​And this is just one tournament. | Luis Gutierrez / Norte Photo / Getty Images Outside of the annual release and planning ballpark trips, fans don’t pay excessive attention to the schedule. We look through it, find games to go to, find reasons to complain, and don’t think about it until Opening Day. I don’t know how the schedule is crafted — how much is done by people and how much is automated — but I certainly never put much thought into it. After all, even when I’ve played OOTP (new tournament coming up, by the way), the game automatically creates the schedule; the only time I’ve had to worry about it is when I expanded the league to 34 teams, 17 in each league, causing it to go out of whack and requiring expansion to 36 teams to fix it.And now.I’ve mentioned a few times that I play in a Dice Baseball league: basically simplified MLB Showdown with fictional teams and players. We’re starting the league’s ninth season (my fourth; my River Heights Sleuths were a Season F expansion team), and our commissioner asked me and another player to set up four schedules to be used on a rotating basis, simplifying new season set-up long term. The commissioner had already set up who’s playing who, home teams, and all that; we just had to copy things down into the seven channels* for each of the season’s 10 series.* We play on Roll20, and the boards we play on are named after TV channels.And even in that… hoo boy.Because I am a dork who overthinks these things, I decided that every team should play on every channel at least once. And getting that set up for the final three series was a doozy:I set up a table with which teams hadn’t played on which channels… and which channels teams had played on twice;I looked for which teams had no other choice but to play on a channel, and if they had just one week where they could do so, that was set in;I repeated the process as teams’ channel needs were eliminated.Did I get it done? Yes. Was it more complex than it needed to be? Completely.Oh, but that was only one schedule. Today, I’m setting up the other one… and I’ve decided that not only will each team play on each channel again, I want to make sure that across my two schedules, every team plays at home on each channel at least once.Am I making things more complicated for myself? Absolutely. But it’s given me an appreciation for MLB’s schedule makers.Well… once more into the calendar.