Where do I start?

There were three things I considered when creating my schedule (and in this order); the game dates, travel, and accommodation.

The first thing I did was input the entire 2016 MLB schedule onto a spreadsheet.



For each team, I was only interested in home games so I did not enter road games.   I then organized each team into geographic areas and highlighted the dates when these teams were playing on consecutive dates.   This helped me see patterns and attempt to avoid bouncing back and forth across the country.   I was able to locate days where I could see Mets/Yankees, Miami/Tampa, Astros/Rangers, and Detroit/Cleveland on consecutive days.  I also spotted a nice grouping of west coast teams in July around the All Star break.

It also helped me see what teams I could use to "fill the gap" between geographic areas.  After Tampa, I was able to find a game in Atlanta prior to heading north to Detroit/Cleveland and the east coast.  

Cincinnati and Houston proved to be the most tricky.  Cincinnati has relatively few road games during the period I chose and Houston, while it fit in nicely with Texas, is an afternoon game.  This will mean a very early flight out of Baltimore that morning.

Initially I had the Rockies on July 18th followed by Arizona and Cincinnati.  However, Cincinnati is an afternoon game on the 20th.  This coupled with the eastbound time zone change would have made it nearly impossible to get a flight out of Phoenix in time to catch the game in Cincinnati.  Switching Cincinnati and Arizona allowed me to take advantage the time zone change going west and should buy me enough time to get to Arizona in time for the 1240 start.

I could have scheduled Houston and Texas earlier in the schedule, but the opportunity to get all the west coast teams done within the first week was way to enticing.

After all that, which took about two weeks, this is what I ended up with:

The website www.baseballtripplanner.com has a tool which allowed me to input my game dates and come up with a map.  If anything, this is proving to be a good lesson in geography.



In my next post, I will describe the process I took to schedule the transportation.