How 162-0 works
No team in major-league history has finished a season above .763. The 1906 Cubs went 116-36 and it's still the record. 162-0 hands you every player who ever lived and asks the obvious question: could any roster, ever, win them all? (No. But watching how close you get is the game.)
The draft
You fill a 12-slot roster — the eight fielders, a DH, two starting pitchers, and a reliever — one round at a time. Each round, the slot machine spins a three-part combo:
position · era band · franchise
SS · Integration · CLE means: pick a player who played shortstop, in the Integration era, for Cleveland. (That's Lou Boudreau, if you're wondering.) Your pick must satisfy all three dimensions — the player really had to be there, at that position, in that era, for that team. The machine only spins combinations that at least one player can satisfy, so you'll never see an impossible spin like a Deadball-era DH — the DH didn't exist until 1973.
Era diversity is enforced by the machine, not by you: no more than two picks per era band, so a finished roster always spans at least six of the seven eras. You can't just build the 1927 Yankees.
League pools
Before you draft, choose where the players come from: MLB (AL and NL), the Negro Leagues (every circuit with published WAR — the NNL, ECL, Negro American League, and more), and the Federal League (1914–15). All three are on by default, which is how Josh Gibson ends up draftable next to Johnny Bench.
Restricted pools reshape the game honestly rather than breaking it. A Negro Leagues–only draft is an 11-slot roster — the DH never existed there — and since published NeL data spans roughly 1920–1948, the era cap loosens so three eras can fill your roster. Qualification is per-season: in an MLB-only game, every pick must satisfy the spin through an AL or NL season, though he still brings his all-time peak with him.
The era bands
| Band | Years | |
|---|---|---|
| Deadball | 1901–1919 | Spitballs, inside baseball, Walter Johnson throwing invisible fastballs. |
| Liveball | 1920–1941 | Ruth changes everything. Offense explodes. |
| Integration | 1942–1960 | The color line falls; the talent pool finally becomes the talent pool. |
| Expansion | 1961–1976 | New franchises, bigger strike zones, the pitching renaissance of 1968. |
| Free Agency | 1977–1993 | Players get paid, rosters get fluid, Rickey runs wild. |
| Steroid | 1994–2005 | Offense at altitudes never seen before or since. Draw your own conclusions. |
| Modern | 2006–present | Velocity, spin rates, and the strikeout era. |
Pre-1901 baseball is excluded — the rules, the schedule, and the record keeping were different enough that the comparisons stop meaning anything.
Skips
You get exactly two escape hatches per game, each usable once:
- Team skip — re-spins only the franchise. Position and era stay locked.
- Era skip — re-spins only the era band. Position and franchise stay locked.
A skip re-rolls one dimension, not the whole spin — if you skip the Integration-era Yankees hoping for the Steroid-era Yankees, you keep the position you were dealt. And if no alternative exists for that dimension, the skip politely refuses and you keep it.
Peak seasons
Every player is valued at his single best season by total WAR — eligibility and value are deliberately different things. A player is eligible everywhere he actually played, but he always brings his all-time peak with him. Draft Tom Seaver off the spin SP · Free Agency · CIN (he pitched for the Reds from 1977) and you get peak 1973 Mets Seaver, because that's who Tom Seaver is. Late-career cameos are sneaky value: the right franchise spin can unlock a legend's prime.
The simulation
WAR — wins above replacement — is the engine's currency, and it's why the sim holds up across eras: WAR is already park- and era-adjusted, and it's denominated in wins, so a 1913 ace and a 2001 left fielder add together honestly. The projection runs on the canonical Pythagorean expectation:
Win% = RS1.83 / (RS1.83 + RA1.83)
- Your nine bats' offensive value converts to runs scored (about 10 runs per win) on top of a replacement-level baseline.
- Your three arms pull runs allowed down from that baseline — scaled up so that pitching carries roughly half the projection, the share it carries in real baseball, despite holding only three roster slots. (This scaling is calibrated against benchmark rosters; pitching WAR is scarce and precious here.)
- A roster of nobodies projects to about 48-114 — what a replacement-level team actually wins. A balanced all-time juggernaut pushes into the 140s. Lopsided rosters get punished: all bats and no arms caps you hard, and vice versa.
Why you can't actually go 162-0
Pythagorean win percentage can't reach 1.000 while your opponents score any runs at all — and they always score some. Even the mathematically perfect draft (the best player at every position, ignoring the slot machine entirely: peak Ruth, Hornsby, Walter Johnson…) projects to about 152-10. The best the game will ever show you is 161-1.
So recalibrate what winning means: the 1906 Cubs' .763 is about 124 wins over 162 games. Clear that, and your roster is — by the engine's math — the greatest team ever assembled. That's the real chase.
Modes
- Classic — full stats on the table while you draft: WAR, peak years, Hall of Fame flags.
- Scout — numbers hidden until the season simulates. Just names, years, and what you know. The eligible list is even alphabetized so the order can't tip you off. For people who don't need the back of the card.
The numbers
Player data comes from the Lahman Baseball Database (CC BY-SA), in its official SABR-hosted edition covering 1871–2025 — including Negro Leagues statistics, so Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Oscar Charleston are in the pool alongside everyone they were kept from playing against. WAR, OPS+ and ERA+ come from Baseball Reference's bulk WAR data, used with attribution. The engine never looks at raw batting averages or ERAs across eras — only era-adjusted stats, which is the whole reason a Deadball spitballer and a Steroid-era slugger can share a roster without the math lying to you.