If you haven't been following blaseball recently, all you need to know is that players have been quietly disappearing off their teams' rosters. They get hit by a Debted player, they get Observed, and sometimes they vanish. You can still find them by going to their player page, but you have to dig, and they have the modification Redacted. That's the brief version. This isn't going to be the brief version. 

In Blaseball's Discipline Era, the Yellowstone Magic weren't a great team. They weren't a consistently bad team like the Dale, or a hilariously broken team like the Tacos; they just had a steady middle of the road record, which suited the balance of the team's slogan, "As Above, So Below". Partially this was because they'd been a very good team that had been just completely shellacked by peanut allergies after Season 2. Other than that terrible run of luck, the most standout thing about the Magic was their welcoming vibe and the fact that they went the longest of any team in the entire Internet Blaseball League without a blessing. 

Specifically, the Magic got the blessing "Hitting Boost" in Season 1, and then nothing for seven straight seasons. It became a bit of a meme, with "we would like to see it" and "this is a threat" becoming joke slogans in round after round of ineffective propaganda. That's what brought me to Yellowstone National Parkpark initially, but I kept coming back because of the vibes, and the Magic became my secondary team, and my home away from Hades. I wanted a nice thing to happen to the team I'd come to cherish and their fans that had made me feel welcome.

In Season 8, their drought was finally ended when they were blessed with Lottery Pick, which was meant to steal the 14th most Idolized player in the League. We'd just recently used that blessing to resurrect Jaylen Hotdogfingers, and while no one was exactly eager to repeat that particular choice, "fuck around and find out" proved too tempting. In season 7, people had tried to see what would happen if Lottery Pick was won by a test Shadows player named McBlaseball Clembons; this plan might have broken the game and lost the Tacos yet another player from their already-depleted roster—which fans of that team understandably weren't thrilled about. Keepers on the Discord intervened to talk interested parties out of that particular misadventure, but the overall interest in shenanigans hadn't vanished. In season 8, evidently with the Garages' blessing, the eye of chaos landed on a Seattle Garages' Shadows player named Chorby Short.

Back then, the Shadows were considered sort of Forbidden Knowledge: anyone with an inclination to peek into the site's javascript could discover that there were players waiting in the wings, but those who preferred not to be spoiled chose to avoid it. Player pages could easily be found, and once found, could easily be linked to—that's how we got Jaylen back, after all. The instigators of the plan—with the Keepers' assurance that this time it wouldn't break anything—circulated Chorby Short's player page. People warmed to this plan because it meant no team would lose a potentially-beloved player to Lottery Pick and another team. Chorby Short landed at Idol slot 14, and the one-star batter with the silly name ended up being drafted onto the Magic.

I'm speaking only for myself here, but I was quietly disappointed. After all this time, the Magic had been hoping for a blessing, and they got a one-star player that fans had put up as a goof? It didn't seem fair. But the Magic took it in stride, as they tend to, and emerged from the one-week siesta that followed the elections with the sense that she was a magical girl, or maybe a frog, or a frog that can sometimes transform into a human, and isn't very good at humaning yet. (For what it's worth, my sense has always been that she's a frog when she screws around during an at-bat, and a human when she slugs it out of the park. Your mileage, as with every player impression in blaseball, may vary.)

Chorby was terrible, sure, but lots of blaseball players were terrible back then, and the Magic wasn't a team that rejected their lousy players. (It probably helped that they'd had several seasons of peanut allergies to get used to that perspective.) But the Magic weren't done with their string of eccentric luck, and captured the 0 No blessing in Season 10.

0 No changed everything. We thought it was "O no", like "oh no", the sound we all constantly make while watching blaseball, and in that sense it's a good pun on the actual blood type O negative, but it was a zero as well. Magic players could no longer strike out if there were 0 balls in the count: the third strike would instead count as a foul ball. This made a minor difference for several members of the team, but it was huge for Chorby.

Part of the reason Chorby Short was terrible is that she had absolutely zero plate discipline, represented in blaseball by the "moxie" stat. Prior to 0 No blood, she'd swing at absolutely everything—and in both baseball and blaseball, if you swing at a pitch then it can't count as a ball. After 0 No...well, she was exactly the same. Add in a pitcher like Polkadot Patterson, who has the lowest career walks-per-9-innings-pitched of any player in blaseball, and the effect was—well, Magic.

On the first day of Season 12, Chorby Short and Polkadot Patterson faced off in a historic 116-pitch showdown. Polkadot Patterson could not throw a ball. Chorby Short swung at every pitch, fouling them off, one after one. The count kept reading "Foul 0-2". Even with the new Feed, it was impossible to keep up. The image of an ace pitcher just destroying their arm as a tiny happy frog happily plinked out hopeless fouls was just too funny to ignore, and it jived really nicely with everyone's impressions of the Magic, or at least how we'd like to think of the Magic. Chants of "Chorby Short, Chorby strong, Chorby make the inning long" were born.

And Chorby kept doing this in subsequent games, particularly against stronger pitchers, and getting on base because of it. Take a look at this chart by SIBR contributor Ith Biff: the number of foul balls per player in Season 12. That green wedge? Chorby Short. 

This remarkable ability got enshrined in a Garages song called "won't strike out", from the perspective of their team of origin. Chorby feels so powerfully a Magic player that it's easy to forget whose Shadows they emerged from sometimes. And the lines "we miss them lots, we'll want them back" have a particular and very different poignancy now.

The "O No Chorby" era began to fade during the Season 12 election, when the Magic won Summoning Circle and rerolled their three worst hitters. Wyatt Glover, the league's cash cow, unfortunately got worse, but at least Chorby finally learned plate discipline. Gone were the days of 50+ pitch plate appearances, but Chorby was actually hitting...pretty well. Everyone loved the silly frog who made their pitchers cry, everyone loved a Chorby chant, and I assume I wasn't the only one who found it deeply vindicating to watch this fun player slowly evolve into a good player, via Summoning Circle and Infusion. The Magic scored Precognition in Season 14 on top of that, which boosted Chorby's hitting to 4.3 stars. We suddenly had a very powerful frog on our hands. They'd also chosen her to receive a Trust, which gives a player an unknown modification. It's a way to hopefully gain an advantage, but in practice it's also a way to imbue a particularly beloved player with some narrative and mechanical specificity. Chorby received the mod Homebody, which meant she'd overperform in the Parkpark and underperform elsewhere, and this builds on the sense of the character a lot: a tiny fearless frog who is simply happiest in her familiar natural surroundings.

Chorby Short, one-star batter from Seattle's Shadows, had a .340 batting average thus far in Season 15, was on the Idols board, and had more chants than I could keep track of. (And I tried.) Their team adored them, and the rest of the league fell in love with them. It felt a bit like your kid brother sneaking into the Major Leagues on a technicality and subsequently turning into Cody Bellinger. And then York Silk, raised from the dead and bearing a Debt, hit them with a pitch. They were Observed, like so many players that had disappeared this season already. Observed doesn't correlate 1:1 with disappearing and becoming Redacted; it only seems to trigger during Coffee weather, and even then not all the time. Rodriguez Internet and Andrew Solis, among others, have made it through. So when Day 33 dawned for the Magic with Coffee 2 weather, fans held their breaths.

It wasn't to be. Chorby Short disappeared at the end of the game. But not before, on the second to last play of a game the Magic were losing, hitting a 2-run home run. Not enough to win the game—they lost 9.7 to 8, to the league-bottom Garages—but enough to make a statement. You can't write a better story than that.

Both that 2-run home run and the final trace of her Homebody modification, which fired at the beginning of her last game, are currently still on the main feed. "Chorby Short is happy to be home" is peak blaseball: a mechanical effect that becomes a gut punch once tragedy strikes. But when we lose our favorites we look for grace notes, and it feels right that the plucky little frog who faced down a legendary pitcher and refused to stop swinging would, with the curtain already falling, face the unknown and swing for the stands.

I don't know if Chorby Short is gone forever. My gut says no. But that ambiguous space makes it difficult to grieve. We've experienced a loss, for sure, but we don't and can't know the shape and texture of that loss until later, when it hurts all over again. The next time we see them, whenever that is, it won't be the same. Blaseball doesn't let us get out easy. Part of that complex grieving process is telling the stories that matter about the person that's gone, and in blaseball, we have a way to do that now. Unsurprisingly, it's peanuts. Always has been.

Starting out

First things first: you’re going to sign up with your email, and then you’ll have to pick a team based solely on name and icon. You don't have to overthink this (but if you want to overthink this we wrote a thing for that too). Just go with what moves you. You can always change later for a bit of in-game currency.

This is what you'll see when you first log in. (Hello, ticker. We are all love the ticker.) The top row of tabs is going to be your main navigation later, but the center column is your entry point: it'll tell you the status of your team's current or most recent game. You don't control games directly: you're a fan, not a player or a team manager. But in blaseball fans can spend money to influence the game. So we'll need some money. Go to Place Your First Bet and click 'try it'.

That will take you to the betting page, which lists the next round of games. (You can't bet on games that are in progress).

Your team will always be at the top of the betting page, and after that it's listed in order of safest bets, with the most uneven matchups first. It also tells you how long it'll be until the next game. Click "place a bet"; you'll need Snake Oil to do so, but the blaseball gods have so thoughtfully provided you with one. If you sell it, be warned that you won't be able to bet on games at all. (I'm not going to cover betting strategy here; for now, just bet on a team with a high win percentage.) Betting gives you some skin in the game; unlike real-world gambling, there's a pretty good chance of turning a profit. Maybe don't spend all 250 coins on maximizing your bets right out of the gate: you want 20 coins left over to unlock the Shop, at least—but we'll get to that later. 

Most navigation in blaseball happens via the menu bar, so you can also get to this page by clicking "League" and then "Place bets". 

Once you've bet, go ahead and click over to "watch live". Here's where the second part of the major action happens. Games occur every hour, on the hour (except for scheduled breaks—the schedule is on the front page). Your team's games will always be at the top of the page, with the rest of the league's games beneath. 

Watching the games!

This seems like too many games to follow! And it is. Nobody can keep track of everything happening in blaseball all at once. You have to pick which bits you want to focus on. 

Fortunately, your team's game is always going to be at the top of the page, so let's focus there. The left-hand section shows teams, current scores, betting odds, weather type, and current inning (in green, top left). The central section shows the state of play: who's pitching and batting, which bases have runners on them, and so on. The text on the right is the game log, which describes the most recent event in play.

If you have a rough idea of how baseball works (it's like rounders for grownups), you'll be able to figure it out from context. The key element here, like with real sports, is to pretend that you really care about who wins. Betting helps with that. So do bragging rights. Watch enough games, and you'll start noticing patterns around all these odd names. You'll start getting a sense of who on your team is a reliable hitter, who often chokes, which one of your pitchers can pull out a surprisingly good game despite their low star rating. Arbitrarily decide that you loathe and/or respect particular rival teams or their players. You have plenty to pick from: there are twelve matchups an hour, all happening simultaneously. 

Also, weird shit happens during games—not every game, and not constantly, but if you're like "well that's weird and confusing" it's probably because some kind of sinister blessing or strange weather is at work. A good way to figure this out is checking rosters and player pages; most Weirdness can be explained by the tooltips on Status icons. Don't worry if you can't figure the Weird Shit out right away—a lot of the time nobody can figure it out, and that Eldritch Mystery is what blaseball's all about. Mouseover on status icons often explains Weird Shit. If any weird shit happens during a game, it'll come up on the game log on the right, and display in the center results box afterward.

Something to watch out for: Sun 2 and Black Hole, which I've written about before, don't change the listed betting odds, but definitely affect who wins. Maybe don't bet on Sun 2 or Black Hole games right away—or, if you do, be prepared for weird upsets. 

Idols

Getting attached to particular players is a big part of blaseball. Idols mean that one favored player—not necessarily on your team—can earn you money when they play well. You can't switch your idol while any blaseball game is still in progress, only when they've all finished and before the next round starts.

Your first idol is free. Clicking that button on the front page will take you to the Idols board—the ranking of blaseball's most idolized players. You can select from anyone there, but you can also pick your favorite player on your team by going to the Team page, clicking the player's name, and then hitting the idol button. Any changes after your first idol will cost you 200 coins.

If you've got hitting-payout snacks, you want to Idolize a strong hitter. Some good choices as of Season 14 include Jessica Telephone (Kansas City Breath Mints), York Silk (Canada Moist Talkers) [edit 3/19: whoops] [edit 3/21: disregard. on the Crabs now. Probably Fine], and Rat Mason (Los Angeles Unlimited Tacos), but you can also choose the player on your team with the best batting stars, as a way of getting more invested in your new team.

If you have pitching-payout snacks, same deal as above. Pick a solid pitcher—Sam Scandal (Dallas Steaks) or Wyatt Pothos (Breckenridge Jazz Hands)—and hang out, since they only pitch once every 5 games or so. For chaos mode, pick Sexton Wheerer of the LA Unlimited Tacos: because the Tacos broke their pitcher rotation and have only two pitchers, idolizing the better of those two pitchers gives you a chance of making money every other game. Fair warning: don't idolize Pitching Machine if you're going for pitchers. Pitching Machine bats now. Don't ask.

Snacks

Well, you’ve watched some games, let's get you some snacks. In blaseball, snacks are your route to ineffable wisdom, influence, and power. There’s a pretty large selection of snacks to choose from, thanks to our wonderful food and beverage creator who absolutely means us no harm. He even has a hat! 

I’ll give you a quick overview of snacks, then I’ll offer some easy initial snack pack recommendations. (Because blaseball is a cruel dystopia, you don't have room for every snack at once.) This is current as of the middle of Season 14; I hope to update this as more snacks come out, but no promises. The Monitor is very busy, and so am I.

Snacks that earn you coins break down into several categories: when a team does something (popcorn, snake oil, taffy, lemonade), when your idol does something (chips, hamburger, sunflower seeds, pizza, pickles, meatball), when something happens in the league (wet pretzel, doughnut, sundae, slushie), and '"miscellaneous" (breadcrumbs, breakfast). Other snacks don't make you money but gives you access to other parts of the game: the champagne flute lets you change teams, votes let you influence the game via elections, and the tarot spread, cheese board, pizza, and apple...well, take a look at the tooltips to see specifics. 

Have some wholesome ice cream! Delicious! How does it make money—oh. Oh no.

There are a lot of ways to earn money, but you can't choose them all. People have spent time collecting the most profitable betting strategies each season, and if that’s what you’re interested in, you’ll want to talk to SIBR. But this is the guide for the streamlined process, so I’m going to suggest a couple starter snack packs that will be a reasonable early investment. (Or at least, they were in Season 13.)

Idle chaos:

regular popcorn + stale popcorn + breakfast

Buy exactly one breakfast, maximize the popcorn as early as you can, then add more snacks as desired. This gives you coins no matter if your team wins or loses, and breakfast gives you a small boost if you wander away from the site for a few hours or overnight. Ideal for just sitting back and watching the fun begin. 

Hit-driven market:

Stale popcorn + sunflower seeds + hot dogs

Start with stale popcorn: its gains scale much faster, making rooting for a losing team feel less bad. Then you'll grab some sunflower seeds, and probably will want to keep buying a few more with your first winnings on popcorn, then a hot dog or two. (As of season 13, you can also throw in pickles to this combo, especially if your idol is Goodwin Morin. They steal a lot of bases.) Scale these up as you see fit. You probably don't need more than 20 sunflower seeds and 10 hot dogs.

I'm glued to a screen sixteen hour a day, please give me something to do:

Snake oil + sunflower seeds + hot dogs + pickles, then add slushies/wet pretzels/sundaes as desired

Idolize a decent hitter, use that cash to maximize your snake oil, put larger and larger bets down, feel the rush of gambling, profit sometimes.

A caution: when you sell a snack to free up a slot for a different snack, you'll be selling all the upgrades you got for it. This is fine for cheap, one-off purchases like pizza and cheese board, but if you're switching out a heavily-upgraded snack, you might lose a lot of money. But you don't need a super-efficient income strategy to enjoy blaseball, so don't worry too much about it.

Elections

Votes resolve on Sundays, so you don't need to spend money on votes, or decide what to vote for, until Saturday. You'll need 100 coins to unlock the privilege to vote. You can also buy votes; those will take up an inventory slot in your snack pack at the time of this writing. A barrier to voting is very blaseball. 

You buy those votes in the Shop, but you’ll spend them in the Election tab. There are 3 categories; 2 open and 1 locked by purchase of a cheese board, which I mentioned above.

Decrees affect the whole league. They're big rule changes, sometimes changing blaseball forever, sometimes just making the next season really strange. How exactly decrees work is usually pretty vague, and there will probably be horrible things in the fine print that we didn't get to read. Blaseball!

Wills are targeted, and let individual players try to execute more precise, targeted plans than were possible in Era 1. However, they’re a raffle system, and one outlying vote can throw a whole coordinated plan awry, if it happens to be what the RNG chooses. 

Blessings affect one team usually and, again, work on a raffle system: everyone puts their votes in a hat and the RNG pulls out a lucky winner for each blessing. The more votes contributed, the more likely a team is to win it—but that’s by no means assured. You’re very likely to hear the word “wimdy” as either a noun or verb to describe a will or blessing that wins with a low share of the vote. This dates back to the time the Miami Dale won the Wind Sprints blessing back in Season 4 with 0% of the vote, causing someone to tweet this iconic piece of art:

You don’t have to spend all the votes you buy in one season, if nothing calls to you; banking votes does happen among established players, as a way of storing their wealth. But you absolutely can! 

Feed

There are going to be many times when you miss games and/or can't figure out why something happened. Era 2 has a new feature called the Feed that will allow you to catch up on things. The Feed exists in two different locations. The main place you'll be looking is team or player pages. Click on the team name, and then "Feed". 

By default, it starts on game outcomes, newest first, which show the scores of recent games. Clicking on any game will take you to a chronological view of what happened in it. 

If, for instance, you're looking for a particular game to see what special-effects-slash-weird-uncanny-shit happened in it, you can simply filter by "changes".

Clicking on a player's name gives you much the same information, but filtered by just that player, so you can check how your faves have been playing or figure out when exactly they grew that third arm. Filtering by plays on your idol will let you calculate how much you've made off them, too. 

Take a look at those icons in the events listed under "changes": Modifications have little yellow borders around them, whereas the icons next to players' names will tell you what team they're on. (This is useful for when teams swap players in Feedback weather.)

If I think something's gone down, I can usually reconstruct it by digging around in the history of the Feed and applying some filters. (You can also let someone else reconstruct it for you—recounting stories is a big part of blaseball.) 

You also have a personal Feed, accessed from your Account screen (the little chair, top-right). This is primarily a balance-book that shows all your expenditures and winnings—you don't have to optimize your earning strategies, but if you're into that, this makes it a lot easier.

Also, those big, plot-relevant events are now recorded on the site. If you want to recap recent pronouncements from the blaseball gods and other shadowy beings—it doesn't happen often but it can be important to the story—go to the Book feed. From the top bar, click the "More" dropdown, select "Book", and then click "Feed".

It defaults to Newest First, but I recommend Oldest First to see how things have Evolved.

