We investigate the choice of the renormalization and factorization scales for the production of squarks and gluinos at the Fermilab Tevatron collider as a function of the produced sparticle masses. We determine a scale to be used in leading-order perturbative QCD calculations optimized such that the normalization of the next-to-leading order cross section is reproduced. Use of this optimal scale permits at least a partial implementation of next-to-leading order contributions in leading order Monte Carlo simulations. We provide next-to-leading order predictions of the production cross sections for pairs of supersymmetric particles at the hadronic center-of-mass energy 2 TeV.

30 pages, 16 figures, 1 table, version to appear in Phys.Rev.D