page_title: List of Major League Baseball records considered unbreakable
section_title: Most regular season games played, season – 165
hierarchical_section_title: List of Major League Baseball records considered unbreakable / Batting / Most regular season games played, season – 165
caption_attribution_description: English: Title Portrait of the baseball player Maury Willis, ca.1960 Description Photographic portrait of the baseball player Maury Wills, ca.1960. Wills bats left handed as he poses for the picture while facing the camera. The baseball field that he stands on appears as a black mass under his feat while an empty baseball stadium is visible behind him. Subject Wills, Maury; Los Angeles Dodgers Subject (adlf) sports facilities Subject (file heading) Recreation -- Baseball Subject (lcsh) Baseball Geographic subject (city or populated place) Los Angeles Geographic subject (county) Los Angeles Geographic subject (state) California Geographic subject (country) USA Coverage date circa 1960 Publisher (of the digital version) University of Southern California. Libraries Date created circa 1960 Type images Format (aacr2) 1 photograph&#160;: photoprint, b&amp;w&#160;; 26 x 21 cm. Format (aat) photographic prints photographs Contributing entity California Historical Society Accession number 42569 Call number CHS-42569 Microfiche number 1-90-720 Legacy record ID chs-m5233; USC-0-1-1-5339 Part of collection California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960 Project USC Rights Public Domain. Release under the CC BY Attribution license -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ -- Credit both “University of Southern California. Libraries” and “California Historical Society” as the source. Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library; From the California Historical Society Collection at the University of Southern California Physical access Send requests to address or e-mail given Repository name USC Libraries Special Collections Repository address Doheny Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0189 Repository email specol@usc.edu Filename CHS-42569 Archival file chs_Volume148/CHS-42569.tiff
context_page_description: Some Major League Baseball records may be regarded as "unbreakable" due to having been initially set by either freak occurrences or during the early decades of baseball when certain rules, techniques, and fundamentals were in place that have since drastically evolved, making it almost impossible to replicate such feats in today's game. Others are due to changes in the game over time, shifts of focus one way or another over a generation or decades in some cases and much shorter spans in others, which make it seem unlikely the marks will be broken when viewed through today's lenses. Outliers, however, can appear at any time, and do, accounting for many previously regarded as "unbeatable" records being broken – and in some cases re-broken.
context_section_description: The record was set in 1962 by Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills, who played in all of the team's 165 regular season games that year.  Thanks to a best-of-three playoff between the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, which ended the season tied for first place (back when league pennants were winner-take-all, with no annual end-of-season multi-tiered layers of playoffs, play-ins, and wild cards), both teams played 165 games.
  Because the play-off was to determine the regular season winner of the league championship, the games were counted as extensions of the regular season, and not the post-season, which at that time was composed solely of the World Series.
  Both the individual and team single-season games played records were set at the beginning of a seven-year span that began with the 1962 National League expansion to 162 games and ended after the 1968 season, when the NL replaced its traditional best-of-three tiebreakers with one-game playoffs. The 1962 season was the only occasion during those years in which a tie-breaker was needed. The American League has always used one-game playoffs.
  No team has played more than 163 regular season games in a season since 1962. While there have been a few occasions where a three-way tie was possible going into the last day of the season (which would result in a team playing 164 games), a three-way tie involving postseason berths has never occurred. From 1969 to 1993, it would have been impossible for any team to be involved in more than three one-game playoffs in a season, since only division champions qualified for the postseason and since there was never more than eight teams per division. As of the end of the 2018 season, there has yet to be an occasion in MLB history where five teams of one league have finished with identical records, which would have been the circumstance needed during this era for any team to play even three tie-breakers and thus match the 1962 record.
  Since the introduction of the wild card, it has been technically possible to play 166 regular season games, but is extremely unlikely. For a team to have an opportunity to play four tiebreaker games, it would have to be involved in a tie involving three or more teams for the division crown and a separate tie also involving three or more teams for the second wild card berth, meaning that the aforementioned-unprecedented circumstance at least five teams in two different divisions of the same league finishing with identical records would have to occur. A team in such a situation would then have to win the division "semi-final" tiebreaker, lose the division "final" and then win the wild card "semi-final" in order to play 166 regular season games. The 2018 season, which resulted in two two-way ties for division titles, was the first occasion where there were even multiple two-way ties for division titles – the losers of the 2018 tiebreaker games (who did not themselves have identical records) subsequently played each other in the Wild Card Game, but that game is considered part of the postseason and not the regular season.
  Wills' individual record is statistically ever more unlikely to be broken because teams are increasingly inclined to rest even their best players, part of a new metric-based strategy known as "load management". On average only about three players in all of baseball appear in all 162 games of any given MLB season. This implies that even if a club somehow managed to play 166 regular season games, there is mathematically only about a ten percent chance a particular team will have a player who will have appeared in all 162 games pending tie-breakers.
  It is also possible for a player to accumulate more than 162 games played in a season by virtue of a mid-season trade.  A swap between a team that has played more games and one which has played fewer can result in a schedule for the traded player to be greater than either individual teams'. Presently '70s-era speedster Frank Taveras holds the records for both most regularly scheduled MLB games played in a season and most games played for two teams in 
caption: Maury Wills was the National League Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 1962, stealing a new single-season topping 104 bases in those record 165 games to break the old modern mark of 96, set by Ty Cobb in 156 games in 1915.
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