Blaseball is social, but how you choose to engage with that is up to you. Blaseball actually does have a core canon, though it's a small one. That canon is what's on the main blaseball website and confirmed by the Front Office (the official verified twitter accounts, and The Game Band developers). Outside of that, multiple fan interpretations flourish. There are a bunch of ways to tap into that social aspect, depending on what interests you the most, how much time and energy you have for the game, and what has the right vibes. The twitter official accounts (@blaseball, @Blaseballmic, @ILBLootcrates) are a good place to start. There's also the unofficial team twitter accounts, places like BNN, SIBR, the blaseball wiki (which records, and mostly distinguishes between, fan interpretations and records of game events), the blaseball discord, texting your friends your feelings, listening to the Garages and crying, and AO3. If you feel moved to learn black-velvet painting to immortalize your Jessica Telephone Vegas lounge-singer headcanon, you should do that. There's a ton of different ways to engage with blaseball, and the right one is the one you find the most satisfying. Don't feel like you need to learn everything immediately, or ever. Nobody knows all of the ever-shifting and contradictory fanon that makes up Blaseball Lore; "lore" in this context also doesn't necessarily mean the same thing that it does in another fandom. Watch some games, pick your rivalries at a whim, and see how you get on.

tl;dr

If that was too much, here's the bullet points:

• Watch games and place bets via the League tab

• Buy snacks in the Shop tab so you earn more from those games

• Good snacks: stale popcorn, hot dogs + sunflower seeds if you're idolizing a batter

• You can idolize a batter by clicking their team page, then their name, then New Icon

• Votes, purchased in the shop, can be spent in the Election tab

• Past events recaps are in the Feed, found on both team pages and player pages; filtering by "plays" and "changes" will often get you the useful or Weird Shit respectively

• What happens on the website is canon, everything else is up to your interpretation 

• there is no one true way to interact with blaseball, you'll have to figure out what works best for you

It’s a beautiful, meditative accomplishment; I can say that because it’s not my design, and because Sam is too modest to. My role in this feels like that of a careful gardener.

Scents & Semiosis is a complex engine of procedurally generated sentences that fit together to create unique, reflective memories. The underlying structure is Sam’s; he’s written about it here, and if you know Inform 7, you can dig through the source code via the game. He can talk more thoroughly about that than I can. I wrote target patterns--sentences the code should be able to produce variations on-- for Sam to take apart and create the component parts which would rebuild them. And I added to corpora--the lists of concepts the generator can spit out within those structured patterns--to flesh out the game world's possibilities.

But much like S&S's scent memories themselves, my creative component feels elusive when trying to describe.

My main role was as its producer: I'd seen Sam working on the game for a while, and every time I saw his progress, I wanted to play it already, and I wanted its recipient to get to play it too. So I asked him if he could use a producer, and I'm very grateful he said yes. A lot of production here consisted of me going “do you really need this feature” and “I think this corpus has enough content that it won't feel repetitive, let's add more to another”, keeping us on schedule to release on the date we’d deemed possible. But in a game about the precision of words and memory, those decisions are creative. 

The late stages of the game have my touch on it, but its heart notes are all Sam’s. My job was just to bring them out and let them shine.

I’m so grateful to Emily Short for letting us release it publicly: it is a game made for one person, very much a present, and it was her generosity that enabled us to share it. For anyone who knows her, this may be unsurprising. But it was a gift for her, and I wanted it to reach the standard she sets in our field in both its output and construction. She is an incredible friend, and we're lucky to know her. That's why we made this, after all. We love you, Em.

I’m thrilled I got to work alongside Yoon Ha Lee and Caleb Wilson, writing striking one-off memories and intricate target patterns for Sam to strive towards, and for populating corpora with richness and beauty. Thank you for being my co-writers on this.

Lisa Ohanian, Hannah Lee, and Yara Khoury have been incredible examples of what a producer should be; I learned whatever skills I employed on Scents & Semiosis from the best. Thank you for your talent and friendship.

I earnestly believe we wouldn't have been nominated if Amal El-Mohtar hadn't fallen in love with the game and showed as many people as she could, which if you know Amal's keen aesthetic eye, feels like a gift itself. Thank you for being its champion.

And of course, Sam, thank you. Thank you for making this game I love so much, and for trusting me to guide it to fruition. Yes, I worked on it, but I go back to it as meditation too. I'm glad it exists. 

I'm so sorry if I've forgotten any contributors--I really don't feel like I have the words, despite writing the longest thread imaginable. And thank you to everyone who saw something in Scents & Semiosis. That's all I ever wanted.

Congratulations to all of the nominees: I'm honored and humbled to be sharing ballot space with you. You’ve all done amazing work.

We left off last time with the Release of the Hall Stars, a cathartic and unexpected respite in the unceasing horror of blaseball, but I told it that way to draw out a particular narrative; it wasn’t actually a respite in the blaseball timeline. It took place in the middle of Sunday’s election results, a time when a plethora of events manifest, resolving some questions and creating others. Blaseball's rhythms are cyclical: a long tension followed by an overwhelming Pandora's unboxing of New Developments. The Monitor had cronched down on the Peanut at the end of the boss battle, but had also mentioned that the Boss would be coming shortly, which was Probably Fine. Wyatt had said something over the Microphone’s twitter account about a deal that had been made. Plus, the Crabs had earned the third championship trophy needed for Ascension right before being one-shotted out of the final battle, and an umpire told us that said Ascension would take place on the Sunday. A battle won, but a great deal unresolved. So we waited.

And we weren’t disappointed. The reveal of election results on the website often came with a brief prologue, which often feels like a narrator addressing the audience at the beginning or end of a Shakespeare play, focusing players’ attention on what they’ve done and what they’re supposed to do. Up until now they’ve been delivered either by the Monitor or Peanut. This isn't surprising: blaseball is a story narrated by its antagonist. Note that the pitch on the site's opening page, which promises that players "never grow sick" and "never tire", is signed by the blaseball gods, who have been well-established as unreliable and monstrous.

One of blaseball's persistent themes is that of the Unfair Deal, which has stretched all the way from Season 1, with the opening of the Forbidden Book. You can learn forbidden knowledge, but also unleash incineration. You can bring Jaylen Hotdogfingers back from the dead, but let loose a deadly rampage on the entire league. So when the Monitor offered to help us defeat our loathsome adversary for, quite literally, peanuts upfront, there had to be a catch. Blaseball is a dark mirror; while it's not a straightforward analogy for any one particular thing, it's in conversation with some of the material conditions we live under, and the near-impossibility of escape from a broken system is one that comes up again and again. Every deal, every possible shred of hope, comes with a cost. And most of the time, we don't get to choose, or even know what the cost is before we pay it. 

So we were going to need a lot of help, some of which would involve The Microphone's plans and what looked like behind the scenes maneuvering. Wyatt Mason—spirit of a former Tacos player, it's complicated—had let us know, starting in Season 8, that they had a plan. At the beginning of Season 10, someone—presumably Wyatt—spoke through the Microphone:

JAYLEN

TELL IT

TELL ITS BOSS

We're In

she can have the shares

HOSTILE TAKEOVER

After that, Jaylen's previously Consolidated Debt—which had been growing milder with each season—was finally erased. This is about the usual oracular non-explanation we get from the Microphone, but what I took from that is that a deal was made with a more-powerful figure over Jaylen's curse and the strength to win the battle against the Peanut. As the final boss fight with the Hall Stars against the Shelled One's Pods commenced, the Microphone tweeted the following:

This was clearly not going to be a good deal, or a fair one; Wyatt seemed to express apprehension, as much as they could via an oracular interdimensional amplifier. After the Peanut's defeat, the Monitor mentioned, in its usual laconic manner, that the "Boss is on her way"; and indeed, she showed up during the Season 10 elections to brightly inform us of the particulars of this deal. Whatever the cost of victory, we were not denied our triumphs. We won when losing would have had terrible repercussions. And the Hall Stars players were Released, which was unprecedented in blaseball; I've written about the power of that moment before. But if we thought we got to win and walk away, well, this is still blaseball.

The Monitor called her the “boss”, though many players now refer to her as The Coin. She’s represented by a Roman-era coin with "Aequitas Aug" printed on it, Latin for (very roughly) "the fairness of the emperor"; this is where we get the modern word "equity" from. Here's a good thread by Arkady Martine on some of the signifiers of this particular sigil.

Wyatt suggests that an ambiguous deal was struck with her in exchange for Release, and the strength to win the battle. Point is, there's a lot here we just don’t know.

The coin speaks in cloyingly sympathetic technocratic “we hear you” language, focus tested to hit just the right cadence, which often gets it wrong in a "how do you do, fellow kids" way: New Management wanting to assure everyone that they're One of Us. It is entirely depersonalized, which is best represented when she began her "speech". "Congratulations [champion]" feels extraordinarily on brand.

The thing I love so much about the Coin, beyond the cheerful potential-amorality and the precise symbology of the aequitas coin, is that she promised everything players have been saying they want.

“Blaseball is a mess,” she began, echoing the countless complaints about mechanics, voting, weather, and a thousand other concerns about balance that blaseball has implicitly signaled it’s not interested in taking up. Blaseball is a mess! That’s why I love it. Where else can you get an event like "all bases are loaded with Summers Pony"? This is a broken game, and a game about broken things. 

But the coin is here to fix all that frustration now!

One of my favorite devices in tabletop gaming, when a player misses a roll and the GM can make a hard move, is: the player gets exactly what they want. On the surface, that doesn’t look too bad. But there are always far-reaching consequences to what the player is asking for, and ways to twist those requests. For example: that time the Wild Wings complained that as a Wild team they shouldn't be in a Mild league. Fine! Easily fixed! They're the Mild Wings now. So when I see the new boss of the league agree that blaseball is a mess, my first thought is something between an anticipatory flinch and "Matthew Mcconaughey smoking dot gif". There's a world where players get everything they ask for, and beg to go back.

The rest of her speech was cheerily sinister in the girlboss capitalism sort of way, but with some instructively ominous hints: Investment will come to blaseball, and "Fair Play"—as defined by the Boss and those she speaks for, of course—will be the game's future. There's a lot that's tangled up here with Jaylen's Debt and shares and the Boss's takeover that might have your head spinning if you're new to blaseball, or a casual follower via my recaps, or if it's been three months in a year where time has no meaning. Blaseball's mysteries aren't intended to be Perfectly Legible—the game is about chaos and confusion and mystery and not knowing why a thing happened, even for the developers. My role is to remind you of that, and to point out where that confusion is intentional, or a product of the game's narrative systems. (Again, there's a lot of overlap between the two.) You don't have to Know All The Lore to be into blaseball, especially in a game which cultivates chaos and multiple reasons for the terrible thing that's just happened, and I think it's counterproductive to try. The best stories in blaseball aren't the ones that you've read all the lore about, they're the ones you latch on to. I'm just offering these recollections in case they help you find more interesting stories of your own in Era 2.

Season 11 was fairly low-key compared to previous seasons’ high drama; a lot of stuff happened, but no deaths, no roster changes, no major elaborate Plans. The Discipline Era was over, and we knew the Siesta was coming. The Hellmouth Sunbeams snagged 3 blessings, and even though they shared Fourth Strike with the Shoe Thieves, and Divisional Walk in the Park with the rest of the Wild Low, these combined with their permanent Base Instincts blessing to make them hilariously, incredibly overpowered. Walk in the Park made them walk on one fewer ball; Fourth Strike gave them more chances to earn those balls; and when they did walk, Base Instincts meant they went further. Incremental bonuses that work in synergy: a perfect storm. The Sunbeams are a chill-chaotic team whose original desert abode was swallowed by the Hellmouth in season 1, and so it’s hard not to root for their success. The real wrinkle in Hellmouth Dominance was the new weather type.

As you may recall, in the final game of Season 10's Internet League Series, Baltimore Crabs player Tot Fox hit the Crabs' tenth run, which immediately caused the sun to collapse. Immediately after Tot Fox's hit, the screen briefly flashed "THE CRABS ACCUMULATE 10 THE SUN COLLAPSES THE MOON IS SWALLOWED THE BLACK HOLE FORMS SUN 2 RISES The Crabs collect 10! The Black Hole swallows the Runs and a Shoe Thieves Win."

That string of unpunctuated frenetic capitals is about what it felt like to watch it happen, too. It was deemed a retrocausal event—Black Hole was one of the blessings we were voting on, so the fact that the effect emerged before the decree passed? That's just existence on the Immaterial Plane. (As I mentioned before, we suspected that this was the result of a decree that Joel had implemented early, possibly to try to salvage some of his weekend. For those of you just joining in Era 2, the Discipline Era was scrappy and everything was always on fire.)

The originating event's summary was provided in Season 10 election results, in case anyone had missed it during the chaos:

TIME TANGLES

RETROCAUSAL EVENT RECORDED

INITIATING PLAYBACK:

WARNING: SUN 1 LOW FUEL

PRESSURE AT CRITICAL

SUN 2 WAIVERS

The season had only two weather types—Black Hole and Sun 2—as a contrast to the plethora we'd previously come to expect. This meant that all player modifications—including the absolute glut of weather-related individual blessings from the start of Season 10—were irrelevant in Season 11. It's a good reminder that "everything can change, every week". That unpredictability is one of blaseball's core tenets: once you start getting too comfortable, you should start worrying. (Please note my previously articulated satisfaction at the Hades Tigers possessing the inability to be Incinerated or Blooddrained, which as we have all learned the hard way, is not the same as being "safe". Noting this will almost certainly come back to haunt me in Era 2.)

This caused...an absolute epistemological destabilization of every blaseball referent we'd previously considered stable. A team could rack up more than one win per game. "Wins per win" was immediately coined by SIBR; I took great delight in pointing out the ways in which our previous ontological constructions were messed up like raccoons got in there. 

It felt, at least to me, like laughing at the absurdity of reality—we'd come this far, done necromancy and killed a god and witnessed a tiny act of grace. At that point, why should wins and losses mean what we'd presumed them to, necessarily? Why should we assume how many we get per given event? When you break cosmic laws and get away with it, the resulting cosmos probably won't reliably function as expected. And there was joy in the chaotic freedom of it.

Both Black Hole and Sun 2 weather were very simple (in theory. lol). A lot of the joy of blaseball is about the ludicrous consequences of apparently simple rules changes. In both weather types, an event would occur once one team scored 10 points, that team's score would reset to zero, and the game would continue. During Black Hole weather, if a team scored 10, one of their opponent's wins would be deducted. In Sun 2, if a team scored 10, they would receive an extra win. More precisely: the Black Hole would "swallow a Win" and Sun 2 would "set a Win upon". It's a very The Game Band approach to building world and mood: evocative gesture, weird and concise.

This made games deeply weird: a team that had been trailing could suddenly come back and win, without the inconvenience of having to score more runs. Home teams could Shame themselves by playing too well. If this happened in Black Hole weather, the previously-trailing team would emerge as victors but with no difference to their win-loss record; in Sun 2 weather, it meant that both teams would essentially win. I will admit it did make betting an absolute nightmare: strong teams against weak teams had the possibility of being so dominant as to "loop" (the quickly established term for scoring 10 and resetting to zero) and thus "losing" the main game. I didn't mind, even though I ended up with far fewer coins than any other season, but I can see how it would have been difficult for new players to get established, either financially or in terms of understanding what the hell was going on. As for the former—this is a gambling game about the ways that capitalism isn't fair. It might not be the most satisfying game design to get screwed over by arbitrary mechanics that make you lose your stake, but it is very apropos.

Black Hole weather was divisive among blaseball fans, but this is my newsletter, and I liked it. More precisely, I liked the fact that blaseball just went into full-on derangement. There's a moment of baffled horror/awe in every season of "wait, what the fuck IS this mess", which tends to come after we've seen the initial consequences of our meddling and they've had a bit of time to build into full careening chaos. The fact that "wins per win" is A Thing, if not a particularly easy to define Thing, is what makes blaseball unique. You don't exactly need to know that wins per win means "the number of wins a team received in a game that they also won by final score" to look at a game log with a litany of "Sun 2 set a win upon" and go "oh what the fuck". 

But what I'm much more interested in is asking what it did for the game's mood and feeling and narrative, rather than "is it good" or even "would I have done this differently". And what happened is that the league, and the playoffs, were thrown into chaos. We had to figure out who was in the qualifying race when win-loss ratios were drifting further and further from normality; this is how we discovered that league rankings only take wins into account, not win-loss ratio. The Sunbeams pulled ahead pretty early, but we were watching the Wild division right up until Day 99, as the Firefighters, Tacos, and Spies were all within several wins of each other, and the Firefighters and Tacos played each other for the last series of the regular season, while the Spies faced off against the Lift, who were underpowered and likely to yield wins. The entire playoff structure could be overthrown by the potential of a game throwing out 0 wins, or 2 wins, or more wins, or swallowing a win. It was genuinely fascinating and nail-biting, because there was really no way to know who was "pulling ahead", because their next game might be in black hole weather and they could easily lose that lead to a team who Sun 2 smiled upon.

A single game on Day 98 resulted in one Tacos win and two Firefighter wins. Normal sport.

The Black Hole/Sun 2 chaos became even more pronounced during the playoffs, in which the possibility that we would see playoff ties if two teams reached 3 wins simultaneously during Sun 2 weather loomed. Fortunately, the Forbidden Book conveniently had a clause pertaining to just such a situation.

On the surface, this seems fairly straightforward, or as straightforward as it gets in a series where each game can result in a number of wins that can range from 0 to 2 or even more. What this meant in practice was an endless series, especially in Black Hole weather, when precious wins would be removed from teams, resetting the hunt for 3 wins. Remember, the playoffs were the strongest teams in blaseball—these were teams that were likely to lap 10 and reset their score anyway. As I've mentioned, the Sunbeams were unstoppable this season, and I would say the only time they got a run for their money was during the Tigers series. (I would also point out that as a Tigers fan, I might be expected to believe this.) In Game 2 of the Wild League Championship, the Tigers and Sunbeams both tied at 8, went to extra innings, and then in the 14th, the Tigers got a solo home run, the Sunbeams got a solo home run, and then Nagomi Nava hit a home run to collect a Sun 2 win and shame her own team. "The next team to score a run loses?" That is perfect, Chaotic, Sun 2 blaseball.

Interestingly, interminable series happened more when one team was clearly stronger. After the Sunbeams beat the Tigers in 6 games for a best of 3 series, they advanced to the playoffs to face the Seattle Garages. The Garages hadn't made it to the finals since Season 6, but were a pretty decent team, especially after swapping lovable but inconsistent pitcher Mike Townsend for secret weapon Shadows-maxed Goodwin Morin. But they weren't really a match for the Sunbeams. The Garages couldn't score enough to win, but couldn't defend well enough to stop the Beams from looping, so the Garages would lose but the score would stay even. But the Beams weren't so much better than the Garages that they could beat the Garages by 10+ runs and win on the loop. Purely on actual runs made, the Garages lost every game of the series, and only one of them was even close. But when you play under Black Hole, you have to either beat your opponent narrowly, or else absolutely crush them—and mostly it was somewhere in between. In order to break the cycle and reach the inevitable result, the Beams had to either play much better, or just a little bit worse. 

In a real sport, this would be easy to tactically exploit; but blaseball players can't choose to do a bad job, even if it would be advantageous to do so. This is yet another one of blaseball's systems speaking narratively: blaseball players cannot choose but play, and we have only seen one canonical instance of a player deliberately playing worse: Jaylen's Saboteur modifier during the Hall Stars' fight with the Monitor. The fact that this is only possible under such extraordinary circumstances has implications about the world of blaseball. But most players don't have this option available to them, and so we watched. A kind of wild-eyed angst set in among spectators—how many games were we going to watch before it ended? I actually found this strangely freeing—I wasn't attempting to guess when I should be back at my computer if I wanted to catch the end, because there was absolutely no way to predict the outcome. The takeaway here felt like "chaos is exhausting even when not accompanied by immediate threat".

