night game cannot be followed by a day game. This rule, of course, affects the Cubs’ schedule more than any other team’s.

--The rule requiring a day off for teams traveling from the Pacific to the Eastern time zone has its greatest effect in the National League West, which includes two teams, Cincinnati and Atlanta, from the Eastern time zone.

Of course, all these rules can be waived by the players’ association, and are on occasion.

Added to all that are the specific requests of the individual teams.

The Orioles, for instance, prefer to be out of town on the day of the Preakness, and the Twins insist on being away on the opening day of Minnesota’s fishing season.

The Canadian teams, Montreal and Toronto, would prefer to be home on holidays that are unique to Canada--Victoria Day weekend in May, Canada Day on July 1, St. John the Baptist Day in Montreal (and all of Quebec) on June 24 and a civic holiday in Toronto in August.

The Red Sox have traditionally played a day game on Patriot’s Day, enabling their fans to enjoy the state holiday by taking in the finish of the Boston Marathon before making their way over to Fenway Park for the baseball game.

Mother’s Day, Memorial Day and Easter Sunday are generally considered bad days to be home, but Father’s Day and the Fourth of July are considered plums.

“What you don’t want to do is stick one team with all the problems,” Henry said. “Essentially, the main objective is to be fair to everybody and create a uniform playing field for everybody to play on. You want the schedule to be relatively neutral. That’s why you don’t get a lot of compliments.”

The American League schedule is the more controversial of the two.

Because all teams play each opponent the same number of times, American League teams play more games against their seven non-division opponents than against their six division opponents.

Everything about the schedule is balanced. Each team plays four series against every other opponent--two at home, two on the road; two on a weekend, two during the week; two in the summer, two in non-summer months.

The Eastern Division teams would prefer an unbalanced schedule in which they would play more often against the more traditional opponents within their division, but the Western Division teams want the schedule to remain as it is.

The Stephensons have drawn up an unbalanced schedule for the American League, only to have it voted down.

According to Bob Fishel, the league’s executive vice president, the voting was split along territorial lines, with the East voting for the unbalanced schedule and the West voting against. In each case, Fishel said, American League President Bobby Brown was brought in to break the tie.

“Fortunately for the league, the divisions are pretty even, but that wasn’t always the case,” Fishel said. “The Eastern Division had a big edge over the Western Division.”

In terms of drawing power, it probably still does.

As Henry told the Baltimore Sun: “Every team wants to play the Yankees on the Fourth of July, and it’s just not possible.”

Working a season ahead, the Stephensons start building the schedules in December, about 16 months before the start of the season. They send questionnaires to each team, asking them to critique the previous season’s schedule and to make their requests for the following season.

The American League office determines the “swing” team, an Eastern Division team that will be paired with the Western Division teams for balance and travel purposes. The odd number of teams in each division make this necessary, and the swing team is drawn from among a centrally located group that includes Milwaukee, Detroit, Toronto and Cleveland. The swing team this season is Cleveland. Next season, it will be Milwaukee.

The Stephensons then go about drawing up the schedule in a room that, except for the American and National league schedules hanging on the wall, has nothing sports-related in it. The most prominent pieces of furniture in the room are two large tables, one with the computer sitting on top of it.

An older computer, used by the Stephensons’ two kids--James, 15, and Katy, 12--for their homework assignments and formerly used by Henry and Holly to make the NBA schedule, sits nearby.

Henry and Holly spend a lot of time in that room for the next two months, putting together a basic draft of the schedule. The computer is programmed to catch any gross errors, such as three teams winding up in the same city at the same time.

After the basic draft is completed, the Stephensons spend the next four months working with scheduling committees and the league offices to iron out any problems. The schedule is set up in little repeating patterns, with two teams often playing in one team’s park one week, then playing in the other’s park the following week. This is done to make modifications all that much simpler.

The Stephensons’ job is to schedule the series. When the individual teams review their schedules, they may move, say, a Monday game to Thursday, or an April game to August. Game times are established by the home teams.

Finally, in June, the Stephensons’ work is finished. After the World Series, the schedule will go to the players’ association for approval. The networks will change game times to fit their schedules. Basically, though, next season’s schedule was completed last month.

It will be released to the public in December, at which time the complaints will start rolling in.

“Nobody’s ever satisfied with it,” said Fishel, the American League executive. “Schedule makers are like umpires. Nobody’s ever satisfied with umpiring and nobody’s ever satisfied with the schedule.”