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I would assume, after 25+ years of inter-league play with 30 teams, pretty much every team has beaten every single other MLB team. To take a sample pairing, Cubs vs. Blue Jays, we have 16 games, which even if one team is expected to win every game 2/3 of the time, has a .15% chance of being a sweep.

With 15 teams in each league, and assuming intra-league series are way too long to be a sweep, that gives a (1-.0015224)^(15*15)=70.98% chance everyone has beaten everyone, and I'm making a big assumption about how one-sided series might be.

So I'd be curious about the first and last teams, and everyone in between. This seems possible by data-scraping the site above (or Retrosheet, where they got it from) and parsing each page for a "W" and finding the date near it, which would be a neat Python project, but I can't make the time for it just now.

So does anyone know, or can anybody figure, the dates each MLB team finally beat everyone else? (I may answer this myself if I have the time this weekend. But I wanted to throw the question out there.)

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Yes, all 30 teams have beat each other at least once. Here is the list.

Braves (June 30, 1998 with a win over the Rays)

Orioles (June 19, 2002 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Red Sox (June 8, 2007 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Cubs (June 4, 2003 with a win over the Rays)

White Sox (June 5, 2003 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Reds (June 10, 2003 with a win over the Rays)

Indians/Guardians (June 28, 2002 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Rockies (June 21, 2002 with a win over the Rays)

Tigers (June 15, 2001 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Astros (June 6, 2003 with a win over the Rays)

Royals (June 9, 2001 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Angles (June 9, 1998 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Dodgers (June 10, 2002 with a win over the Rays)

Marlins (June 22, 1998 with a win over the Rays)

Brewers (June 14, 2005 with a win over the Rays)

Twins (June 13, 2003 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Mets (June 8, 1998 with a win over the Rays)

Yankees (June 10, 2002 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Athletics (June 5, 1998 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Phillies (June 26, 1998 with a win over the Rays)

Pirates (June 14, 2003 with a win over the Rays)

Padres (June 7, 2002 with a win over the Rays)

Giants (June 19, 2002 with a win over the Rays)

Marlins (June 27, 1998 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Cardinals (June 17, 2005 with a win over the Rays)

Rangers (June 23, 1998 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Blue Jays (June 22, 2002 with a win over the Diamondbacks)

Nationals/Expos (June 5, 1998 with a win over the Rays)

Finally, the Diamondbacks beat all 29 other teams for the first time on June 19, 2007 against none other than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. And it was actually the Rays that took the longest to beat every other team. They finally accomplished this by beating the Reds on June 28, 2011.

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  • Please provide a source to your answer
    – alamoot
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 1:36
  • champsorchumps.us
    – Alex Vaughan
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 1:38
  • what order is this in? I can see it's not order they did it, nor alphabetical by team nickname. I think it's not date team was formed either. What is it?
    – Kate Gregory
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 17:03
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    @aschultz That has a lot to do with schedule making. The Red Sox never played the Diamondbacks until 2002, and were swept in their lone series. They did not play the D'backs again until 2007, when they finally won a game (two, as it turned out) in their lone series. (champsorchumps.us/team/mlb/boston-red-sox/head-to-head/…)
    – chepner
    Commented Jun 14, 2023 at 15:48
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    Interleague scheduling was very asymmetrical in the past; I believe teams like the Red Sox that had a "natural rival" in the other league played them overwhelmingly more often than other teams. For example, they played the Atlanta Braves (who originally played in Boston for ~80 years before moving to Milwaukee for the 1953 season) every year from 1997 to 2002, usually 6 times instead of just 3.
    – chepner
    Commented Jun 14, 2023 at 15:55

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