The Crabs' Ascension was another bookend to the Discipline Era's epilogue. The possibility of Ascension had loomed over the whole game from the beginning, and the Pies' and Tigers' wins in the first few seasons made it seem like it might happen imminently. But it didn't shake out that way, and the Crabs were the first team to undergo this mysterious event. As play resumed in Season 11, the Crabs were nowhere to be found. Well before this, we had asked the Commissioner on twitter what Ascension actually meant, to which he responded "uh they go up or climb", and added the dictionary definition that google returns on a search.

Which made us think that he, like us, had no idea. And given how much he often seemed not to know—he had just claimed not to have read the rulebook—seemed plausible.The Crabs were in the Big Leagues now, which were clearly somewhere, because the Telescope on the website kept updating their scores against an unknown opponent with loss after loss. It took a little bit, but finally, someone uncovered it: the Crabs were on blaseball2. 

Numbers go up, indeed.

Blaseball is either intractably arcane or misleadingly overliteral, and sometimes at the same time. I love it.

Speaking of the intersection between arcane and literal, Season 11's Elections were a bit...different. Where previous elections offered disorderly grab-bags of weird and strange ideas, these options were much more consistent—but also deeply opaque. We were offered a number of potential verbs, with no other context, for what we could do to the Forbidden Book (opened at the end of Season 1, and the source of many troubles): Bury, Burn, Close, Deface, Eat, Freeze, Shred, Sink, Trash. Most were verbs of destruction, and the spare language suggested that these were actions we would collectively perform upon the Book as a way of concluding this arc of blaseball. This also served to immediately contradict the Boss' cheery promises: she wanted the Book gone, it seemed, and it looked as though we were being made to sign off on that through purely aesthetic choices about its fate. The Book is a malign force in blaseball, but it's also the only place where we get to see the rules; new management often works to eliminate established rights. Ultimately, this threat proved misleading because of a Phrasing Loophole, the sort blaseball loves: subject and object were deliberately obscured. We thought the book was going to get eaten: turns out it was the one doing the eating. This thing that we thought would be a literal book-end was, in fact, writing—or at least unveiling the writing in—the next chapter. What those mandates will mean, going forwards—well, we have Stadiums and Concessions and Wills coming, and vague hints about their meaning, but those are mysteries for future seasons. 

Season 11's blessings were even more arcane, since they involved the actual arcana. As a result of the Boss' pronouncements about Fair Play, Total Fairness had been visited upon teams on the Sunday, which said "each team will win only one Blessing, and will be Happy with what they get". 

And on the Monday, 20 blessings were rolled out: one for each team, minus the Fool and the World. As a tarot reader, my sense is that both were left out because they're the bookends of the cycle: as spectators, we are all collectively the Fool at the beginning of the journey, and the World at the completion of it, ready for the cycle to start anew. But that's what's compelling about the intersection of tarot and procedural narrative, which I've written about before in Procedural Storytelling and Game Design. Tarot possesses multiple layers of interlocking meaning: its visual symbolism, its numbering and naming, the position of cards (with respect to other cards) in both the deck and the spread, and in other ways. Readers and querents are able to project their own meanings onto the cards, extrapolating suggestive symbolism into meaningful narratives they craft together. The difference here is that in blaseball, there are likely to be very concrete answers to things like "what does the Death card mean". And—unlike earlier blessings—those are all hidden now. 

Season 11 worked for me because it aimed to do two distinct things: to provide a bookend to all the chaos of the Discipline Era, and wind down that intensity, while also foreshadowing what might be important after the Siesta. This new upcoming Era is going to be different. In what ways, I don't yet know. My approach to this newsletter is also going to change: I don't expect to do summaries of what happened in a season every week. It's my hope that some of the changes The Game Band has forecasted make the need for a weekly unpacking less immediately necessary, and I can talk more expansively about the game's mechanics. Those are really what drew me to write this after all: to help explain all of this weirdness that I love, and why it matters. Thanks for reading. I hope to see you in Era 2. Together, we write the Future.

"you know what would be fun?

if we put out the sun

we're coming to get you"

- The Garages, Fight Gods, Season 3-4 siesta

(reality-distorting blessings that look real cool in fan-art were haphazardly conferred on this text by sam kabo ashwell)

On Day 113 of Season 10, Tot Fox put out the sun. It was a Saturday.

The Baltimore Crabs were about to complete a 3-0 sweep of the Charleston Shoe Thieves in the Internet League Series, and they'd run up the score, 9 to 0. Tot Fox hit a single, batting in Silvaire Roadhouse, and triggered a paracausal event in which the moon was swallowed, the sun collapsed, and the Crabs' ten runs were consumed by a Black Hole (because runs, as it turns out, are physical objects). And as with many apocalypses, the sun's destruction was just the overture.

Blaseball has been leading up to the culmination of a bunch of threads for a while now. Let's rewind to the start of Season 10 and see how we progressed to an act of deicide. (If you’re new to blaseball and have come in during the siesta, you want to rewind way further than that. Start here, read through the rest chronologically, and just know that modifiers, which aren’t even mentioned in Season 3, changed the game.)

While everyone was still catching their breath from the Peanut's defeat of the Shoe Thieves, blaseball returned to its familiar relentless pace. Season 9's election was a busy one, filled with effects which would have major impacts on Season 10. The Decrees for Season 9 were a return to the enigmatic: all were Forecasts of the games' weather events: Eclipse, Blooddrain, Birds, Peanuts, Feedback, and Reverb. After the events of Season 9, Day X, we had a better idea of the storm that was coming. 

We got to pick three weather effects—the only weather we would get in the coming season. We voted for Blooddrain, Birds, and—to my surprise—Eclipse. Blooddrain is fun—it lets players steal stars from other players—and has caused a number of funny emergent moments, like the pitching machine drinking blood, so it's no surprise we voted for that. Birds is also a fairly well-liked weather; we'd seen birds peck Shelled players free, and with the Peanut firmly established as our primary antagonist, that was always going to be popular. Eclipse weather kills players. Player death makes for some amazing stories and I'm glad it's in the game, but a lot of why that works is because we never asked for it. Incineration was a consequence of the Book opening, which we did vote for, but we didn't knowingly choose that mechanic over other, safer options. But by Season 10, apparently some fans would rather see their favorite players burn than be swapped to another team. It's probably for the best that fans of real life sports aren't offered this choice. 

As a bonus feature of the new Forecast condition, three players on every team received a special modifier, one corresponding to each of the three weather conditions. This was enormously cool: the affected players got not just a mechanical bonus, but one with strong aesthetic and narrative connotations that made them richer as characters. Fire Eater made players immune to Incineration; when Paula Mason, formerly of the Chicago Firefighters, received that blessing, it felt apropos. Siphon felt like the most noticeable of them, but maybe that's just because Richmond Harrison received it and promptly developed a powerful thirst, especially for Garages blood. This led to a number of new interpretations: that Richmond Harrison went from "big like a friend" to "big like a tick swollen from blood", or that his neotenous axolotl form might be metamorphosing into a much less friend-shaped mature stage. Also, Jaylen, undead revenant now in a milder phase, got Friend to Crows: a good "this pitcher is terrifying" power that doesn't actually kill anyone, but is a gift to fan-artists everywhere. 

These effects had wide-ranging consequences—some of them shaking out rather differently than we'd assumed. The Shoe Thieves carried curses from their run-in with the Peanut that we figured might neutralize them. Flinch in particular looked devastating: its text reads "Hitters with Flinch cannot swing until a strike has been thrown in the At Bat". But in an actual game this wasn't as bad as it seemed—they were effectively playing more conservatively, swinging less at bad pitches as well as good, and thus earning more balls and more walks. Their kicks were, in fact, made for walking. Meanwhile, Shoe Thieves pitchers were burdened with the Mild modifier: occasionally they would throw a Mild pitch, which was an automatic ball, and any runners on base would advance. This is another one of blaseball's Mild/Wild jokes: in baseball a wild pitch in baseball is one which the catcher is unable to retrieve, such that while chasing it down at least one baserunner advances. The mechanical effect is very similar, but the theming is uniquely blaseball.

Fifth Base was surreal in a very blaseball way. It originated as a decree that inexplicably hadn't passed in Season 7, but was interesting enough to The Game Band that it was brought back as a bubble blessing: something that affects all teams in one division subleague, or penalizes every team not in that division subleague. The Baltimore Crabs received it, ensuring that every team not in the Wild High division would have to run an extra base before scoring. This also created Quadruple hits, as well as the possibility that home runs could rack up more points. It was suggested—and confirmed at least by the Commissioner, who may not be the most reliable source—that the fourth base was a lot further away from home, and thus harder to run to. I'm not sure if stats bear this out, but it seems to track. Watching a game swap from five bases to the traditional four depending on if a Wild High team was pitching or fielding was incredibly funny, and caused several discussions about whether the fifth base was removed between innings or simply ignored.

But that's not all; Blessings were a very rich source of narrative this season. The Lovers fittingly received Love Blood type, which allowed them to Charm their opponents into voluntary strikeouts and walks. The Garages campaigned for Out of the Shadows and Secret Weapon, both of which they received. (Campaigning isn't a guarantee: teams have taken to making propaganda convincing other discord server players that their team "deserves" a blessing, so that other teams will put their votes towards something else, but blessings are random and a team having the highest number of votes only makes it likely, not guaranteed, that they'll get it.) My sense is that the Garages hoped Secret Weapon would maximize Mike Townsend in the Shadows, but it hit the previously-unknown Shadows player Goodwin Morin, and instead of maximizing their pitching, it maximized their...everything. Out of the Shadows—which swaps active players with players hidden in the Shadows—initially swapped two hitters, instead of two pitchers; when the mistake was pointed out and fixed, the previous swap remained, but Mike did in fact return: the point of going for the blessing in the first place. (He was swapped with Ortiz Morse, who was, well, kind of the Canadian Mike Townsend: a terrible pitcher sad-boy whose team loved them a lot. Losing them to the Garages had already been hard for the Moists.) The problem was that the maximized Goodwin Morin was still in the shadows, and Mike Townsend still kind of sucked. Oops.

Finally, Downsizing hit the Tacos, of all teams, and Wyatt Dovenpart was sent to the Shadows, which shortened the already-truncated Tacos roster even further. They did benefit triply from the Tigers receiving Tag Team Pitching, the Moist Talkers receiving Tag Team Hitting, and the Sunbeams getting Mutually Arising, all of which increased the Tacos' pitching and hitting by 10% and overall stats by 2%. The result was this chopped-down, lopsided, one-pitcher team, which was surprisingly really very good. The Tacos ended up making their first-ever playoffs—where they promptly got swept by the Wild Card Sunbeams, who had [checks notes] the second-worst record in the league that season. You live by the weird, you die by the weird.

The season itself was defined by the Weather: the looming storm. As a result of more games being played in Solar Eclipse weather, incinerations were inevitable: but actually way less frequent than you might expect, given the doubled frequency of Eclipses. The incineration of Annie Roland on day 39 hit the Yellowstone Magic hard: Annie was a formidable 4 star hitter, and had survived not one but two Jaylen beans in the era when Jaylen's pitches caused Instability. Watching games with Annie and Jaylen felt white-knuckle: Annie would never back down, and instead of getting out as soon as possible (and thus getting off the field, where she would be safe from incineration), she insisted on getting on base. Annie was a fearless player, and to lose her to a wholly random incineration, when she'd survived the targeted variety twice, stung hard.

But Blooddrain, and especially players with the Siphon modifier, was the real star of the show. Overall there were 99 instances of a player siphoning stars from another; a full 10% of those were Richardson Games. Richmond Harrison had a particular thirst for Seattle Garages' blood, a fact which I know because my editor is eternally salty over it. (It was even more frustrating because Ortiz Morse, the Garages' Siphon player, had been sent to the Shadows immediately after in exchange for Mike Townsend, as previously mentioned.) Because the weather-related blessings were so widespread, didn't favor any particular team and were relatively low impact, they weren't huge news—but they did give a lot of players a little extra flavor, which resonated more if it was a player you were already invested in.

Those weather-related modifiers that caught so much of our attention early in the season were clearly a sign to fans, but of what, we weren't initially sure. Similar icons appeared on the Idol board at slots 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18, along with a Feedback icon at slot 14—a narratively loaded number in blaseball, as it's both the number of players on a team and the number of the Idol leaderboard that brought Jaylen back in the first place. The Idol board itself was reset—the Commissioner tweeted "FEEDBACK DETECTED", a standard announcement of a shakeup involving team shuffling. This was a pretty clear sign that the Idol board was going to be important: the obvious reason to reset the board was to limit the effect of idle accounts and make it easier to manipulate rankings. But manipulate in what way, we weren't sure; early week propaganda efforts were overcomplicated and unpersuasive. We'd been on a bit of an information overload around the end of Season 9, and we had a lot of clues and no obvious way to resolve them. We did know that we were going to have to fight the Shelled One's Pods again at the end of the season. The players it shelled and drafted had not returned to their original teams. The Peanut's recruitment—based on shelling top-tier Idols—was designed to create a super team: the most beloved, high-performing, all-star team in all of blaseball, granted divine power and turned into our antagonists. Except—remember the Snackrifice? When the Tacos shelled all of their pitchers so they couldn't play blaseball, and for play to continue they had to be given a pitching machine? Most of those players were fairly lackluster, because the Tacos suck. It's as though you called up MVPs and fan favorites from across major league baseball, and then rounded out the team with the pitching rotation from the 1896 Williamsport Demorest Bicycle Boys. 

The only real clues we had were the Monitor lackadaisically saying "tell me next time" after showing up too late in the aftermath of the Season 9 boss battle, and (in retrospect) the season being subtitled "Backdraft". A blue line appeared in the Hall of Flame beneath the fourteenth player, leading to a lot of speculation: fourteen players makes a team, and the Hall is the Monitor's domain, but until late in the week, it really wasn't clear to most if the Monitor was raising a team to fight the Peanut or if the next boss fight would be the Internet Series winners against the Hall team.

But on Thursday, the Microphone offered some clarification. (The Microphone, in case you have very understandably forgotten, is an oracular twitter account which speaks in the voice of former Tacos player Wyatt Mason.) The Microphone implored us to "Remember", and then retweeted a series of its previous utterances. One purpose was to make them accessible to screen readers, but to me there was a fairly clear message. As clear as we get in blaseball.

Incinerated players, of course, were still here: not just present in the code but visible in the Hall. (Blaseball's cosmology is, as ever, idiosyncratic; and additional planes of existence seem to get jammed on every couple of weeks or so.) The only verb we could apply to them was "tribute": giving them our peanuts. This hunch also made several other things clear: the season title of Backdraft could be about Incineration fire, but of course this is also a "draft back", of returning players to some as-yet-unknown purpose.

I wasn't the only one having these thoughts. While the Hades Tigers furiously conferred, the Baltimore Crabs were preparing an experiment. One of their players, Tillman Henderson, had recently been incinerated. Tillman's fanlore persona was a swaggering, entertainingly awful douchebag: a sort of midpoint between Jack Sparrow and Post Malone. When he was incinerated, the Crabs' response was essentially "of fucking course Tillman Henderson gets incinerated in the middle of the night in the US when hardly anyone's around, thanks a lot". So they figured he was the perfect guinea-pig to test a theory about the slots on the Idol board.

The Crabs Idolized Tillman until he appeared on the board, and then until he reached spot 18. And then, at last, something happened: the Blooddrain icon next to the slot turned the glowing blue of the Monitor. For the first time, Tillman Henderson was useful.

Once the Crabs confirmed that Tillman being in any marked slot (except the microphone at 14) produced the effect, it seemed pretty clear that these were slots for dead players—and that, probably, we were going to be bestowing blessings on the Hall team. Furious negotiations began. There were 6 slots, and 14 Hall players above the line. Not every player would receive a modifier. In the end, choices were made based on historical importance and narrative resonance: Caligula Lotus was the player whose incineration allowed us to discover necromancy; Landry Violence's incineration became an iconic moment in the game. The Tigers and Crabs negotiated so that the two Eclipse slots would go to Landry and Tillman, respectively, which isn't something I'd have envisioned back in Season 4. It's nice to see the league come together for shenanigans.

Or at least, that's how the plan circulated was supposed to go.

Right before the countdown to the regular season's end, there were fluctuations. Getting a half-dozen players into precise spots on the Idols board is tricky, especially if not everyone's down with the plan. When the dust settled, we discovered that Thomas Dracaena rather than Randall Marijuana had received the Blooddrain blessing, while Sunbeams player Hahn Fox had got the Friend to Crows slot we'd planned for Sebastian Telephone. As I understand it, some fanlore holds that Thomas Dracaena is a vampire (who claims not to be a vampire? It's very confusing), and the New York Millennials wanted him to receive the Siphon modifier so that he could drink blood. (I have no idea whether Hahn Fox fans had a motive here, or if this was just a random outcome of a rapidly fluctuating board.) Unfortunately for us all, in contrast to the Season 9 random weather modifiers, the Idols-board modifiers were set to disappear at the end of the season, so Dracaena would only have this postseason to reap the benefits (as it turned out, he never used it). It had been made abundantly clear that a regular team stood no chance against the Shelled One's Pods; these blessings were probably meant to even the playing field, and we'd only managed to get four out of six.

During such a chaotic time, it took us a bit to notice that there had been...a swap. As part of the plan, we'd moved Jaylen to the Microphone slot, even though no one was really sure what it did. But 14 on the Idol board was a narratively significant slot for her, and there was some player speculation that she was connected to the Microphone along with NaN and Sixpack Dogwalker. After the dust cleared and the lag settled down, instead of Jaylen at spot 14, there sat—and none of us could believe it—Tillman Henderson, recently incinerated resident troll of the Baltimore Crabs. How had this happened? It was tremendously unclear, because Jaylen's so entangled with the game's narrative threads and mechanics: it felt like it could have been any one of them.

The Mic slot Feedbacked the player in the slot with the 14th player in the Hall of Flame: giving us the opportunity to add one living player to the Hall team. But that's not the direction we took. Due to some last-minute concerns among the Tigers that Yazmin Mason might not remain above the blue line, some fans tributed peanuts to her, raising her from 14 to 13, and dropping Tillman Henderson into the fateful place. The first time we'd brought someone back from the dead, it had been a huge moment of community planning and catharsis. This time it was an accident and a joke.

Tillman Henderson had been a pretty decent batter, at least according to his stats; his awful persona was confined to Crab fanlore. But he was a 1.5 star pitcher, and that's the lineup spot he swapped into on the Shoe Thieves, Jaylen's previous team. Suddenly a blameless team had their ace replaced with a truly terrible pitcher, in both senses of the word. The Crabs sprang into action to explain to the Shoe Thieves just who they'd been saddled with. The main Discord broke into a communal riff of all the sorts of low-key irritating things that they could think of to blame on Tillman Henderson as a communal affirmation of narrative meaning as a way of dealing with change.

But Tillman coming back wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. We learned—much, much later, on the inaugural Inside a Blaseball Q&A stream—how close we came to disaster. Yazmin Mason might have been in slot 14 on my recollection, but if Crabs fans hadn't poured a bunch of peanuts into getting Tillman Henderson as high as possible (Tillman Henderson's preferred state), then the person in slot 14 could have been Mclaughlin Scorpler. 

