Build the Perfect Season

How to Play 162-0

162-0 is a free baseball roster-building game — a baseball take on the viral basketball game 82-0. You assemble an all-time team from 150 years of Major League history and find out whether it's good enough to win every game and finish a perfect 162-0 season.

The goal

A flawless MLB regular season is 162 wins and zero losses — something no real team has ever done. Your job is to draft a 16-player roster stacked deep enough that the season simulator gives you all 162. It's deliberately hard: only a near-perfect roster gets there, so a true 162-0 is the holy grail.

The roster — 16 spots

You're building a full team, not just a starting nine:

The three modes

Classic

The slot machine spins you a random franchise and decade. You draft one legend from that team and era to fill an open roster spot, then do it fifteen more times. Full stats are shown on every card.

Scout

The same slot-machine draft, but the stats are hidden — you pick on baseball knowledge, memory, and instinct alone.

Salary Cap

The slot machine plus a $300 million budget. Every player now carries a price, and here's the catch: prices are based on raw, old-school stats (batting average, home runs, wins, saves), while the simulator scores era-adjusted value. So a dead-ball-era star with modest-looking numbers can be a huge bargain, while a flashy counting-stats name from a hitter's era is a trap. Hunting value under the cap is the whole skill.

How players are rated

Baseball already solved the "compare across eras" problem. OPS+ (for hitters) and ERA+ (for pitchers) are normalized so that 100 equals the league average for that player's own season. That means a 1927 hitter and a 2004 hitter can be compared directly — no era guesswork. Each card's OVR rating (40–99) is built from those era-adjusted numbers, with small-sample seasons pulled toward average so a flukey 40 innings can't masquerade as an all-time great. Exactly one card in the whole game rates a 99: Barry Bonds' 2001 season.

How the season is simulated

Once all 16 spots are filled, your roster plays a 162-game schedule. The engine turns your hitters' era-adjusted value into runs scored and your rotation and bullpen into runs allowed, then uses the Pythagorean win expectation to project a record. A single weak spot in the lineup drags the whole season down — a perfect team has no soft links.

Tips

About the data

Player stats come from the Lahman Baseball Database / baseballdatabank, covering seasons through 2021 across the 30 currently active franchises (relocations are merged, so the Dodgers include Brooklyn and the Giants include New York). OPS+ and ERA+ are computed with league and ballpark context so ratings are fair across every era.

Play 162-0 →
Home · Privacy Policy