Has any professional baseball team at any level gone winless over a full season?

Not at the major league level, and it is vanishingly rare anywhere the schedule runs past a few dozen games. Winless seasons happen in leagues where rosters are fixed, replacement is impossible and the schedule is short. MLB has none of those conditions.

Would a forfeit count as a loss toward an 0-162?

Yes. A forfeited game is recorded as a 9-0 loss and counts in the standings. That is the only theoretical path to a winless season, and it would require a club to refuse to play 162 times, which the league would resolve long before the standings did.

What is the fewest wins by a team in the 162-game era?

Forty, by the 1962 New York Mets, who actually played 160 games after two rainouts were not made up. The 2024 Chicago White Sox won 41 across a full 162, and the 2003 Tigers and 2025 Rockies each won 43.

Does the draft lottery make an 0-162 more or less likely?

Less. Since 2023 the top six picks are decided by lottery rather than reverse standings order, which removes the marginal reward for finishing dead last instead of third-from-last. Whatever incentive existed to keep losing at the very bottom is now weaker than it was.

Has Any MLB Team Ever Gone 0-162?

No. No MLB team has ever gone 0-162, and none has come remotely close. The worst full season any major league club has completed is 20-134, by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders — a team whose own owners had moved its best players to another club they also owned.

This site exists because of the question in the other direction. Has any MLB team gone 162-0? is the more famous version. The winless one is arithmetically identical and, if anything, even further out of reach.

From the scorebook — Closest to winless, all time: 1899 Cleveland Spiders, 20-134. Closest in the modern era: 2024 Chicago White Sox, 41-121. Longest winless start: 21 games, 1988 Baltimore Orioles.

How close has anyone actually come?

Measure	Record	Team	Distance from 0-162
Fewest wins, any full season	20	1899 Cleveland Spiders	20 wins short
Fewest wins, modern era	36	1916 Philadelphia Athletics	36 wins short
Fewest wins, 162-game era	40	1962 New York Mets	40 wins short
Most losses ever	121	2024 Chicago White Sox	41 games short
Longest winless start	21	1988 Baltimore Orioles	141 games short
Longest losing streak, any point	26	1889 Louisville Colonels	136 games short

Read the right-hand column. The best attempt at going winless, by a club that was actively sabotaged, still fell twenty wins short. Nothing in the modern era gets inside forty.

The 1988 Orioles: the only real attempt at the front end

If an 0-162 were ever going to start, it would look like Baltimore in April 1988. The Orioles lost their opener 12-0 and then lost the next twenty. Manager Cal Ripken Sr. was fired six games in. They did not win until 29 April, at Comiskey Park, in game 22.

That is the record for consecutive losses to open a season, and it has stood for nearly four decades. The roster included Cal Ripken Jr. and Eddie Murray, both future Hall of Famers, on a team that had won the World Series five years earlier.

Then they went 54-86 the rest of the way — a .386 pace, bad but ordinary. That is the pattern every time. Baseball’s floor pulls teams back up.

The math, which is worse than the history

Take the worst winning rate any team has ever sustained over a full season: the 1899 Spiders’ .130. Assume a team could somehow play at exactly that level, every day, for 162 games.

The chance of losing all 162 is 0.87 raised to the 162nd power — roughly one in six billion.

Now use the worst modern rate instead. The 2024 White Sox won 25% of their games. At that rate, the odds of losing all 162 fall to about one in 170 quintillion, a number with 20 digits.

Both figures assume the impossible premise that a team could play at its worst-ever historical level with zero variance, which no team does. Real seasons have a healthy starter’s turn, a favourable matchup, a wind-blown home run, an opponent resting regulars in September. Twenty-five percent means winning roughly forty games, and those forty are not optional.

Why baseball has a floor at all

Football and basketball have produced winless and near-winless seasons. Baseball has not, and the reasons are structural.

A single starter can beat anyone. In a game decided largely by one pitcher’s day, the worst roster’s best arm regularly beats the best roster’s fourth starter. The 1899 Spiders won 20 games with a roster of replacements.

Every day is a new game. There is no momentum carried over from a blowout. Play 162 times and the distribution asserts itself.

One-run games are near coin flips. A large share of every season’s outcomes are decided in a single inning, where the talent gap compresses to almost nothing.

Rosters change mid-season. A team losing at a historic rate promotes prospects, claims waiver players and shuffles the rotation. The 1988 Orioles did exactly this and immediately started winning at nearly twice their April rate.

Nobody benefits. Since 2023, MLB’s draft lottery decides the top six picks by chance rather than by reverse order of finish. The last thin argument for wanting to be the worst team in baseball is gone.

The symmetry with 162-0

The perfect season and the winless season are the same problem viewed from opposite ends, and both fail for the same reason: the schedule is too long for any level of talent to hold.

The best team in modern history, the 2001 Seattle Mariners, won 116 games and still lost 46. The worst team in modern history won 41 and still won 41. Neither extreme survives contact with a 162-game year, which is exactly what makes 162-0 effectively impossible — and why no team wins more than 116 either.

The game on this site asks you to run a season and lose nothing. Running it in reverse is the same problem: you would need a 162-game losing streak, and the longest one ever recorded is 26. The record book has never come close in either direction, and the arithmetic says it never will.

For the full ranking of futility, see the worst record in MLB history.