You may remember Scorpler from the very blaseball order-of-precedence Season 5 elections blessings that saw him receive a fireproof jacket, then immediately discard it for soundproof headphones, which made him immune to Feedback. He'd been fluctuating wildly all week, rising as high as 11 at one point. If he had been in slot 14 when Jaylen was supposed to return, she would have missed out on rejoining the Hall Stars. And—as will soon become clear—the Hall Stars were really going to need a star pitcher. 

The postseason itself felt like a bit of a rote prelude to the real action, and I'm (probably) not just saying that because the Hades Tigers didn't make the playoffs. We had the not-actually-nerfed Shoe Thieves in one division and the Baltimore Crabs in the other, and once the Shoe Thieves rallied from a 2-game deficit against the Kansas City Breath Mints to clinch a Mild League Championship spot, a playoff rematch ending in Crab Ascension felt fairly inevitable. We'd already had the "underdog beats overwhelming favorite in grueling fight" story; having the favorites get tougher (the Crabs got 5th Base; the Thieves got mildly cursed) and sweep the underdogs was always going to be an anticlimax. And that's what we got. As the Internet League Series went on, the score gap between the Shoe Thieves and the Crabs widened. Where in the first game the Shoe Thieves had rallied from being down by 8 to finish on a 7-10 loss, the second game saw them score no points. With their Flinch modifiers firing frequently, and with the boss battle hanging over all of our heads, it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine the Shoe Thieves' low scores as a manifestation of their reluctance to go through last week's ordeal again.

The third game was similarly one-sided—at least until the Crabs racked up 9 runs and, as previously mentioned, Tot Fox's single drove Silvaire Roadhouse home, causing the moon to collapse and the blaseball cosmology's first recorded Black Hole to form. It felt like a mass hallucination, an almost-too-perfect opening act. It felt as if something had broken not just the state of play (the game score was reset to 0-0) but the universe.

(We suspected this was a feature going live too early—Joel frantically trying to get ahead of implementing the next season's chosen Decree, and having it misfire right as our anticipation was building up and our expectations were focused on the next game. Blaseball incorporates and works through its bugs, rather than walking them back: BETA is displayed next to the game's name, almost an alternate subtitle to the Discipline Era, and catastrophic bugs like the Wyatt Masoning and Peanut Fraud are integrated into the narrative. Blaseball's bugs become features, and it works because—as The Game Band acknowledges—this is a story about the weirdness and inhumanity of messy, broken systems.)

We were expecting big shocking events, yes, but this was a stark reminder that in blaseball, however much you're anticipating, you're going to be surprised. The sun getting swallowed is a very apocalyptic-battle kind of event—it's a core element of Ragnarok—and so it was a really fortuitous moment that's been reflected in a lot of art since then. It also makes a nice bookend to the Discipline Era, which began with Eclipses, but we can talk about that later when we get Sun 2.

The Crabs won, the Emergency Alert message played, and the Peanut arrived. It mocked us: 

(The Peanut delivered each line in succession; I'm editing them together here like this to capture the sense of seeing it as dialogue in real-time.)

And then Wyatt Quitter immediately one-shotted the Crabs out of the game. We'd known that no Internet League team was going to have any hope against the Pods, but the Shoe Thieves had hung on for several innings. So watching the Crabs, who had just clinched their third Internet League Championship and set themselves up to be the first Ascension team, get immediately knocked out by two-star Tacos batter Wyatt Quitter, was extremely funny. The Crabs were a huge powerhouse that had risen from the worst team in the league in Season 1 to a juggernaut, and the Tacos are a scrappy, chaotic mess who do badly and don't give a damn. The Crabs had moved heaven and earth to be the first team to Ascend; the Tacos had fucked around and shelled all of their pitchers to see what happened. Wyatt Quitter, in particular, was there due to being shelled completely at random by a falling peanut. (They’re also often depicted as a small, cute, scrappy, and more or less mundane femme human with no particular cosmic powers.) It was peak blaseball to watch the most chaotic and randomly-recruited player on the Pods team immediately obliterating the most performance-focused team in the game; it was also a neat fast-forward through a repeat of the spectacle we'd just watched the week before to get to the anticipated <eucatastrophe / Götterdämmerung / shitshow>. 

But it was also grimly funny, because it was a stark reminder of just how fucked we might be. It was pretty obvious, if you'd been following the Idol board's cues via the Monitor-blue glow activated icons, that there would be a Hall vs. Pods matchup. But only 4 of the potential 6 playing-field-evening modifiers had gone to Hall players, and we didn't know how much we'd need them. The same foreboding text for Emergency Alerts informed us that something was coming.

This was the introduction of the Hall Stars—this exact name had been floated in hypothetical discussion about a Monitor team, but this was the first confirmation. (Team motto: Hey now, you're a Hall Star. Incidentally, I would like to know who to incinerate for that). The Hall Stars, like the Shelled One's Pods, had a number of modifiers in addition to Squiddish. While some, like Chaotic and Tribute, were immediately understandable, others like Loyalty weren't as clear. It was evident, though, that they should improve the Hall Stars' odds—and a clear signal that this was not a run-of-the-mill blaseball team, but one backed by a chthonic power.

As the Peanut sputtered its outrage, a new game began, with the recently-redeemed Jaylen Hotdogfingers pitching for the Hall of Flame team. Notably, Jaylen is the only player to face the Peanut on Day X twice: the first time as the Shoe Thieves' pitcher holding off the Pods, which marked her face-turn. Now, the revenant pitcher had returned to the Hall with the rest of the dead, and was, once again, our best hope against our longtime adversary.

Our team—and it was our team, composed of the 14 Deceased players we'd collectively decided to honor. We began with 148,609,129 Spirit, which was much higher than the Pods' 29,918,000, but the Pods had a lot of unique modifiers which all seemed like big important force-multipliers, but which were difficult to assess because we'd only seen them in one game prior to this. The effect was chaotic, in that there were too many factors and complexities at play for us to readily understand why something would happen or predict an outcome. It didn't feel arbitrary to me, though—it felt overwhelming. The Game Band is very adroit at the use of game mechanics, individually and en masse, as rhetorical signal.

Because of the sheer number of multi-factorial elements in play, and because every player on the Hall Stars meant something significant to those who had paid tribute, this game was flooded with deeply intense moments of high drama, narrative payoff, and catharsis. Everyone's experience of the game was different: everyone was pre-invested in different characters, and able to link their actions on the field to established feelings and narratives. Beyond even that, the site was straining under the number of people watching. The site didn't show every play to everyone; the Peanut's taunts sometimes were delayed enough that a Hall Stars player cancelled them out while they were appearing. Stephen's said that blaseball is roguelike oral tradition before, and Season 10, Day X is the best example you could possibly have of this. There are game logs and VODs, yes, but they're not more real than the memory of yelling at the screen, or the story's reprocessing in art and music and excited conversations.

So, while acknowledging that I cannot tell every story here, I'm going to talk about some dramatic moments that stood out to me. Initially, the game felt just as grueling and dire as it had in Season 9, when the Shoe Thieves stood no chance. Jaylen Flickered back and forth, swapping pitching slots with former Crab Axel Trololol as the Peanut accused the Hall Stars of cheating. And she absolutely was: because the Hall Stars had Loyalty, which gave anyone leaving the team the Saboteur modifier, Jaylen had a chance of intentionally failing when pitching for the Pods. That, alone, wasn't enough: but in the 2nd, when the Hall Stars hit home run after home run, it began to feel like victory was possible. When Caligula Lotus, beloved Boston Flowers player whose incineration had given us the idea for Necromancy back in Season 5, hit a solo home run, it knocked the Pods' health bar into the yellow for the first time, and it seemed—incredibly—that we were ahead, that we were going to pull this off. But anyone who's watched blaseball knows not to trust a second-inning lead. 

And, then, in the bottom of the third inning, right off a Dominic Marijuana home run, Sebastian Telephone was incinerated. Some popular fanlore holds that Sebastian and Jessica are siblings, because the last name is already pretty uncommon; the drama of heel-turned Jessica Telephone facing off against her deceased brother was already a big deal. It knocked the Hall Stars' health bar down, but—because the Hall Stars had the modifier Squiddish—he was replaced by a random Hall of Flame player. 

Scrap Murphy is a name I didn't know before this. The fan wiki tells me that he played on the New York Millennials until he was incinerated halfway through Season 2—the first season of incinerations. He was a one-star pitcher. And now he rose to join his teammates, adding 250,869 Spirit to the team. Fans had quietly been paying tribute to players, even players most of us had never heard of or didn't care about: a quiet act of faith that ultimately came to fruition at the most dire, and necessary, of moments. It's a magnificent metaphor about what it means to care for each other: you do the work not because you know for a fact you will be rewarded, but because you take an action, quietly and with hope that it will mean something to someone someday, even if you can't see what. I will also note that Scrap's Spirit indicates that someone had been going around donating peanuts to every dead player so that their Tribute total ended in 69. Nice.

Scrap Murphy immediately hit a home run. Also nice. 

This is, incidentally, around the time when we noticed the presence of the Monitor—at first just a faint, ghostly outline behind the Peanut and the weather effects. I was watching the game on video chat with Sam Kabo Ashwell and Amal El-Mohtar, and when I saw the Monitor appear, I screamed and pointed it out. Amal's screen, however, was set at a different contrast, and so we spent breathless moments explaining to her what we were seeing, that the Monitor was coming, that we might finally get to see it eat that nut. Collective anticipation; communal storytelling.

And then—okay, this is the moment that really got me. Landry Violence, who I touched on briefly in my initial blaseball primer. Landry Violence was a four-star batter for the Hades Tigers from the very start of Internet League Blaseball, and quickly became a team favorite. Back then, the Tigers were the dominant team, both on the field and socially: in addition to the rest of their strong lineup, they had the maxed-out batter and top-tier fan-favorite Jessica Telephone. Coming into the Season 3 playoffs and a strong contender for the championship title, the Tigers had so far not suffered any of the incinerations that had swept the rest of the League. Until the second game of the championship series, against the New York Millennials, when Landry Violence was incinerated. Paula Turnip, who replaced him, went on to be a strong player in her own right, and the Tigers rallied to take the series. Fan chants of "do it for violence" turned to "rest in violence", which in turn spread so widely through the league that it became the official subtitle of Season 8.  Various players across many teams are, fanlore-wise, claimed to be carriers of the Spirit of Violence; RIV is the standard form of respect for a dead player. Landry was popular because he was a fitting symbol for turning a painful loss into fuel for anger and struggle. Fans from across the league who loved the legend of Landry Violence tributed their peanuts; he was second in the Hall only to the Kansas City Breath Mints' beloved Boyfriend Monreal. 

From the moment we realized we could—and should—give dead Hall players modifiers via the Idol board, there was a debate about which players should receive modifiers. This is another example of Sam Kabo Ashwell's "it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but everyone has to hold the shotgun" principle; there is never complete consensus on any plan in blaseball. The legend of Landry Violence was well-known enough for enough people to rally behind placing him in an Eclipse spot, which we expected would correspond to Fire Eater—and that's what he got. By the bottom of the 8th, we were hoping for any advantage. The Pods' health bar had been knocked into the red, but percentage-wise, there wasn't much separating the two teams. The modifiers would have been useful at this moment: we actually hadn't seen the Idol board modifiers pay off for much of the game, but even if we had, there was so much chaos, they'd have been easy to miss. 

Emmett Internet stepped up to bat, and then suddenly, we had our second incineration event of the game. Or more precisely, a rogue umpire tried to incinerate Landry Violence, but Landry Violence ate the flame. This gave them the Magmatic modifier, which in addition to being an enormously cool image, guarantees a home run on the player's next at-bat. (We'd seen this happen a few times earlier in the season.) This is an incredible image for the Spirit of Violence, animated for one last fight against the greatest evil of the Era, refusing to be incinerated again, consuming and powered by the flame. It's a payoff that spans almost the entire era of blaseball, involved multiple teams' coordination, and required possibly hundreds to thousands of people's effort. And because I'd been there from the beginning, watching as this story took root and spread from the Tigers' own discord channel to a league-wide ritual phrase, this was a much hoped-for and deeply satisfying catharsis—the more so because it was never guaranteed.

The rest of the game was filled with these, too, and the final moment of victory wasn't exempt. Peanut Bong was chased off the field by a flock of crows, which dropped the Pods under 3 million Spirit. It would only take a few more good hits. Workman Gloom, famous for hitting a home run directly after his incineration, hit another off a sabotage-pitching Jaylen Hotdogfingers. Tyreek Olive struck out. With the opposing team's Spirit below a million, we held our breaths. And then Dominic Marijuana hit a home run, dropping the Pods to zero and heralding the arrival of the Monitor. 

Millennials fans may have felt a personal exultation at one of their own striking the final blow, but the moment of victory, like the rest I've mentioned, was one of collective joy. The Monitor arrived, and, as we had been begging it to do for seasons by this point, cronched down on our loathsome adversary.

The end of the game provided a brief respite, before we could really understand all of its consequences: we were all too busy processing just what had happened, and could only speculate about what came next. A lot happened during the next day's elections, which I'll pick up next time. But for the Hall Stars players, their story is at an end, and I want to finish with that. That was part of the deal Wyatt made, after all. We'll leave the fine print on it for later. (There is a lot of fine print. Much of it is redacted.)

As part of the aforementioned deal, the elections decided the fate of the god-touched players of the now-disbanded Pods and Hall Stars. The Pods fell back to earth at random, landing on new teams, but the Hall Stars were Released. They no longer appeared in the Hall of Flame, lost the Deceased modifier, were unable to be Idolized or Tributed: though their database entries are still technically accessible, they were gone from blaseball entirely. One more thing: their Soulscream, the multi-letter arrangement of mostly vowels that is an expression of a player's Fate number, was renamed to their Soulsong. We've talked about the Peanut's taunts as a reincorporation of a musical theme; this feels akin to that. This feels like a minor-to-major key-change; a long-recurring motif of internal anguish transmuted to a paean.  

None of this is anything we've seen before, or that we were prepared for, but it felt both meaningful and earned. The Hall Stars fight was close: our team racked up an absurd number of home runs, the number of which would shatter records in any Internet League game, and it was still barely enough to hang on. If anything more had gone wrong: if Jaylen hadn't swapped and played Saboteur, if Scrap Murphy's Spirit hadn't been added to the Hall Stars after Sebastian Telephone's incineration, if we'd shelled more superstars instead of Snackrificing, if Landry Violence hadn't become Magmatic, then the Hall Stars could have lost. This haunts me, the more so because I haven't really seen the community grapple much with that possibility, and maybe that's understandable: victory feels good. But that victory would ring hollow if it were kayfabe, and blaseball has never shied away from going hard. If we'd lost, I have no doubt that The Game Band would have told an interesting story from it, and I'm sure it would have been Extremely Bad News. The world of internet league blaseball is a horror, even if at times a cheerfully absurdist one: players are routinely incinerated, have their blood replaced with arcane substances when they join new teams, have their bodies distorted and transformed in order to gain marginal advantages in play. No one should want to play blaseball. And so it was another kind of triumph that our most beloved players, incinerated too soon, rose to steal victory in the hour of our greatest need, and had their pointless, arbitrary deaths given redemptive meaning.

There's not a lot of grace or mercy in blaseball, despite what the Blaseball Gods claim on the website's loading page. We've just passed through the Discipline Era. And yet, arising from Wyatt's deal—which we were told is a bad deal but the only one around—we have this. The first era is a story that we've all been participating in, to some degree or another—even if you only experience blaseball through this newsletter, you are participating in the cultural event of blaseball. I am, admittedly, more invested than many: blaseball hits on my interest in meaningful stories arising out of unpredictable game mechanics, and there have been so many over the course of the Discipline Era. But this one is the most meaningful to me: it pays off the work we've done and the stories we've told; it acknowledges our effort; it shifts into a new key—one we don't get to hear often in this game.

Narratively, Release is a mystery. But mechanically it’s clear: Released players cannot be Idolized or interacted with in any way. They’re gone; they aren’t returning, at least not through any player effort. "Wherever you are," the Microphone said, "I hope you get to rest."

What do I even say about this one.

Well, uh, congratulations to the Shoe Thieves? That was one hell of a postseason. But we can't just go careening into the wild chaos of Season 9's crowning event, though. Blaseball is all about ramping up the tension until the out-and-out horror of the revelation. Without context, it just doesn't hit as hard.

Season 9 started out like any other season, with the usual chaos we've come to expect from blaseball. Bird weather now has a chance of summoning a flock of Crows that chase the current batter off the field, resulting in an out. Because it was a new event, the code hadn't quite accounted for every possibility. With the Lovers already at two outs, Crows chased off their batter Alexander Horne… and an out was recorded, but the inning continued. And then Ortiz Lopez hit a ground out, but that didn't end the inning either—the code condition to end the inning was exactly three outs, not three or more. Fifteen more outs were subsequently recorded—during which time the Lovers scored seven dubious runs, turning a close-fought tie into a rout—before Helga Moreno was caught stealing a base, an action which apparently did have "equal to or greater" than three outs in its code, the inning ended, and the bug was quietly fixed. The incident called "Crowvertime" is another great example of how, because blaseball is weird and uncanny (and text-based), bugs enrich rather than undermine the game. What exactly happened here, fictionally speaking? A number of surreal and hilarious images come to mind.

We were anticipating something big from the Peanut after the Fourth Strike, but early signs weren't anything near as scary as we'd been built up to expect. During the opener between the Dallas Steaks and the Kansas City Breath Mints, a giant peanut crashed into the field, but landed harmlessly. I pointed out that the construction of those clauses suggested the possibility of harmful peanut landings, and on Day 46 we saw that effect when the Tacos' Wyatt Quitter was encased. But other than Wyatt Quitter's shelling, and the permanently Flickering players' team swaps, the events of the early season didn't seem to have a huge impact.

The one exception was our perpetually wandering revenant pitcher, Jaylen Hotdogfingers. Early in the season, she swapped onto the Philly Pies, only to swap back to the Garages 14 games later. Feedback and other forms of player-trading are fairly common in blaseball, and there are plenty of players who've moved around many times, but returning to an old team is very unusual. I wrote last week about how repetition is a requirement for patterns, which we seek explanation for, and so I enjoyed thinking that Jaylen had clashed with her equally-famous Shelled teammate Jessica Telephone. Jessica and Jaylen have history—in season 7 Jaylen beaned her to confer Flickering, but she avoided the consequences and remained on the Pies. I like the idea that there was bad blood, that their rivalry only grew and Jaylen promptly ditched the Pies at the earliest opportunity. And Jaylen kept moving: she was only with the Garages briefly before she Feedbacked to the Moist Talkers, then to the Shoe Thieves, where she remained for the rest of the season. Each of those teams benefited from her formidable arm, and a number of players gained the modifier Repeating from her debt consolidation. 

By the middle of the season, there was a general sense that the Fourth Strike really ought to have done more than just dropping giant peanuts onto the field. Around that time, the season's scheme began to come together. The Monitor had appeared next to the idol board next to the highest Shelled player; whenever the leaderboard changed, it followed the highest Shelled player. The Monitor only has one stated motive, and that's to eat Peanuts. There was not any great mystery about the basic deal here.

