Has Any MLB Team Ever Gone 162-0?

Short answer: no. No MLB team has ever gone 162-0, and unlike football’s near-misses, baseball has never even produced a serious threat to do it. The gap between the best season ever and a perfect season is enormous — dozens of games wide.

The most wins in a single season

Two teams share the record for wins in a season, from very different eras:

• 2001 Seattle Mariners — 116-46. The most wins ever in a 162-game schedule. A historically great team led by Ichiro Suzuki’s MVP-and-Rookie-of-the-Year season. And still: 46 losses.
• 1906 Chicago Cubs — 116-36. The same win total in a shorter, 154-game schedule, which gives the Cubs the highest winning percentage of the modern era at .763. They lost 36 games — and then lost the World Series to the crosstown White Sox.

That is the ceiling. The winningest teams in the history of the sport lost between roughly 36 and 46 games. “162-0” isn’t a record anyone has approached; it’s a number no season has ever come within shouting distance of.

Why baseball makes a perfect season basically impossible

Football teams have gone undefeated because a season is short and a great team can dominate every week. Baseball is the opposite kind of sport. Teams play almost every single day, often for two weeks at a stretch without an off day, across a six-month grind. Even the best rotation has to hand the ball to a fifth starter; even the best lineup runs into an ace having a career night; even the best team plays tired at the end of a long road trip.

The math of it is unforgiving. A team that wins an outstanding 65% of its games — a 105-win pace — would still be expected to lose more than 50 games. To go 162-0, a team would have to win every one of those coin-flip-adjacent games for six straight months. It has never remotely happened. For the full breakdown, see our guide on why 162-0 is effectively impossible.

The longest anyone has stayed unbeaten

The closest thing to “unbeaten baseball” is a winning streak, and even the greatest streaks are a small fraction of a season:

• 1916 New York Giants — 26 straight (a streak that famously included a tie), the longest in modern MLB history.
• 2017 Cleveland Indians — 22 straight, the longest unbroken streak (no ties) of the modern era.
• 1935 Chicago Cubs — 21 straight, down the stretch to clinch a pennant.

Twenty-six games is remarkable. It is also about one-sixth of a season. Stretch even that once-a-century run across all 162 games and you still come up 136 wins short of perfect.

The takeaway

That’s the backdrop the game is built on. Going 162-0 in 162-0 is meant to feel like chasing something that has never happened and, realistically, never will. Getting your drafted roster deep into the season with a handful of losses already puts you ahead of the 2001 Mariners’ pace. For where the real record sits, see our guide to the best single-season records in MLB history.