By Bruce Gerson

Michael Trick won’t hit .300 this year, or any other year, but he has an extremely promising career in major league baseball.


Trick and his colleagues at The Sports Scheduling Group have produced the first computer-generated master schedule in major league history.

The Bosch Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business is one of the masterminds behind the creation of the 2005 MLB schedule, which includes 2,430 games played by 30 teams in two leagues.

That’s no small trick (pun intended), considering that even with only 10 teams “you can generate more possible solutions than there are atoms in the universe.”

Trick co-founded The Sports Scheduling Group with Doug Bureman, a former Pittsburgh Pirates vice president, and George Nemhauser, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at George Tech.

The Butler, Pa., firm also produces master schedules for the Atlantic Coast, Mid-American, Mountain West, Southland and Colonial conferences of the NCAA.