The Tacos, perhaps tired of being the center of chaos for so many seasons in a row, expressed their reluctance at the Monitor consuming one of their Shelled players—the pitching machine was highest-placed at the start of the season, and would have been the obvious choice. The next most likely player to attract the Monitor's attention would have been York Silk. Fanworks most commonly depict York as an eight year old child. The optics of feeding a child to a monster wouldn't have sat right with many fans, even though his age is pure fanlore without any mechanical status. Enter the Moist Talkers.

The Moist Talkers have cultivated a reputation for a certain style of enthusiastic bad idea: they played a major role in Necromancy, and ever since the Monitor's emergence, they have essentially become squid cultists, embracing the commonality of the damp. They figured that offering their top-tier Shelled pitcher Polkadot Patterson would either do something interesting or further their lore, and when I checked in with them, they were all very strongly committed to the bit. I had my doubts that this was strictly speaking a good idea, which of course meant I wanted them to do it anyway. Propaganda asking fans to help the arguably-willing sacrifice commune with the Monitor circulated through the league.

(This is the most Canadian propaganda in blaseball I've ever seen.)

When Friday came, Polkadot Patterson rose into the appointed slot at the appointed hour. The Monitor showed up and dutifully crunched down on Polkadot's shell as we all watched. But the creature declared Polkadot to be "spoiled" and spat them back out, declared that it was still hungry, and then asked—in its most threatening stance to date—if we were holding out on it. (If my theory—which I am not posting publicly in case I give the Monitor ideas—is right, then we are in fact holding out on it. And it won't be pretty.)

The site hung for a few breathless moments, but when things finally settled, there was Polkadot Patterson, Unshelled. And with one new modifier.

Probably Fine.

The playoffs seemed like they'd be the exciting culmination to a fairly quiet season: the Wild Cards decree introduced a (cool, but not exactly transformative) playoff twist, in which the fourth-placed team in each sub-league had to play a randomly selected team in a best of 3 series. The Tigers faced off against the Fridays, pulling the Fridays out of Extended Party Time for a shot at the championship. It looked on paper like it should be a very uneven matchup, given that the Fridays inaugurated Season 9 Party Time on Day 73, a new record for underperformance: but Extended Party Time gives players the chance to party during games, which gives them slight stat boosts. It's what in board games is called a "catch up" mechanic—offering bonuses and penalties that make falling behind less brutal and leads less easy to hold on to. The Fridays partied enough to make them better than their 21-78 record suggested, even if still uneven. Game 1 settled 13-1 in the Tigers' favor: but the Tigers love drama and the Fridays rallied to take the second game of the series. Game 3 started with tensions high, and a friendly rivalry formed between me, our resident Hades Tigers unapologist, and Stephen, the Game Band's narrative designer and Hawaii Fridays fan. The Fridays and Tigers remained tied or within one run from the second inning onward—until the game broke open in the 8th with 3 doubles in a row, capped off by a two-run home run by everyone's favorite slightly unsettling good moist boy, Richmond Harrison. The final score was Fridays 5, Tigers 10. I want to assure my readers that I was a very gracious winner and that the Tigers would never hold back and play with their food purely to make a point. On an entirely unrelated note, the Tigers will be incinerated. Rest in violence to the Tigers.

The nailbiting playoff games began. Baltimore Crabs star Nagomi Mcdaniel was pecked free from her giant peanut shell by birds in a quarterfinal match with the Hellmouth Sunbeams, and with Nagomi back in action, the Crabs looked even more formidable. We've written here about the fallacies in the Inevitable Crab Dominance narrative, and even the return of Nagomi wasn't enough to make them the invincible team that many in the league believe them to be. We saw that other teams could match them in the faceoff between the Spies and the Crabs, where the Spies trailed most of the game to come back strong in the last few innings. This isn't that surprising: the Spies have been a quietly good team since Season 6, when their lineup swapped and Alexandria Rosales became a solid pitcher, and they benefited from Reverb in Season 9. Nagomi Mcdaniel got a chance to showboat by hitting a home run in the ninth, but even that solo run wasn't enough to catch the Spies. Nonetheless, the Crabs won the three other games of that series to progress to the finals, where they faced the Mild league champions, the Charleston Shoe Thieves.

The Shoe Thieves flew under the radar all of season 9; they've always been a pretty decent team, but were never as dominant as the Season 3-4 Hades Tigers or the current Baltimore Crabs. They hadn't featured prominently in any big league-wide storylines; they were a fun team with a cool appealing theme that mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Nonetheless, with a 62-37 season record and a solid lineup boosted by the addition of uncanny ace Jaylen Hotdogfingers, they can hang. And hang they did: they took the Crabs to Game 5 of the Internet League Series, after the Crabs blew a 2-game lead. This was kind of a big deal in its own right; nobody would have been surprised if the Crabs had swept them. 

The Game 5 score settled at Crabs 4, Thieves 2, in the bottom of the 3rd, where it would remain until the bottom of the ninth. It's a semi-common rhythm in blaseball and baseball alike where it's often hard to score, but if you get into the right situation—bases loaded, with less than two outs, it becomes pretty easy to score—and to potentially score a lot. With the Shoe Thieves up at bat, Velasquez Alstott hit a single, Simon Haley drew a walk, and then Stu Trololol stepped up to the plate and hit a 3 run home run to shame the Crabs and clinch the series.

That would have been enough as an incredible capstone to the greatest upset blaseball has ever seen, or, to quote the Game Band directly, "what many experts are calling the biggest choke job in Internet League Blaseball history". 

But immediately after, the screen went dark and began to display a series of warning messages. 

EMERGENCY ALERT

INCOMING

SEEK SHELTER

We had been told all season that a Storm was coming. Perhaps we had grown used to the Peanut's empty posturing and dismissed the warning. But now it was here.

And then the new game began.

The usual interface, which resembles a sports site's box scores, was replaced with an interface out of Pokémon or a JRPG boss fight. The Charleston Shoe Thieves, just-crowned Internet Series champions, found themselves facing a new team, THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS, made up of all of the Shelled players plus the three Peanut-named players. In other words, every player we Idolized throughout the seasons—because we loved them or because they earned us massive amounts of passive income or both—were now the antagonists. This was an incredible twist, and a thematically resonant one: the Idol board has been a critique of fan culture under capitalism since its inception, but that's another article. Having our favorite players turned against us was devastating, but also satisfying: it resolved a lot of threads that had been hanging for a while. It hit hard because every one of those players had featured in important story; it was scary because we knew that a lot of those players had been effectively chosen, by us, specifically because they were so good at blaseball. 

Each team had health bars with staggeringly large numbers: Jace in the SIBR discord has suggested that the number is a multiplier of the team's total stars, but that connection certainly wasn't apparent in the moment. Fouls, strikes, and outs did a certain amount of slightly-variable damage. Throughout, the Peanut taunted us, backgrounded by a representation of the ever-shifting weather conditions of the Storm. It was a stacked game from the beginning. The Pods team had an array of new modifiers that would do various forms of damage: Peanut Rain, Crunchy, God, The Fourth Strike, Curse of Crows, Subjection, Pity, and Destruction. Every one seemed more ominous than the last: "Crunchy", for instance, says that "the Honey-Roasted players on a Crunchy team will hit 100% better and with +200% Power". The blessings conferred on the Shelled team ensured that the Shoe Thieves could not hope to win, and in the moment, they added to the barrage of new information as we struggled to figure out exactly how fucked we all were.

The interface shift felt like we were playing an entirely different game, one that none of us had signed up for. It's impossible to overstate the effect of this. The Baltimore Crabs had been calling Game 5, and their stunned disappointment quickly turned to utter incomprehension. The Crabs broadcast team, comprised of Al Exoskeleton, Emma Shannon, Riley Lowther, and Orange Fox, scrambled to describe this entirely new game and interface in the same style as they were processing the events in real time. At first this was mostly an exclamatory incoherence, but they rallied admirably. It was a paradigm shift, something we genuinely weren't expecting from the game of blaseball, where we're already accustomed to the unexpected.

All we could do was watch as the Peanut taunted us and the Shoe Thieves—who were very much suddenly "our" team, representing not just Charleston but the whole league—valiantly faced off against Axel Trololol. Another piece of fortuitous emergent weirdness: Jaylen Hotdogfingers, the perpetually wandering undead revenant who had been cursing the Internet League with death and disruption for multiple seasons, was suddenly our champion. We were finally doing what we'd said we'd wanted to for so long: actually fighting a god. That's one hell of a redemption arc. 

I should say: this wasn't the only way it could have played out. It probably wasn't the way the Game Band expected it to play out. Let's say the Crabs had won, as most expected—then you'd have had a different hero-story of Nagomi Mcdaniel, newly Unshelled and technically a stronger batter than Jessica, barely avoiding being drafted to the vengeful god's side. (For bonus points, Nagomi spent some time on the Fridays, and—according to some lore—is York Silk's stepmom and the reason he's playing blaseball in the first place.) Is that a better story? What if the team that makes it is the Tigers, who Jessica played for in their championship days? What if Jaylen had switched teams in the postseason? What if Jessica had been unshelled and led the Pies to the finals? A good GM doesn't rely on a single plan—you've got enough material so that any roll of the dice leads to something interesting. 

By the top of the fourth, the Shoe Thieves had been reduced to 1 HP. Because this was not a normal game of blaseball, and clearly followed boss fight rules, this—not the 9th inning—should have been the end. Instead, the Peanut offered its patronizing mercy, taunting us with our lack of Spirit and transferring 23,813,322 Team Spirit to the Shoe Thieves, leaving the Pods with 5,953,330. The Pods then lost the modifier Pity, which previously had caused them "to hold back, out of Pity"; when the game continued, they dealt damage in the millions, instead of the previous thousands. The game was, manifestly, rigged. It was pretty clear we didn't stand a chance, but we also knew we didn't understand any of what we were watching, and that gave us enough hope to keep us glued.

The second chance wasn't enough. The Shoe Thieves burned through their HP now that the Pods had dropped Pity, and as defeat loomed, the Peanut demanded that we bend the knee.

To add insult to injury—and give the uncomfortable sense that it had been watching us more closely than anyone imagined—it leaned on ironic reincorporation of fan chants, the way a movie does a pop song in a slow orchestral minor key, or when the villain's song steals parts of the hero's harmony, twisting them to mock our affection. Fans have chants for favorite players. Back before York was shelled, when he was the golden boy of the Fridays, his was York the Dork. And suddenly, here was the Peanut: "MY DORK".

Readers, we screamed.

Immediately after that, Jessica Telephone stepped up to the plate, wielding—as ever—the Dial Tone. Jessica Telephone is arguably blaseball's most famous and beloved player—only Jaylen comes close, and that only post-necromancy. The community dubbed her bat the Dial Tone; the devs acknowledged this by giving her an item called the Dial Tone that (as far as I know) is solely cosmetic. Jessica Telephone is the only player to be shelled twice as a result of her position on the Idol board—even when fans knew what the top of the board did, they didn't stop Idolizing her enough to keep her out of the danger zone. And now the fans had given her to the Peanut, as our greatest antagonist. She hit a home run, dropping the Shoe Thieves' Spirit to zero and ending the game.

Everyone's been talking about this as a JRPG boss fight, but to me? This looks like a heel turn. The Peanut is setting her up as our nemesis, the beloved player forced to sabotage the desperate hope of the ragtag rebels against Heaven. Which makes Jaylen, incredibly, a face. After the Garages nerfed their own pitching lineup because the effects of her league-wide carnage were just that widespread, suddenly Jaylen is the unlikely hero. 

We were left reeling in the aftermath, which brought a deluge of new information almost as overwhelming as the battle had been. The players that made up the Shelled One's Pods were not returned to their original teams—they're on the Peanut's team, for now. More importantly, they were not replaced, leading to shortened lineups—this has hit the Tacos particularly hard, given that the Snackrifice meant that all but one of their pitchers is Shelled. They now have an eight-player lineup: but also, that truncated lineup is actually quite good. It's led to the very blaseball disconnect of feeling like your team is completely gutted and unrecognizable, when actually on paper they're improving. 

The Pods' modification Destruction said that they would "add 5 Curses to their Opponent when defeating them in battle", and we saw at least two of them. The Charleston Shoe Thieves' hitters now all Flinch when at bat, meaning that they won't swing before the first strike. (This sounded really bad before we saw it in action. Turns out, this mostly means that they end up walking a lot.) Their pitchers, including Jaylen, now have the possibility of throwing a Mild pitch. And of course, the Monitor showed up significantly after it would have been useful, its brand of blasé curiosity now deeply infuriating. 

What Season 9, Game X did was something games can really shine at: the paradigm shift. In a paradigm-shift moment, you as a player are given an affordance you never expected to be offered, and the stakes are suddenly completely different. Suddenly you're standing in an entirely different place, with entirely different tools and an entirely different sense of what's possible and necessary. And that is a euphoric feeling, as we saw on Saturday night. This has precedents in the narrative idle game genre: think about the shifting of scale and scope in both Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room, and the moment of horror when you realize exactly what significance your actions have at a broader scale.. Blaseball as a game has offered relatively little minute-to-minute agency, and a sense of detachment from the main action; we're mostly watching as our teams go up against each other, and voting (as best we can) to steer the game's larger direction. We are not the players. But in moving into a JRPG battle screen, we're given the feeling of immediacy; and our lack of control feels even more agonizing when we're used to that UI in a different context.  

Blaseball is a horror game, and thus relies on the unexpected: both the unnerving mystery of hidden things and the shock of their revelation. And horror is most powerful when it doesn't just reveal monsters, but shocks us into the awareness that our assumptions were wrong, that the world isn't as we thought. It's impossible to do this week after week: Seasons 8 and 9 were relatively light on the all-out screaming moments, no doubt in anticipation of this moment. If you keep perpetually escalating those revelations and shocks, there's no room to take a breath or find relief. And on the subject of relief, there's a catharsis here, too: we'd been quietly disappointed with the Peanut's previously-ineffectual displeasure, the Monitor's slow buildup, and even the delicate nibbling of Polkadot Patterson rather than outright bone-crunching carnage. Was that really it? The Boss Battle proved that it wasn't. The terrible thing had happened, and it was as enormous and unspeakable as we had imagined—even more so. There was a satisfaction to be found in the wake of that, and a thrill, and excitement for what terrible thing would happen next. 

I can't wait.

Blaseball's back from its Siesta, and so am I. As usual, a lot happened in Season 8, but all of the cool narrative foreshadowing from the early part of the week didn't actually come together into one overarching narrative arc that finished the season—other than the Microphone, which we'll get to later. And actually, I'm kind of happy with that. We've never been waiting for the One True Story to emerge from the chaos: blaseball is about a bunch of different threads, which sometimes run into each other. Some stories progressed this week; some mysteries and clues lingered, to be picked up in Season 9. Let's dive into some of the most interesting from Season 8.

We were all anxiously watching Jaylen Hotdogfingers after the bloodbath of Season 7, and fans noticed that the icon indicating her debt had changed to "Refinanced"—with the Microphone's telltale style of writing. 

Sure enough, players beaned by Jaylen were now "Flickering". We had to wait a bit to discover what Flickering did, but our early speculation proved correct: Flickering players had a high chance of being swapped—traded between teams, mid-game—in Feedback weather. This was considerably less painful than incinerations were, and it notably meant that the Garages, which had mostly been spared Jaylen's wrath in the previous season, took the brunt of the effect.

As blaseball's version of player trades swept the leagues, new connections between teams were forged. When players get feedbacked, it's often a painful moment for fans who are attached to that individual or their team composition, and there's a ritual that's developed in the wake of it. Members of the player's previous team pop into the new team's discourse to share links and lore tidbits and tell stories, essentially becoming the interpreter that takes previously diffuse headcanons and solidifies their lore into a few takeaways. It's a bonding moment, where both teams promise to take good care of the new player—an empty promise, since blaseball's complicated systems mean that players are sometimes on their new team for very little time before being feedback swapped again or incinerated. (Take the case of former Tacos hitter NaN, who didn't even spend one full game on the Spies before Flickering again to the Wild Wings.) But for the most part, fans try to embrace their new players wholeheartedly, while honoring their origins and histories. When Paula Turnip, the Tigers' beloved player and connection to the Landry Violence Arc, got swapped with Paula Mason, the Garages came to tell us that Paula Mason's lore gave her a connection to the Spirit of Violence. It turned out Mason had received the Performance Enhancing Demons blessing while on the Chicago Firefighters at the end of Season 3, and that team had decided that the three players affected were blessed by the Spirit of Violence. A blaseball team isn't just a list of players: fictionally it's an aesthetic, an attitude, a system of loyalties—and any change in the lineup requires that to be adjusted and reconciled. Having representatives from each team bridge that gap is a way of smoothing that process.

The Monitor did make an appearance early in the season, to make a request and to deliver a necessary quality-of-life feature. I tend to expect that any explosive mid-season revelations will manifest somewhere around Game 33 (best known for Ruby Tuesday). And right on schedule, after Game 32, the Monitor requested that we "hurry up" the feeding of "tiny eggs", aka the peanuts that fans were using to pay tribute to incinerated players in the Hall of Flame. When the Monitor disappeared, we discovered that we now had sliders that allowed mass-buying of votes and mass-tributing. Previously, every single peanut tribute took one mouse-click—and peanuts get bought in lots of 1,000. Players had been demanding this for a while, correctly pointing out that it was an accessibility issue; while I'd seen it requested for vote buying, the introduction of the Hall caused a significant and vocal uptick in the requests. If the Game Band had planned this from the start, the sliders could have been easily and unobtrusively rolled out alongside the Hall. So an in-game reason for the change and interruption was needed, and thus the Monitor delivered. This had the effect of emotionally attaching us to the unseelie creature that keeps heavily implying that it will eat shelled players. It's a very smart piece of game design: the external necessity of updating the website to add a feature gets woven into the narrative in a way that isn't just connected to the plot, but actively makes players root for this new character because it's given us something we want. 

The other major thing in the early part of Season 8 was the consequences of the Snackrifice. As you may recall, the Tacos succeeded in shelling all of their players, preventing them from being able to play blaseball. But on the first day of the season, there was a fix that initially seemed to be a denouement: they had one pitcher, labeled "Pitching Machine", which was a 3-star pitcher (notably, better than any of the shelled Tacos pitchers outside of Wyatt Pothos). Because of the way that names work in blaseball, it's impossible to tell if the new pitcher is a pitching machine, or if it is an individual with the name "Pitching Machine". I'm choosing to refer to it as the former, but do keep in mind that the sentience and form of the Tacos' new pitcher is currently left as an exercise to the player.

Here's where things get hilarious. Players can currently generate passive income by Idolizing a player; they'll then earn coins when their idol does cool stuff. Idolizing a pitcher is considerably more lucrative than Idolizing a hitter, but it probably shakes out about evenly if you don't constantly switch Idols (which takes coins to do). This is because—unlike the relief system on actual baseball teams—blaseball pitching follows a strict rotation, and most teams have five pitchers to rotate through, so your superstar pitcher will only actually play in 20% of scheduled games. Some fans have figured out a rotation of which pitcher to Idolize per game, a strategy which rakes in coins but requires a tremendous amount of maintenance to keep up. However, the pitching machine pitched every single one of the Tacos games: if you wanted quick cash, you could Idolize pitching machine and just rake it in every game. So predictably, the pitching machine shot to the top of the Idols board. Some Tacos fans, meanwhile, got attached to their new pitcher—at least partially because it was winning them games—and begged fans not to shell the pitching machine. Because the Snackrifice had been framed by some—and apparently acknowledged by the Peanut—as a sort of labor strike, discourse about whether or not the pitching machine was a scab ensued, causing the Discord to be put on slowmode. 

