This stuff doesn't happen by accident.

OK, so maybe most of it does.

But if you think making baseball's schedule this nerve-racking heading into the season's final weekend - and remember, it would have been more stressful had the White Sox continued to unravel - try it yourself sometime.

Right off the bat, the math is daunting. Start with 14 teams in the American League, 16 in the National and three divisions in each. So much for balance - and we haven't started on interleague play. Next, guarantee every team 81 games at home, including 13 weekends, then 81 on the road. Then, make sure every team in every division gets three series against each other, and jam as many of those as possible into the final month.

And can you say "special requests?"

Good, because some teams hate congestion: The Mets don't want to be at Shea when the U.S. Open Tennis Center is open for business across the way and the Cubs want out of Chicago when the already crowded Wrigleyville neighborhood is playing host to the annual Gay Pride Parade.

For other teams, though, it can't be congested enough: The Cardinals always want the Fourth of July crowd and the Red Sox insist on being home for Patriot's Day, even though the Boston Marathon is winding its way through town. And don't get us started on the wish list the TV partners hand in. Or how many times a team's business office and its baseball people hand in conflicting requests.

Or the time the Republican Convention nestled down in the Astrodome in Houston ...

"For a month," recalled Katy Feeney, in whose lap this mess is dropped every year.

Talk about conflicted: Her job title is senior vice president for scheduling and club relations, which can be diametrically opposed tasks when a pennant is up for grabs.

"I never root for anyone," she said, "and I never predict."

Basically, she farms out the number-crunching to a high-priced consulting firm with high-powered computers, then brings any unresolved scheduling conflicts to a committee of owners and commissioner Bud Selig.

When pressed, Feeney will concede she pulls for the National League in every postseason, likely because her dad, the late Chub Feeney, was NL president from 1970-1986. And the part about predicting isn't completely true, either. After nearly all the mixing and matching is done, somebody still has to try to guess which teams will be playing for division titles when October rolls around and schedule them for the final weekend.

Considering how much hype surrounds their rivalry these days, it's easy to think the Red Sox and Yanks go mano-a-mano all the time at season's end with the AL East title on the line. Not. The last time was 1978, which produced that memorable one-game playoff that BoSox fans still recall fondly as the "Bucky Bleepin' Dent Game."

Chicago closing out the season with three games in Cleveland looked to be just as inspired a choice - last time that happened: 1993 - until the White Sox won Thursday afternoon at Detroit and locked up the AL Central. Even so, there's a nice little revenge angle still at work, since the Indians might have to sweep to guarantee themselves the wild-card spot.

Then again, anybody arguing that last season was even more of a nail-biter might have a point. In what could be described as a West Coast extravaganza, the NL's Giants and Dodgers and the AL's Angels and A's met on the final weekend with both divisions still up for grabs. That happened only once before since the start of divisional play in 1969, and that was in 1980, when the Dodgers and Astros and the old Expos and Phils ran to the wire together.

Getting just one division race to come down to the final series is tough enough. That's happened only once in the last five years, in 2001, when Houston went to St. Louis and the two finished with identical records, prompting baseball to sort out the division winner (Cardinals) based on the teams' head-to-head matchups.

Even though all of that that was her handiwork, Feeney begs off any credit. And she's even quicker to dispel any notions that she works behind a curtain like baseball's version of the Wizard of Oz, pushing and pulling levers for some grand dramatic effect.

"Believe me, I have no idea who's going to be contending," she said. "Sometimes stuff just happens."

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist with The Associated Press.