Bowie Kuhn's worst nightmare

Students are presented with a narrative concerning the contentious negotiations between Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) over a new collective bargaining agreement in the early 1980s. Details of the 1981 players' strike, ensuing collective bargaining agreement, and strategy for resuming the interrupted season and facilitating the playoffs are provided. Pre-strike win/loss records and number of post-strike scheduled games are provided for each team. This case gives students great insight into the formulation of integer programming problems and interpretation of the resulting optimal solutions; in this case they must formulate constraint satisfaction problems with integer decision variables to assess the advisability of the MLB plan for resuming the season and revising the playoff structure to reflect the games lost to the strike (and the potential for an occurrence of Simpson's Paradox). As such, this case is also unique in its use of optimization to demonstrate a statistical phenomenon. Furthermore, although the case deals with a baseball-related problem, it is relatively self-contained and requires an understanding of how baseball is played, so students who are unfamiliar with the sport will not be seriously disadvantaged.