Meanwhile, the pitching machine continued to grow in power by drinking players' blood. (Any player can do this, but it takes on a new aspect when the training equipment joins in.) Shelling the pitching machine was almost an inevitability at that point—we still had a red line on the Idol board, even if we weren't as focused on it, and even though the Tacos' perpetual pitching machine lineup was shaken up when birds pecked Sexton Wheerer out of their peanut shell, enough people kept Idolizing the pitching machine. This was fundamentally a really interesting emergent story about capitalism and desire: for fans that considered the Tacos' act a labor strike, the pitching machine was breaking that strike—but it was also far and away the best way to generate personal income. The whole episode generated questions about automation and what's easiest for the individual vs. the community, and also some very funny discourse about the definition of a strike and what texts one should read before deciding if the pitching machine was bad praxis. Political metaphors about weird fictional worlds can be hard to sustain in detail: a good simulation doesn't seek to accurately mirror back reality, it tries to capture a facet of it. One of the best things models—simulation and other forms of fiction—can do is allow us to consider alternatives to real-world problems and arm us with the insight and passion to tackle them as they exist: but mapping our current moment directly onto the careening apocalypse of blaseball is always going to be unsatisfying in one way or another.

But most of what caught my interest in Season 8 were small moments that were disparate consequences of earlier Big Overarching Plot, rather than a coming-together of existing threads, or the emergence of yet another Big New Thing. Instead, we got a dispersal phase of the effects that had been building up from past seasons. Seasons 6 and 7 were very high intensity, narratively speaking, and you arguably don't want to operate at that pitch constantly. Season 8 gave the game mechanics themselves a bit of time to breathe and show off, and show off they did.

First up: Stats Aren't Real. Okay, I'm kidding, and I am genuinely grateful for the amazing work SIBR (especially with Reblase) and Blaseball Reference do that makes writing this newsletter much easier. But part of the fun of stats is using them to predict how a player is performing compared to how the data that we have surfaced suggests they should perform, which is incomplete and RNG-driven. This is always going to be an inexact science, and I'm always fascinated when I see fans complain that a player is "underperforming" compared to what the data suggests they should. Anyone who's ever played XCOM knows that a 95% chance of success is not a guarantee, and it's a well-known issue in game design that people's intuitive understanding of probability is often very off, in ways that can make designing a game that feels "fair" a real challenge. And to me, the element of surprise is wonderful. Take this moment: Ortiz Morse became the second player in all of blaseball to pitch a no-hitter. He is, statistically speaking, the worst player in the splort. (The only other player to pitch a no-hitter? He has pitched five. Speaking of statistical anomalies.)

On the subject of statistical anomalies and probabilities, let's talk about the Crabs' record. There was a noticeable increase in complaints about Inevitable Crab Dominance during Season 8, but it's worth noting that while the Crabs have been ranked first in the last three or four seasons, they've only won two championships, putting them level with the Pies and the Tigers. Part of this is because Axel Trololol is shelled, and something may be happening with the Crabs' pitching lineup that's disproportionately putting their weaker pitchers on the mound more frequently than the rotation I mentioned before would indicate. But if this weren't happening, the Crabs would be even more dominant, and I expect complaints would only increase. Part of the problem with both sports and splorts is that "the favorite wins" is a really boring story on its own, but the favorites win a lot. Blaseball is most interesting when the Championship match isn't the main story, narrative-twist underdog stories like the Mild/Wild Wings are the exception, not the rule. Fortunately, blaseball has a lot of fragments that threaten to become the main story at any one time.

One of blaseball's best features is the "oh, so that's what it does" moment. Status effects are often obscure until the moment they trigger, and everyone watching goes "oh, so that's what it does". This occurred in spectacular fashion when, during Day 94, a rogue umpire tried to incinerate the Miami Dale's Beck Whitney. Raúl Leal, her teammate, wields the Iffey Jr.: a Season 7 blessing that minimized him, leveling all his stats to 0 stars, but protects his team from incinerations. Not only was Beck Whitney—adorable fan favorite and also the Dale's best batter by a good margin—not incinerated, but the umpire was incinerated instead. This was the first instance of umpire incineration in Internet League history, and has caused the Dale to campaign for all of the incineration related blessings in Season 9. 

Sometimes blaseball's moments aren't as big as an incineration, but are a series of satisfying results of the systems interacting to offer up a narrative. On Day 90, Alyssa Harrell swapped teams twice due to Feedback: from the Fridays to the Pies and back again, two innings later. On the first swap, she was instantly up to bat, and promptly hit a ground out to her previous team. It's a perfectly normal thing to happen in blaseball, but with the Feedback, it's tempting to read it as a passive-aggressive "I am absolutely over this and refuse to do my part". When she swapped back to the Fridays in the 4th inning, she once again immediately hit a ground out, to remove any impression of shenanigans or favoritism. A great deal of the unintentional comedy in procgen systems comes from repetition occurring where it wasn't expected, which makes things read differently. Think about Jessica Telephone returning to the Pies after her championship run on the Tigers, which cemented her to me as a Pies player who would go wherever she could help a team rise to victory, rather than a wandering free agent. Repetition is a requirement for patterns, which we intuitively seek out and generate explanations for, and explanations produce narrative.  

Even if blaseball's systems didn't give us a huge satisfying moment that tied everything together at the end of the season, several major plot threads that had been previously left hanging were picked up. The Microphone, an odd, often marginal oracular figure that speaks in plaintive fragments, had been teased all season: small microphone icons appeared beside several of the spots on the Idol board. No clear plan to address these new icons cohered throughout the season—a number of plans were offered, but they were incredibly confusing and not particularly persuasive. The infographic format that's caught on in the blaseball fandom couldn't make sense of the proposals, and by the end of the week, parodies of Season 8's plans began to surface that made more sense to me than the unironic calls to action. Eventually, though, enough fans settled on boosting NaN, Jaylen, and Sixpack Dogwalker to the spots—a collection of decent guesses, rather than a cohesive theory. When the Microphone tweeted "here goes nothing" right before the Idol board finalized, in blaseball's first integrated cross-platform beat, it felt like an accurate assessment. 

And then the Microphone spoke through them. All three of them received the Flickering modifier permanently—the modifier usually dissipates—and Sixpack and NaN gained the new Receiver modifier. (Jaylen didn't—my thought is that she is too unheimlich already to be of any use to the Microphone, but also she's the only pitcher of the three.) Also, Sixpack and NaN's pregame rituals changed:

Hi friends

It is Wyatt

I have a plan

We only noticed this after the Peanut had finished the latest bout of its recurrent ineffectual chiding, which had been interrupted by the Microphone tweeting. This, too, was interrupted by our new definitely-friend the Monitor, who rather clearly sowed the eggs—sorry, the seeds for what we would see after the Election. The Monitor did not, however, consume the Peanut, much to our surprise and outrage. We had been anticipating all season that this was an imminent possibility, and may have engaged in more "EAT THAT NUT" chanting than was strictly decorous.

A number of the Election results also felt like satisfyingly apropos caps to loose threads of story and theme. The Yellowstone Magic finally got a blessing, after eight seasons without one, in the form of a player stolen from the Garages' Shadows by the name of Chorby Short. The Tigers poured votes into Composite, sending their weakest pitcher to the Shadows and boosting their pitching power significantly—the ruthlessness of this feels like a very Tigers move, and I approve. And in a season that was marked by the Garages finally being hit by their own storm, the Blessings they received turned that up to 11.

The Seattle Garages poured their votes into Promo Code, and won it with 44% of the vote: this blessing gave them one additional pitcher in the form of Lori Boston, bringing their lineup to six. They'd looked into the Forbidden Knowledge and knew that the pitcher's stats were terrible, but one more pitcher meant more space between Jaylen's onslaughts. It was a self-inflicted kneecapping designed to minimize the pain Jaylen caused: but she had the Flickering modifier now, and in fact Feedbacked away from the Garages early in Season 9, leaving them with an utterly terrible lineup and without the reason for it. (She did return, but then Feedbacked away to the Moist Talkers and then the Shoe Thieves, where she is at the time of this draft.) Ultimately, the gesture reads to me as an olive branch to the rest of the league, less for what Jaylen was doing or might do, but an attempt to mitigate her damage after the bloodbath of Season 7.

Order of procedure irony struck again, because the Garages received four blessings, in the following order: Forever Physical, Promo Code, Home Field Advantage, and then New Kid. First up, Forever Physical. Ron Monstera was blessed with the Stable modifier, which protects him from the Incineration-attracting Unstable modifier, and which is currently useless because no player is handing out Instability anymore. Then Promo Code gave the Garages Lori Boston, as I've just mentioned. Home Field Advantage starts the Garages with one run during home games: kind of great. And then New Kid kicked in, which incinerated the least idolized player on the Garages: the newly Stable Ron Monstera. 

Because Promo Code had ensured the lineup rounded out at six pitchers, Ron Monstera was replaced by Durham Spaceman, a 2 star pitcher. Ron Monstera had been a perfectly average 2.5 star pitcher, but he had a presence on the Garages, as cemented in The Garages' musical lore. There's a song named after his pregame ritual of "talking to the parasite", and my Garages consultant insists I stress that "it fucking slaps." After a season where the Garages' original lineup had been hollowed out by Feedback, Ron Monstera's incineration felt like a cruel punchline—and also a reminder that, with Idolization as a tool for generating player income as well as manipulating big in-game events, it doesn't always accurately reflect a player's popularity. 

There's an old joke about team loyalty and trades in the inferior sport that goes, "at the end of the day, you're rooting for laundry". And there's some truth to that—as I mentioned earlier, a team isn't just the players, it's the culture, ritual, and vibes. But it's also the players, and when a bunch of new folks show up from all over the league, with their own ties, it's sometimes hard to reconcile that. Ron Monstera got his own memorial track, in true Garages style, called "Fundamentals"; it pays tribute to his reputation by being nearly seven minutes of experimental music. A fitting sendoff.

This recap of Season 8 wouldn't be complete without mentioning that we have technically incurred the Fourth Strike, a pronouncement delivered with such anticlimax that I initially forgot to include it when outlining this. In the moment, it admittedly felt ominous: but it also felt vaguely funny: the possibility of another strike has been hanging over players' heads like an apocalypse clock ticking closer to midnight, and every tick ratchets up the dramatic tension and rampant player speculation. If the final tick of the clock ends up feeling like a dud, then the Peanut diminishes as a genuinely frightening threat. If all it can do to punish us for our transgressions is occasionally Shell a player, then it's a bit of a paper tiger. Apologies to my team. 

We haven't seen the Fourth Strike mentioned at all yet this season, adding to the sense of anticlimax. Which I'm sure means it's going to be very, very bad when it does kick in.

A lot can happen in a blaseball season. Last time I checked in, blaseball fans had just done a successful necromancy, defying the gods and bringing back first-incinerated Seattle Garages player Jaylen Hotdogfingers back. (Back from where? We'll get to that.) We held our breaths to see if our audacious gamble would pay off, and it did--but escalating the drama beyond our expectations, perpetual underdog Mike Townsend was exchanged for Jaylen. The community mourned and celebrated, and the Mike Townsend musical trilogy was completed in cathartic and heartrending fashion. We'd really done it, even if the cost was Mike's sacrifice—because he was a player who already had a substantial amount of widely-known character development, this was able to feel like narrative closure rather than random cruelty. For a lot of people, I think, the emotional capstone of the season wasn't the final, or even the triumphant act of Necromancy, but the narrativization of the act of Necromancy—Mike Townsend (Knows What He's Gotta Do), etc.

Jaylen had come back with two new status icons: "Returned" and "Debted". While these were ominous and kicked off a lot of speculation, new icons at the beginning of a season that coincide with just-introduced mechanics are a routine feature of blaseball. We discovered on Day 5 in Jaylen's first game back that she had an unfortunate habit of throwing pitches directly at batters she was facing. In baseball, this is colloquially referred to as "beaning", and it's definitely not something you want to happen—a ball winging your head at 100 mph, even with a helmet, isn't pleasant. In blaseball, this is something that just didn't happen until Jaylen. Players who were hit got the Unstable icon, and every nine days all players lose their Unstable status, but other than that its effects were kept secret. So, time for blaseball's favourite pastime: speculation. The Garages happened to run up some uncharacteristically high scores—including a 20-1 trouncing of the Moist Talkers—so perhaps Instability was tanking hidden Defence stats.

(It's always amazing when the denouement turns out to be far, far worse than the speculation.)

Jokes, speculation, anxiety. The Instabilities accumulated. In Game 30 against the Hades Tigers, Jaylen beaned three players: McLaughlin Scorpler, Moody Cookbook, and Zion Aliciakeyes. Game 32 for the Hades Tigers featured a Solar Eclipse, the weather effect where rogue umpires occasionally incinerate players; seasons 2 and 3 saw many incinerations, but they'd become relatively rare since then. Partway through the game, Moody Cookbook was incinerated and replaced, and fans saw a new status: that the Instability had chained to Elijah Bates of the Moist Talkers. The text on the Unstable effect was revealed: Unstable players had a drastically higher likelihood of being incinerated during a solar eclipse. Suddenly and horribly, we understood what the mechanic actually did, and before anyone had time to process this, Elijah Bates was incinerated and replaced, and the Instability chained and struck again, incinerating McLaughlin Scorpler. There's an awful-but-narratively-fascinating note of irony to this one: Scorpler had received two blessings in the Season 5 election, a jacket that made him immune to Incineration and headphones that made him immune to Reverb. Because players only have one Armor slot, however, the game discarded the jacket—his previous armor—to give him the headphones. Blaseball has a small thing for this kind of order-of-procedure irony: consider how Jessica Telephone became the Steaks' best batter immediately before being stolen by the Pies.

The game was an all-out screaming horror, and fan reactions were all over the place. Some who had been anti-Necromancy from the beginning essentially went "I told you so". There was anger of various kinds, directed at: the Garages, the gods, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, all the teams who had peripherally participated in Necromancy, either in-lore or mechanically. Some people wanted to get rid of Jaylen ASAP, either by shelling her, sending her back to the Void, or giving her to another team; others were excited by the prospect of a terrifying undead revenant bent on collecting an unspeakable debt. There were a number of different characterizations of Jaylen: the person playing her on Twitter chose to go in a "penitent unable to control herself" direction, eventually posting pictures of zucchini bread she had baked in between the contrite Notes app apologies for incinerating half a team here and there. Other people gleefully leaned into the exultant destroyer in their fanart. (Perhaps unsurprisingly; blaseball sure loves a demon girl.) The community generally recognizes that any time a player dies there will be fans who are sad and angry, and is good about acknowledging and making space for that, but all this was So Damn Much that the whirlwind of apologies and sympathy added to the sense of general chaos. The bloodbath of the Tigers-Talkers games was termed "Ruby Tuesday", which struck a good note between pathos and comedy. 

Incinerations continued. Fan favorites burned. All we could do was scry the schedules to see when we'd have to face Jaylen, or a team still carrying her curse. Because teams mostly face opponents from their own division, the Garages' fellow Mild High members, the Hades Tigers and the Canada Moist Talkers, suffered the most from these chain incinerations.

Despite the fact that we were learning a horrifying lesson about the consequences of our hubris, we decided to do something even more blasphemous: the Snackrifice.

For this to make sense—such as it does—we're going to need to back up and talk about Idols and Shelling. When the Peanut came down to observe the red line, it expressed its displeasure at our failure by Shelling Jessica Telephone and Nagomi McDaniel, the two non-Peanut-named players in the Top 3. Nagomi and Jessica had been Idolized due to a combination of genuine player affection and because they were two of the strongest hitters in the league, and Shelling sealed them into giant peanut shells, ensuring they could not actually bat. (They could still field, somehow.) We didn't know that Unshelling a player was possible, or how, until two-thirds of the way through Season 7, when birds pecked Jessica Telephone free. She was left with the Superallergic status icon from her time in the shell; we don't know precisely what that means, but it can't be good. The two best batters in the league missed most of the season, and the championship games due to, essentially, blaseball's version of injury.

The Unlimited Tacos (formerly the Los Angeles Tacos) looked at this and went oh hell yes. Blaseball has lots of teams who are pretty terrible and are okay with it, but the Tacos go way beyond that. They have always been a mediocre to bad team, and when they get blessings, those blessings make them worse—often in weird, reality-warping ways. In Season 3 particularly, we don't even know how, precisely, the Grand Unslam, Full Anticapitalism, Interviews and/or Exploratory Surgeries interacted to turn them into the Unlimited Tacos, produce the Wyatt Masoning, and turn one of their players into an error code. (Also worth noting: The Game Band is mostly a Los Angeles-based outfit, which might contribute to their willingness to let their home team be complete trash.) The Tacos don't fear poor performance or ruining the fabric of reality, because all of that has already happened to them.

"Do it again" has come to exemplify the Tacos' willingness to take a hard fall for the sake of the bit, and here, once again, they stepped up to the plate. Their plan, termed the Snackrifice, was to get all 5 of their pitchers above the red line so that they would be Shelled at the end of the season, and therefore could not play because none of their rotation could pitch. It was, essentially, a dadaist labor strike. It's worth reiterating that we did not actually know if Shelling would happen again this week, whether the Peanut-named players were above the line or not; this was a tremendous gamble.

Infographics and memes were created and circulated on Twitter and Discord, and early in the week, I did not think it would work. And as the season wore on, there were a lot of simultaneous propaganda efforts happening around the Idols leaderboard: Get York Down and then the subsequent Save Polkadot Patterson; keep Jaylen Hotdogfingers in 14th, hoping she'd go to a non-Garages team; get the Peanuts up above the red line, now that we knew the consequences and the line had dropped to 10. Sam Kabo Ashwell observed that this week, getting the Peanuts above the line was less of a puzzle and more "shooting fish in a barrel but everybody has to hold the shotgun at once"

The chaos only intensified in the final minutes: people were shouting and throwing "unidolize York" and "unidolize Polkadot" propaganda back and forth until the moment the red line locked; it was so chaotic that multiple fans reported seeing different results every time they refreshed the page. When the dust settled, we all held our breaths—we had somehow pulled off the impossible. All 3 Peanut players in the top 10; all 5 Tacos pitchers in the top 10; the York Silk campaign had just barely won out. Axel Trololol, the League's best pitcher, remained at #1; the Crabs have claimed that this was their noble snackrifice contribution after being an enviably dominant team for the past two seasons. I will choose to give them the credit for this instead of wondering whether this was a non-Crabs effort to lightly shell the Crabs; they certainly didn't mount an active campaign to save him.

(To put this in perspective: the best pitcher in the entire game, playing for the still-dominant reigning champions, was taken out by scheming-related injury on the eve of the championship games, and it barely even registered in the conversation. Such is the chaos of blaseball.)

The Peanut, when it appeared, seemed mildly impressed at our efforts: it offered begrudging praise for our mediocre Peanuts and seemed a little irritated at Snackrifice. (When a god you have recently tested says "wow" once, it might be good. When it follows that with "woww" and "wowww", it's probably not good.) Notably, it (dismissively) acknowledged the growing amount of fan-lore about unionizing, saying "YOU WITHHOLD YOUR LABOR? YOU THINK THAT GIVES YOU POWER?". It then dispensed a massive reward of seemingly-useless peanuts to everyone, then suddenly disappeared, replaced by a levitating, curious squid: what we've since learned is the Monitor.

