The Yankees and Red Sox will take baseball’s best rivalry from the U.S. to the U.K. next June for MLB’s first games in London.Getty Images

The late Katy Feeney, for years Major League Baseball’s senior vice president of scheduling and club relations, used to joke that if every team was unhappy with her work developing the league’s master schedule, she had done her job.

Given how often players, club executives and fans complained about MLB’s schedule each year, Feeney was usually successful in her quest.

But MLB’s 2019 regular-season schedule, released last week, sought to mollify team concerns through a very different strategy for how it was developed.

Now under the guidance of Chris Marinak, MLB executive vice president for strategy, technology and innovation, the schedule was created after a nearly yearlong process in which each club president was interviewed at length. 

Those interviews, covering topics such as timing conflicts in local markets, preferred travel routing and ticketing strategies, were dramatically different from MLB’s traditional practice of sending written surveys to clubs.

“We shifted to a much more interactive process that gave us an unprecedented level of dialogue about the schedule and what teams wanted,” Marinak said. “The prior surveys were fairly standard, asking things like ‘Do you want to be home on Mother’s Day?’ And sometimes they would get filled out by somebody in baseball operations, [or] somebody on the business side, so there wasn’t necessarily consistency in what you were getting. 

“By going to team presidents, you’re getting all of those perspectives, you saw how differently everybody views the schedule, and this new format opened us up to a lot of new ideas.”

Among those new ideas was the creation of several two-game weekend series with Friday off-days, a marked departure from the typical schedule. Clubs including the A’s, Angels, Rays, Reds and White Sox opted for those, typically with a goal of showcasing key interleague matchups. 

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in June that such sets were being considered. The thinking is that by funneling fan interest to those key dates on the weekend when attendance is already stronger, it could more than make up for the loss of weaker Friday dates.

“The scheduling process was a real departure from the past, but allowed us to express our individual objectives,” said A’s President Dave Kaval. The A’s, shifting next year to a membership-based ticketing model, will play two-game weekend series next August against the Cardinals and Giants, respectively.

“We’re being a lot more strategic about how we’re putting all this together,” Kaval said. “And creating more variance in the schedule, it also gives you more opportunities to try new things on the business side.”

The 2019 schedule features an escalation in the league’s international and special-event games. Next year games will be played in Tokyo, Monterrey, Mexico; Omaha, Neb; London; and Williamsport, Pa. 

It was the two-game slate on June 29-30 in London involving the Yankees and the Red Sox, the first MLB games to be played in the United Kingdom, that presented some of the thorniest challenges for MLB. Both teams wanted to be home prior to those games and, given the travel involved, both clubs have two off days between their last games in the U.S. and the first London contest. 

Marinak and his staff then sought to keep both teams on the East Coast following the London games to lessen travel burdens, with the Red Sox going to Toronto and the Yankees staying in New York to play the Mets.

“There were a lot of moving parts there,” said Marinak.

Marinak’s guiding principle in building future schedules echoes what Feeney said for so long.

“What I’m after is a sense that the process was fair and that everybody was heard,” Marinak said. “If at the end of this everybody respects the process, I’ve done my job.”