The Monitor appears to have followed Jaylen back to this realm from 'the Hall'—that is, the Hall of Flame, recently unlocked when blaseball reached its $10,000 Patreon goal. (This is my gentle reminder to donate to the Patreon if you're able and enjoy seeing these sort of wild stunts, since gameplay chaos seems to be directly tied to how much money The Game Band can raise. As a formerly-indie developer, I salute this.) The Hall memorializes Incinerated players, allowing you to pay respects with Peanut offerings, but it will surely have other effects going forwards. Anybody hoping that the Hall will let us rescue the dead en masse would probably do well to consider our record with Jaylen. The Monitor's interest in "tiny eggs" is akin to a dragon demanding we feed it princesses: it's not trying to be "cruel", it just operates on a completely different plane of logic than we do.

The Commissioner has the affect of a gentle-souled but incompetent regional manager who has just been woken from a nap by a subordinate; the Peanut is an oracular god-king who's constantly irritated that we don't take this as seriously as he does; the Monitor speaks like a small child that doesn't realise it's a city-block-sized monster. The Monitor wants to eat the Peanut, which it thinks is an egg, and it will hang around to see if that egg comes back and watch Jaylen play some ball in the meantime. There's an interesting parallel here: in the world of blaseball, you only escape from a scary, demanding god through the advent of a scarier and hungrier one; just as the natural follow-up to a disastrous plan is a bigger, messier, more hubristic plan.

Also, the three Peanut players are still with us, but now they've got the status Honey-Roasted. We don't know what that means yet.

The dynamic between the developers and the fans is very much centered around planting and payoff, and the most effective, satisfying forms of planting tend to be things that work as a good footnote joke. Last week I wrote about the fun footnote of the legal battle between the Wings and the Commissioner which culminated in their name being changed to the Mild Wings. The Wings made it to the postseason—but that meant they had to face the Garages in the semi-final, with Jaylen pitching in the very first game of the series. Jaylen promptly beaned five players—the most ever hit in a single game—and won the game 7-1.

Feedback is an effect that shuffles teams around—reorganizing lineups, even trading players between teams. And the Commissioner usually announces its occurrence. But that usually happens during games, not in between them.

And then people noticed that the Mild Wings were the Wild Wings again, and the Wings fans exulted. The Wings lost one of those Unstable players—Miguel Wheeler, rest in violence, who fanonically was a car tire piloted by a swarm of rats—but they went on to win the Championship.

If the Wings hadn't made the postseason, or had been knocked out by the Breath Mints in the first round, it wouldn't have been a big deal—it would have been a fun footnote. The name change wasn't exactly a reward for "being brave enough to take on the Commissioner": instead, it was "you did a good bit, so we'll make that bit pay off narratively when your team runs into a Big Narrative moment again." Blaseball relies on having a lot of these apparently-trivial narrative threads running at any one time, so that there are always some relevant ones to bring to the foreground during moments of crisis and catharsis.

The current planting note I'm following up on this week has to do with a particular triumph of the Yellowstone Magic. The Magic are a solidly chill, middle-of-the-road team that pride themselves on getting as neutral a record as possible to match their team motto of "As Above, So Below". They've got a very distinct vibe, and the sense I get from them is that while they are playing blaseball with the rest of us, they are also playing another, deeper, more obscure game that allows them to be sanguine about the constant vagaries of fortune. (It hopefully does, because they have not received a blessing since Season 1.) The Magic's victories are usually quiet, not breaking out of team lore into the broader narratives of the league. But then their 2-star pitcher Inky Rutledge pitched a no-hitter—the first that we have solid records for—whereupon the Commissioner announced that Inky had found the 2-blood blagonball. 

Definitely not related to any similarly-named franchise, blagonballs are hidden unlocks, discovered during particularly notable and unprecedented feats. (The 3-blood blagonball was discovered by New York Millennials player Sandie Turner after they batted a single and went on to steal second, then third, then home. The 5-blood blagonball was discovered when the Patreon reached $5,000, the enigmatically-worded reward for which was "something will happen". At time of print these are the only discovered blagonballs.) We aren't fully sure what a blagonball does: like any blaseball mystery, it's probably not good but people really want to see it anyway. Raucous joy ensued among Magic fans—finally they had a unique record that was theirs alone. Every season has a championship winner, but now they'll always be the team with the first confirmed no-hitter, and blagonballs are rarer than championship pennants. Among the celebrations, a campaign started immediately to let Inky pitch the blagonball.

(meme edit by bethy, of an original image by @graciedarts)

Once again, the Magic did not receive any blessings this season, despite the Top 4 teams being shut out of blessings by the Bless Off Decree. But then someone noticed an addition in Inky's item slot that wasn't related to any election blessings: 

This is almost certainly fine. Inky has already pitched once this season, and nothing immediately visible has come of it. Yet.

Maybe if I grew a third arm

I could steal the fandom’s heart

Till then I’ll keep showing up

Til the umps put my soul in park

-"My Name Is Mike Townsend", off The Garages’ Redemption Arc

This is, as promised, 500(+) words of uncontrollable gushing about today's events; I make no promises about its coherence. Blaseball's Necromancy plan has concluded in the most narratively satisfying, high-stakes, and emotionally wrenching way. If you haven't caught up on what's been happening, you need to go read that now, then come back here.

When we last left off, we'd secured Jaylen at #14 on the Idolatry chart. She held steady there as the final countdown to the election clicked to zero, where it remained for a worrying amount of time. The Discord chat began a chant of "First In, First Out"; the Commissioner, in that obscurely-threatening omnipotent tone I've mentioned before, asked if we were sure. And then, at last, the Peanut manifested, and spoke.

(I cannot explain how funny it was, as we all collectively braced for our doom, to see that the Peanut's first response was an incredulous "HOTDOGFINGERS?")

HOTDOGFINGERS?

AMUSING

THE LEDGER MUST BE BALANCED

DEBTS PAID

GOOD LUCK

And then the results of decrees and blessings were revealed. The Garages, as we hoped, won Lottery Pick with 58% of the vote--which is actually high for a blessing! And Jaylen Hotdogfingers, first incinerated, Seattle's 4-star pitcher, returned to them.

We did it. We did a necromancy. We defied the gods and we won.

But not without a price. And not without a debt. The ledger must be balanced; we are under alchemy's law of equivalent exchange.

I actually stopped breathing for a moment when I saw this. Mike Townsend, everyone's favorite underdog and 1.5 star pitcher, traded places with Jaylen Hotdogfingers and "retreated to the shadows". With his sacrifice, he cemented his status as a credit to the team, a hero, and a legend. 

Jaylen's not out of the woods. She has two status effects that I'm sure will be significant in the upcoming season: Returned (This player has returned from the Void), and Debted (This player must fulfill a Debt). Her new pregame ritual is "checking their pulse". But she's back. The Garages made a promise that they would try to bring her home, and they managed it. "First in, first out" became a ritual incantation, part of the magic: we spoke it into truth.

But it's Mike Townsend's fate that stays with me. The pitcher who took over for Jaylen Hotdogfingers afterwards and who struggled constantly. The player who had a diss track written about him by his own team, and who still kept trying. He left it all on the field. And he was a credit to his team, even before this: Jessica Telephone, beloved titan of blaseball, consistently struggled against him. In his retreat to the shadows, he finally has the recognition and love that he craved from his team and the fans--but he's not around to see it anymore. I want to be clear: Mike Townsend does not seem to be dead. "Retreating into shadows" is the same text that was used for the Alternate swap on the Party Line blessing; it is weirder and more interesting than just death. And it's my hope that we haven't seen the last of Mike Townsend. But for now, he's really gone, without ever getting to appreciate the end of his redemption arc. The fandom created a vision of a completely useless pitcher who everyone got frustrated at, then humanized him and gave him emotional depth, and now that the game's mechanics have taken him away, we're left with nothing but his incredible story and a couple of fantastic songs. Thank you, Mike.

So we got what we wanted, but at a price. Necromancy couldn't have made a more painful exchange. Which I feel is the point: if you're going to do Faustian magic, you have to be prepared to pay the cost. 

One of the issues with writing deep dives about blaseball's mechanics during the season is that the season does not end. There's always something evolving; unless it's a Sunday afternoon, there's usually some chaos occurring. Outside of some twitter threads on blessings and balancing player pain and relief,  I haven't written much about blaseball over the past week and a half—which doesn't sound that long, but in blaseball a week is an eternity. And this is unfortunate, because some cool stuff has happened, like a genuine (if not universal) shift in the perception of Mike Townsend from "disappointment" to "credit to the team", and the weather effect Reverb shaking up teams' lineups. Maybe it's that it's difficult to keep up with new systems' impacts as they keep getting rolled out. Maybe it's that as a systemic narrative designer, I promptly dumped 80 hours into Crusader Kings III this week. Who could say?

But something wild's been happening this week that I need to write about. The new Idols mechanic has rapidly led to a spiraling situation of blasphemy and necromancy that might be hard to follow for all but the most diehard fans; but it's reliant on emergent narrative collaboration between fans and developers, which is what I find most fascinating about blaseball. Let me tell you a story about conspiracies, schemes, and a metagame transgression that extends as far back as Season 2. (There may be Forbidden Knowledge contained here. Proceed at your own discretion.)

A little historical context. (I know, I know, this is a violation of the Hades Tigers' motto, but trust me, we're going to be violating "Never Look Back" a lot more as this story goes on.) At the end of Season 1, fans voted for the Decree to open the Forbidden Book. Decrees generally come with dire consequences, and the Book's opening set the tone for that: it caused a solar eclipse that incinerated a player and turned some umpires rogue. Rogue umpires still plague the league, but they were the only weather effect in Seasons 2 and 3, which led to dozens of players getting incinerated: for the first time, beloved players were at risk of random, senseless death. Mass outrage and a concept album ensued. The first casualty was Jaylen Hotdogfingers of the Seattle Garages. Notably, she was the only player who wasn't actually incinerated by a rogue umpire, but by the Book's opening itself. 

During this era of incinerations, Season 2's Decree of "Peanuts" passed. While the Decree itself simply read "Peanuts", an entry in the Forbidden Book stated "if at any time, ████████████ atone ████████████  one million Peanuts". Like the Forbidden Book, Peanuts also came with mechanical and narrative consequences. When the Decree passed, each instance of "Dan" in a player's name was replaced with "Peanut", which is why you'll see players named Peanut Holloway, Peanut Bong, and Peanutiel Duffy take the field. (Remember their names; they'll be relevant later.) Peanuts were a new item available in the shop that we could buy and eat, and the blaseball website's ticker reflected a seemingly-accurate count of how many peanuts had been consumed. Nobody had any idea what Peanuts were going to mean, but it felt like something trivial and fun. 

Early in Season 3, though, the Commissioner broadcast the message "PEANUT FRAUD DETECTED", and blaseball had its first deliberate stoppage. This is slightly inside blaseball, but Peanut Fraud involved some individuals finding an infinite-cash exploit: a pretty common issue for the early life of MMOs. The game returned but was suspended again almost immediately when another instance of Peanut Fraud was detected. 

The regular website vanished, and was replaced by a giant rotating Peanut and the utterance BLASPHEMY. This was its first appearance, but not its last; it now appears during ominous or significant in-game events to punish the fans' hubris. The Peanut appeared at the end of Season 3 with a dire warning: we already had two Strikes against us, and we would "LEARN DISCIPLINE". Worse, Peanut Atonement—previously only a fan-theory based on a redacted line in the Forbidden Book—was confirmed only as it was taken away: it used to be a way for players to collectively atone for misdeeds, but its abuse had closed off that line of redemption. This set a precedent: the Peanut is a god of clues, puzzles, and fan theories, which are only clarified when it's too late. Through various in-character pronouncements, a picture emerged of the Peanut as a wrathful god requiring appeasement, in contrast to the less overtly aggressive Commissioner, even as the method of appeasement remained unclear. BLASPHEMY was the first time blaseball incorporated narrative consequences in reaction to unpredictable player behavior. From this point on, it felt as though the narrative stakes were raised: both for the players and the fans invested in them.

While the Peanut has continued to plague us during events like The Grand Unslam and the postseason after Season 3, its presence in Season 6 felt different. The season opened with the appearance of the Peanut, admonishing fans:

WHO IS TALKING

BE QUIET

YOU WORSHIP THEM

WHEN I WALK AMONG YOU?

MY PROGENY

MY PODS

HONOR THEM TO HONOR ME

Immediately after this, the new Idols mechanic was introduced—which was a surprise, because it didn't result from anything we'd voted for! I've spoken a bit in this newsletter and on twitter about how fans celebrate their favorites; blaseball's popularity is fandom-driven, and fandom's always been focused on beloved characters. This mechanic is a way to bring those preferences explicitly into the game of blaseball itself. You choose a player to Idolize; you get coins when your Idol does cool stuff. There is a table ranking of the most Idolized players in the league, and—because this is blaseball—there is an Ominous Red Line that separates the top 3 most Idolized players from the rest of the top 20. Idols also provided mechanical hooks for many of Season 6's blessings, including "Collect Call: Call in the Alternate for the least Idolized Player on your team" and "Lottery Pick: steal the 14th most Idolized player in the league". In general, there's a mechanical reward for Idolizing strong players—but predictably, a lot of people preferred to idolize players they just liked, like the notorious underdog Mike Townsend.

A theory circulated that the Peanut's speech meant that if the three players with "Peanut" in their name were raised above the ominous red line, the Peanut would be appeased and Blasphemy would end. In retrospect, I'm pretty confident that the developers planned for this result, a puzzle and a challenge for fans to tackle together. Blaseball already involves quite a lot of back-and-forth between the devs and the fans (the Commissioner has been doing a great job all week in a number of these situations[1]), and the Peanut is an already-established antagonist in moments where players' actions impact the overall game experience. The Peanut Plan, as it came to be called, was a narratively compelling way to finally appease the insatiable Peanut; it deepened the world of the game and gave fans a reason to work together after the competitive tension in previous seasons. And it contrasts nicely with the unexpected emergent hack that surfaced Tuesday.

Having figured out a way to atone for past Blasphemy, we promptly found a new, more audacious way to defy the gods.

On Day 31, the incineration of Caligula Lotus of the Boston Flowers brought a curious feature to light. A fan who had been Idolizing her discovered that they were still Idolizing her after her incineration. That prompted SIBR to look up the ID of Jaylen Hotdogfingers, the first incinerated player. They then discovered they could in fact access Jaylen's page, that she was labeled as a player on something called the "Null Team", and that the Idolize button was available. The people who discovered this immediately reported it as a website bug to a Discord moderator, who checked with the dev team and relayed the message "can confirm no bug to report. please continue enjoying blaseball". The news spread like wildfire. Jaylen Hotdogfingers was the most narratively satisfying candidate to Idolize, given that she was the first player incinerated, and she cracked the leaderboard almost immediately—accompanied by an ominous fiery skull beside her name. The skull is a clear sign that the devs were aware that dead players might show up in a player-facing list, whether this was the intended context or not. CSS is not something you fuck around with if you don't have to. 

The Necromancy plan came together at lightning speed. Remember those blessings I mentioned before? The available blessings are different each season, but this crop included Lottery Pick, which lets the team that wins it steal "the 14th most Idolized player in the league". Null Team seems to count, at least mechanically, as part of the league. So if we could get Jaylen Hotdogfingers to exactly the 14th spot, that one blaseball team would have to receive her, the incinerated former pitcher of the Seattle Garages, back from the dead. A lot of discussion was had between a lot of groups, which I cannot pretend to fully capture here, but eventually a rough consensus emerged among the Seattle Garages discord server members to endorse to the attempt to bring Jaylen Hotdogfingers home.[2] The plan for those on board with Necromancy is to keep Jaylen Hotdogfingers at 14th, and for non-Garages teams not to vote for Lottery Pick; we'll let Seattle maximize their chances at getting that blessing.

The necromancy plan and the Peanut plan were both popular, and attempting both was delightfully referred to as "necronut". Necronut was an ambitious plan: get Peanut Holloway, Peanut Bong, and Peanutiel Duffy into Idol spots 1-3 in any order, while also ensuring Jaylen Hotdogfingers stayed at 14th. The necromancy part of this was always the easier bit: the whole league could band together for the narrative payoff of bringing Jaylen back, and 14th place requires far fewer votes than 1st. Jessica Telephone and Nagomi McDaniel, as two of the most popular and most statted-out blaseball players, were consistently 1 and 2: fans didn't want to stop Idolizing them, whether because their pendants were a source of easy money or because they really did love those players. Around Game 97, though, the Peanuts began rising steadily in the ranks; Peanut Bong ascended to #3, followed by Peanutiel Duffy and Peanut Holloway in 6th and 7th place. Unfortunately for all of us, at the end of the regular season, the Ominous Red Line began—to vibrate? to fracture?—and the Peanut spoke.

It expressed outrage that we would patronize it, indignantly asked who "Telephone" and "McDaniel" were, and informed us that this was Strike Three. 

(In blaseball sometimes you get four strikes rather than three. Blaseball is odd.)

After this ominous proclamation, "SHELLED" appeared over the first names of the two players the Peanut had objected to, though Peanut Bong was spared.

The Peanut expressing outrage at Jessica Telephone and Nagomi McDaniel by name specifically feels Peak Blaseball: it was impossible to know before the start of game 99 who the final Top 3 Idols would be, so the team must have adapted their script on the fly. 

Seeing the consequences of their failure, blaseball fans scrambled to boost the Peanut players into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. They did succeed, but the Peanut did not reappear. The only change to come from this was the disappearance of the ominous red line. Fans are currently quibbling over whether this act was too little, too late to appease the Peanut, or if something else might happen because of this partial success. One thing is clear, though: the community's belief in the Peanut Plan was utterly vindicated. Blaseball fans picked up on this plan and a coordinated effort was made, and their suspicions were justified, even if the execution fell painfully short. This is enormously gratifying: both the fans and developers came together to create a somewhat ominous hidden puzzle that ended in the most blaseball of ways.

The resurrection of Jaylen Hotdogfingers, by contrast, feels truly emergent rather than scripted, even if its possibility feels deeply right based on a lot of pre-existing elements of the game. The Hades Tigers' motto is "Never Look Back", a tongue-in-cheek reference to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; necromancy (and its consequences) is thematically appropriate within the actual canon. And it's very on-brand for the fandom to care for and want to save their players—beyond reason, beyond good sense, beyond life and death. The idea of sticking a giant middle finger at the uncaring cruelty of the blaseball gods is reinforced by a lot of fanon work; the Garages have the "The Garages Kill the Gods" album, and a lot of fanlore is anti-kyriarchy more generally. Finally, even though "an incinerated character on a hidden game object is the 14th most Idolized player" is probably not what the blaseball devs began the week planning on, the Peanut Fraud debacle is a good indication of how the game handles and incorporates fan exploits. And this is very much a fan exploit.

Resurrecting Jaylen Hotdogfingers is not a good idea. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons it is so popular; blaseball in general is about making very bad choices. The Peanut warned fans at the end of Season 3 postseason that we had two strikes against us: opening the Forbidden Book was the first strike, and Peanut Fraud was the second strike. Now, our collective failure to fulfil the Peanut's demands has caused a third. There's been a lot of debate among blaseball fans over whether necromancy—and this is necromancy, we are trying to bring back the dead—would be our last strike. Some players (including some Garages fans) are not on board with this; others embrace the plan specifically for how it offers an excellent chance for in-character spite towards the purported organizing forces of blaseball. 

This spite towards the "blaseball gods" is notable for how clearly delineated it is from the fandom's understanding and appreciation of the Game Band as a dev team. While some fans enjoy the anti-kyriarchy roleplay of ascending to the heavens to kill the gods and others seem deeply wary of it, the overwhelming majority of all blaseball fans are bound together by an appreciation for the team that creates the universe we're all playing in. 

From a game design perspective, this is deeply satisfying on a number of levels. Ever since the controversial decree to Tame the Tigers was introduced, there's been an ever-increasing element of PvP play, where fans of Team X target fans of Team Y, and bad impressions linger even after seasons end. With the introduction of a league-wide audacious plan that pits fans against the blaseball gods, we've returned emphasis to a PvE model, which is much more satisfying for the kind of collaborative players that a game like blaseball has already attracted. Whether this was intentional or not, I think the move towards more PvE elements is smart, especially when those gameplay elements offer fans of struggling teams something meaningful to work towards that isn't tied to their team's current record. Additionally, it's been fulfilling to feel as though we've discovered an exploit in both the game and the canon narrative: that there's a way to fight back against the tyranny of the ever-encroaching apocalypse. It will almost certainly bring about worse consequences, but making the stand is the point. We've picked the player who will make the biggest statement; if we get our way, the first to be incinerated will be the first to be resurrected. Mechanically, it looks as though the developers left this possibility open for us: the littered references to resurrection and the flaming skull image ready to go indicate to me that there was at least a sense that at least the Peanut Atonement aspect of the Necronut plan could occur. But narratively, it feels very much as though we're descending into Hades, driven by hubris out of sympathy for loved ones taken too soon.

Does that metaphor make us Orpheus in this plan, warned against the consequences but still incapable of resisting them? It does. Is being aware of many ways this can fail horribly and doing it anyway very blaseball? I think so. I've said before that the power fantasy of blaseball is that even in a world that slips further into apocalyptic darkness, chaos can be mitigated (if not always averted) through solidarity, storytelling, and mutual aid. And there's no better example of that than an entire group of players across the entire league banding together to try a moonshot plan to hack the game into forcing a resurrection of the first incinerated player. If we strike out, we strike out swinging.

[1] One of the most hilarious moments of player-developer interaction occurred this season on Twitter between the Mexico City Wild Wings and the Commissioner. As a result of the High Filter decree, the Good and Evil leagues were shaken up into the Wild and Mild leagues; the Mexico City Wild Wings were placed, purely based on their win-loss record, in the Mild league. The Wild Wings—whose whole deal is that they are spicy—did not appreciate this. As a result, a lawsuit—in-character, I should stress—was filed against the blaseball gods for defamation of character, alleging "irreparable material damages" to the Wild Wings' reputation. (They mocked up pretty good court documents.) The exchange leaned into a number of blaseball's pre-existing absurdities—in particular, the Commissioner's established persona of obscurely-threatening omnipotence accompanied by perpetual confusion, but also the whole idea of defending how cool and wild you are through the medium of dry legalese—culminating in this

(So, this was already a little comedy storm in a teacup, held in the shadow of the high-stakes drama of Necronut. And while everyone was reeling from the Peanut's wrath, a few people noticed a very small change, illustrating how you don't tweak the nose of the blaseball gods and get away with it:)

[2] I should mention that a number of Seattle Garages fans are not on board with necromancy, and that should be respected; the Garages (like any other team) aren't a monolith. But overall, the team has decided to try to get Jaylen back.

The simulated game of blaseball uses rules pretty similar to actual baseball rules. It helps to have a rough idea of how those work, but knowing all the rules isn't that important: you can figure it out as you go along, and in any case, you're not playing the game, you're watching the players. If you're familiar with the rules of baseball already, feel free to skip this section!

Take The L: An Overview of Baseball

The bare bones of the rules, for those who aren't familiar: a player on the defending team, the pitcher, throws a ball at a designated player on the batting team, who then tries to hit it. The remainder of the defending team field: they stand around trying to catch or retrieve the ball after it's hit. If the pitcher fucks up and throws the ball outside the zone it's supposed to be in, that's a ball; if the batter fucks up and is unable to hit a decent pitch, that's a strike. In baseball, three strikes means the batter is out, and the next batter comes up to the plate. A team's turn at bat ends when three outs have been recorded.

Once a player hits the ball, they try to score a run by running to first base, second base, third base, and home, in that order. If a player reaches a base before the ball is retrieved and thrown to that base, then the player is safe and can wait at that base while their teammates continue to bat. If the ball is thrown to a member of the fielding team guarding a base and that person catches it before the player reaches said base, then that player is out. Players can "steal" bases while another player is up at bat. The pitcher can attempt to throw to the base they're trying to steal, and tag them out. Stealing home is considered risky, since the pitcher is already throwing that direction.

A baseball game usually consists of 9 innings, which are split into a top and bottom. The away team always bats in the top of the inning, and the home team always bats in the bottom. If a game is tied at the bottom of the 9th, it goes to extra innings, in which the first team to score a run wins.

If you know about the Inferior Sport, you can start reading here again!

So how do you participate in the cultural event that is blaseball? First, there's a distinction between different types of participation. There's how you interact with the game itself, on the blaseball website, but then there's also how you interact with the social and fan experiences that have built up around the game, and which, crucially, feed back into the game itself. A lot of blaseball is intentionally cryptic, strange, and obscure, which is a big part of its aesthetic. Let me tell you about that aesthetic!

The Bleautiful Game: Betting on Blaseball

Interacting with the actual game is fairly simple: you'll log into the website and choose a team to root for. The teams are split into the Good and Evil leagues, which are then separated into Lawful and Chaotic divisions. Some teams are from recognizable real-world places and others... uh, less so. All of the team names are delightfully off, on a scale that varies from "just a bit weird" to "I have some questions"; there's a consistency to the weirdness overall in that it paints a pervasive picture of absurdity. Some favorites: Charleston Shoe Thieves, Yellowstone Magic, Hades Tigers, Chicago Firefighters (team chant: the inexplicably ominous "we are from Chicago"), Mexico City Wild Wings, Seattle Garages, Miami Dalé.

Disclaimer: I am a proud supporter of the Hades Tigers, Season 3 champions. Never look back! 

You'll then place your bets with in-game currency, which you cannot buy with real money, for every game on the website. Each blaseball season has 99 games, each of which takes one real-world hour. All of them happen simultaneously, so you can give up on the obvious early disappointments (especially if they're your favorite team, or you bet big) and focus on the real nail-biters. The odds of a team winning depend upon [REDACTED BY THE FORBIDDEN BOOK], aka "no one outside the devs actually knows". If you win, you can bet bigger and buy upgrades to your betting experience, or you can spend on Votes for the end of season election. More on that in a bit.

As you watch the matches on the website, you'll see procedurally generated players with truly excellent names (my kingdom to look at your generator curation process, seriously, get at me) take their turns pitching and at-bat. Players like Jessica Telephone, Kennedy Meh, and Rodriguez Internet possess statistics which affect their hitting, pitching, baserunning, defense, etc. The complex formulas that determine a player's star rating—which I stress are not necessary to understand or enjoy the game--rely on delightfully and evocatively named statistics, as pictured below.

Figure 1: Player star statistics compiled by @baronblissy on Twitter, for SIBR, the Society for Internet Blaseball Research. (Tag yourself; I’m "shakespearianism".)

These statistics probably influence the likelihood of getting a hit, a strike, etc. But watching a blaseball game is about surrendering to the game's randomness, or even having an invested relationship in it—as with real-world sports, you don't (and can't) know all of the underlying factors that go into a win or loss. As seasons pass, the in-game possibilities feel more and more precarious, mostly because of players' choices when it comes to end of season Decrees and Blessings.

The election comes at the end of every season, where players can cash in their earnings in an attempt to influence the metagame. One hundred coins gets you one vote; you can spend that vote on either Decrees or Blessings. The most popular Decree(s) go into effect for blaseball as a whole, while Blessings target particular teams. If you and your team's supporters spend a ton of votes on a Blessing, you're more likely to receive it than another team, but there are no guarantees. Ask the Baltimore Crabs. 

Blessings can impact individual players, like Gunblade Bat (a random hitter on your team will gain the Gunblade Bat, maxing out their hitting stats) or Exploratory Surgeries (re-rolls your team's worst 3 pitchers). They can also target an entire team, like Performance Enhancing Demons (Mggoka match ng strike fm'latghor. Fm'latgh. +8% Team Overall) or The Rack ([cartilage and bone snapping] +15% Team Defense). Even in contexts where a blessing doesn't take anything away from another team and is only a benefit, the framing is always ominous, suggestive of a world in which blaseball players are subject to body-horrorish transformations and invasive demon magics. 

Decrees, on the other hand, affect everything; they also tend to have cascading apocalyptic consequences. At the end of Season 1, the Forbidden Book was opened, and players could read the (heavily redacted) rules. After that point, rogue umpires began to appear during games and to incinerate players at random. This ushered in the beginning of the Discipline Era.

Season 2's Decrees were the Fourth Strike, which gave low-ranked teams an additional fourth strike at all of their at-bats, and Peanuts. Players could purchase Peanuts in the blaseball store; their presence led to a chaotic weather effect called Lots of Birds. A statistic called "peanut allergy" was also added; when an allergic player swallows a peanut, their hitting, pitching, and overall blaseballing suffers. Additionally, the introduction of Peanuts kicked off a cascading spiral of blasphemy and punishment.

During a Day 73 game between the Charleston Shoe Thieves and the Los Angeles Tacos which ran into extra innings, reality fractured: the 15th inning apparently repeated and a Bad Gateway event (on the website, but I’m sure in the blaseball universe as well) immediately followed. A siesta was declared, during which The Peanut appeared on the website with threatening messages. The results of Day 73's game were recorded twice; the Tacos had one extra loss and the Shoe Thieves one extra win, reflecting the spacetime distortion. Again, all of this is rendered in text, often fairly terse and cryptic text, so what it means—or what that even looks like—is left almost entirely to your interpretation.

Even more troubling was the interruption of the Season 3 playoffs (after the semi-finals) by The Peanut, which delivered a series of troubling messages that declared that we had committed two strikes, and were now being punished. After this, the site immediately went down for a short siesta, interweaving in-game canonical lore with potential server maintenance challenges.

SO ABOUT THE PEANUTS

THE BOOK WAS STRIKE ONE

THE FRAUD IS STRIKE TWO

YOU WILL LEARN DISCIPLINE

PEANUTS

GET YOUR PEANUTS

WHILE YOU STILL CAN

At the end of Season 3, the Interviews decree was passed. Immediately after, the following message appeared:

ERROR: The Grand Unslam Weakened The Bridge

Spacetime Tears over Los Angeles

The Infinite cit(ies) shine

Platonic Form Corrupted

You've looked too close…

Like before, we were not given any more information on what that looks like materially, so the event and even some of its ramifications is left to everyone's individual imagination and speculation. Materially, the Los Angeles Tacos became the Unlimited Tacos. But fictionally, the game makes no clear ruling (so far) about what consequences of the weakening of the bridge or the corruption of Platonic forms will have to Season 4, or on residents of Los Angeles. The effects players have on the reality of blaseball seem to be both accelerating and worsening as seasons progress, leading to a narrative apocalypticism that makes us want to see more of it. There's a parallel here with Cookie Clicker in terms of a wholesome activity that gets steadily more menacing as a result of player hubris, but that's something to explore at greater length in a later newsletter.

Let Me Into The Blaseball: The Social Culture of "Participating"

If you just watch blaseball on the website, though, you'd have probably missed most of the context around the apocalyptic events mentioned. At the very least, the players' blasphemy being the cause of the Los Angeles Tacos' transformation into the Unlimited Tacos would have been easy to overlook. Blaseball is best appreciated by interacting with fandom. You don't need to create independent works to influence or creatively participate in the cultural event of blaseball; there's a deliberate blurring of lines about active and passive agents here that's important to the experience.

There are a number of different places these activities occur. There's an official discord that hosts lively, fast-moving conversation that gives rise to a lot of the game's lore. That's often then recorded on a wiki that collates popular fan theories; the biggest unwritten rule is that you can only edit your own team's player pages. Players and teams maintain twitter accounts that retweet fanart and post in-character about the games. And of course, most frequently, people shout their feelings and theories at their mutual friends that follow blaseball. That's why I'm writing this newsletter: for my friends who want to shout along with their friends, and weave their own collaborative personal stories about their viewing experience. And I need to stress that you don't need to follow all—or any!—of these platforms: it's about dipping in and enjoying what you do, when you do, rather than trying to keep up with everything. So I’m going to talk about a few of the standout occurrences I’ve enjoyed the most, and how they’ve interwoven fandom and the actual blaseball game to create delightful experiences.

The Ballad of Jessica Telephone, Wielding the Dial Tone

Jessica Telephone has somehow become one of the most beloved names in blaseball. And I do mean most beloved names—she started as a randomly generated character, with no personality outside of her hidden stats and no pictorial image, on the Dallas Steaks. At the end of the season, she was Blessed and her stats immediately maxed out; the next Blessing let the Philly Pies steal her from Dallas immediately. She wields a bat called the Dial Tone, and I honestly cannot tell you where that comes from—as far as I know she didn't initially have the Gunblade Bat in the code, fans just came up with the idea and then the devs added it to the game in her batting text. I could be wrong about the origins—but part of the fun of blaseball is that this series of events is completely plausible. 

Remember Peanuts from above, and how peanut allergies, which would reduce a players' stats when they choked on flying peanuts during a game, were randomly assigned to players at the beginning of season 3? Jessica Telephone used to have a peanut allergy. But because dropping her stats as a random, semi-frequent throwaway game event would interfere with Jessica's emergent storyline of becoming incredibly buff and cool, somehow Jessica Telephone magically lost that peanut allergy. Which, for the record, I think is the right call for what are essentially live-service procgen MMO developers to have made. It's not fun to watch a beloved character lose power essentially at random (rather than from a narratively-satisfying reason, at least), and that's worth making an intervention for one beloved character only.

DO IT FOR VIOLENCE: A Story of Bloodlust

My favorite emergent storyline just happened in the Season 3 playoffs. As I mentioned earlier, rogue umpires have been incinerating players since Season 2, but it's really picked up in Season 3. Up until the playoffs, the Hades Tigers were the only team that hadn't yet had an incineration. During the finals, one of the Tigers' beloved players, Landry Violence, was incinerated. Tigers faithful watching in the official blaseball discords were incandescent with rage; immediately, shouts of "do it for violence" and "rest in violence" flooded the channels, as new batter Paula Turnip immediately took his place. The Hades Tigers went on to win the playoffs, motivated—so we believe—by the spirit of Landry Violence.

After our pyrrhic victory, fans turned to allocating votes for Decrees and Blessings. At the time, our worst pitcher was Yazmin Mason, who—prior to my arrival in the blaseball community—was identified by the fandom as a deer. Which makes a logical amount of sense! It must be very hard to pitch with hooves! So it was recommended in the discord that votes should be put towards Pseudo-Thumbs, to increase a pitcher's ability by 15% (mechanically, in-game) and to give her bone-augments that would allow her to grip the ball better (narratively, out-of-game). But we weren't blessed with Pseudo-Thumbs.

Instead, she received Bloodlust. Mechanically, this maxed out her pitching, which is better than a 15% increase. (It may have maxed out all her stats; I'm unsure about this, so let me know.) More importantly, the narrative parallels of this are deeply satisfying, even though—especially because—there's nothing in blaseball's code that made "Bloodlust" more likely to fire after a tragic emotional loss. It was obvious to Tigers fans that Yazmin's newly acquired skills were a direct result of her feelings on the loss of Landry Violence. Our digital howls of "DO IT FOR VIOLENCE" inspired her, and, unable to channel her rage and grief into anything but blaseball, she broke through to a new level of excellence. Is this mechanically reflected? No. Does it need to be? Hell no. Hades no.

Mike Townshend Is a Disappointment (But This Song Isn't)

I said earlier that you can participate in blaseball without actually creating a separate work. You can say "I think Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of Jessica Telephone's many girlfriends" and it's on her wiki entry; and Hades bless whoever figured out that Yaz was a deer. But a lot of people do create separate works, and while fanart is very common and also incredibly good, there have been a few surprising, incredible quality in-world musical performances. The first one I ever heard was "Mike Townshend is a disappointment", a song about Seattle's worst pitcher, by the grunge band The Garages (it's unclear to me whether or not this is also the blaseball team). They've since come out with a full 7-song EP called "the garages kill the gods" which, in my unprofessional opinion, slaps.

There's also the blaseball anthem, "Let Me Into The Blaseball", which has been recorded as the creator's own voice looped over itself for an appropriately uncanny experience. In particular, the song's line "every week is a year long" is both an accurate descriptor of a blaseball season and what it feels like to be alive in August 2020. There's something deeply appealing about the depth of ambiance in it; the blaseball organ, the clapping and stamping and whistling. I'm not suggesting that music is a different or better class of fan creations; just that they appeal to me in a deeply visceral way and feel like very satisfying augments of the blaseball experience.

The Wyatt Masoning

I can't conclude a section about emergent weirdness in blaseball and fan reactions to it without mentioning the, uh, time that every player on the Los Angeles Tacos turned into Wyatt Mason. At the end of Season 3, Los Angeles Tacos fans voted for and received Exploratory Surgeries, which should have rerolled the team's three worst pitchers. I'm pretty sure this happened. It just also had the side effect of renaming every single player on the Los Angeles Tacos "Wyatt Mason", which had previously been the name of one LA Tacos' (pretty bad) hitter. Outside of the pitcher*, all other stats of the Tacos players were unchanged. 

*(What happened was that Exploratory Surgeries targets the worst pitcher, rerolls them, then targets the new worst pitcher. In the Tacos’ case, the worst pitcher was rerolled, and was still the worst pitcher. He was then rerolled again, and became even worse. He was rerolled for a third time, and now sucks less.) [EDIT: Brian Grey points out that the actual story is even better. Wyatt Glover, the original Tacos pitcher, started at 1/2 star, was rerolled to 1/2 star, was rerolled again to 1/2 star, and on the third reroll landed at 0. So the pitcher in question does not, in fact, suck less now. The writer regrets the error, but also finds it hilarious.]

People went absolutely wild. I recall wondering if every player’s name becoming the same was a deliberate effect of the Tacos becoming fully anticapitalist (which was the blessing they had received just prior to Exploratory Surgeries). It somehow felt like the perfect culmination of the wildly absurd consequences to Decrees and Blessings, that a Blessing with no specified mechanical effect would in fact have a deeply weird and uncanny mechanical effect. The commissioner stated that "the league is looking into the situation in los angeles"; the results of that investigation simply informed us that "user error resulted in Feedback". All Wyatt Masons were then relocalized according to randomly generated frequencies. One Wyatt Mason was attuned to frequency NaN, and while the commissioner initially seemed alarmed, the localization status was declared "good enough", and that's why the Los Angeles Tacos—sorry, the Unlimited Tacos—have a player named "NaN" and a bunch of players whose names exist in proximity to Wyatt Mason's. I'm very interested to see what new Tacos chants come out of this one. 

Next season, I guess!