What the Hell is Blaseball Anyway?

Screen grab from https://www.blaseball.com/

You’ve almost certainly seen the word floating around online by now. Blaseball. At first maybe you just thought it was a typo. (Google Docs seems to think so even now.) Or maybe that there was some sort of in-joke intentional misspelling you didn’t get. But no, blaseball is a real thing, and it’s taken the internet by storm. But what is this real thing, exactly?

Blaseball is an internet sport (or splort, to continue the naming convention). It was created during the pandemic last year, when all the normal, live-action sports were cancelled. Like many people, the developers at independent game studio The Game Band were disappointed that their beloved hobby was temporarily unavailable. Unlike most other people, however, they elected to do something about it.

And thus, Blaseball was born. The roots of the splort are familiar enough. It started with a simulation of actual baseball, with its primary distinguishing factor being the goofy players and teams. Fans could root for such phenomenal teams as the Hades Tigers, the Baltimore Crabs, the Charleston Shoe Thieves, and the clearly superior Los Angeles Unlimited Tacos. (I assure any readers that I am completely unbiased in this regard.) Meanwhile, players could have names like Nandy Fantastic, Kennedy Loser, or league superstars Jessica Telephone and Jaylen Hotdogfingers.

Games are all simulated and resolve within an hour, and a complete season finishes up in a week. Fans can watch readouts of the games live as the simulations run and bet virtual currency on games or purchase ballpark snacks to generate income when certain events happen. Did your favorite player get a home run? Have some coins. Did a pitcher throw a perfect game? Here’s some coins. Did the ballpark flood and sweep players away, lost and adrift for multiple games until they can find their way back to their team? Have some coins!

Which brings us to the thing that truly makes Blaseball Blaseball. Every season things have deviated further from the sport of its origin. The elections. The season finishes on Friday, and the playoffs finish on Saturday. Sunday, though, is the highlight of the entire Blaseball season. All those coins being earned can be cashed in for votes, and this is where the fans get to play an active role in shaping the future of the game. Each week there are different decrees that people can choose between, which will install a permanent change to the rules of the game in all seasons going forward. These could be relatively normal, like voting on how to add equipment for players to the game, or far more absurd, such as voting to change the parameters of the sun itself to affect the game in different ways.

On top of the major rules changes, the fans can vote on Wills and Blessings, which will affect their favored team. These are essentially votes on how your preferred team will spend their offseason training, ranging from boosting particular stats to calling up players from the Shadows (Blaseball’s term for reserves or farm team players), to forcing trades with other teams to swipe players you care about.

Because this is Blaseball, however, there’s always an inherent feeling of discomfort just below the surface. You’re not just having players run wind sprints to get their speed up, you might be replacing their lungs so they can perform better. Or maybe you’ll just do a bit of necromancy and revive a beloved player from their eternal rest so that they can blaseball once more, as happened to Jaylen Hotdogfingers after her tragic death at the end of the first season.

The developers bill the game as a horror game, and they’ve chosen to express that in mild yet unsettling ways. There are lots of situations, presented in the simple, matter-of-fact text of live sports updates, that are presented as normal at first glance but leave you with potentially unsettling questions the more you think about them. For example, like any other sport, blaseball is played under various different weather conditions that can affect the game in different ways. But rather than your standard weather like “rain” or “windy”, blaseball offers situations like Sun 2, where scoring ten runs gives a team a free win, or blood rain, where players can drink other players’ blood and absorb their stats. Or peanut weather, where players can consume peanuts tossed on the field by fans and enjoy a boost to their ability to play or discover the peanut allergy that leaves them virtually unable to play.

Oh, and they can be incinerated by umpires in the middle of the game. And that’s not even discussing each team’s stadium, where fans can also contribute coins to invest in upgrades and equipment to provide various home field effects, making each individual game further distinct.

If all of this sounds like it’s not saying much of anything, or just touching on the surface without diving deep into what blaseball really is, you’re right. Trying to cover all of what blaseball is would be a fool’s errand. After all, by the time this gets published, the rules may very well have changed again. But also none of that really matters, either. Do you need to understand every rule of any other sport to appreciate it? I certainly know plenty of people who don’t know why something happens in football but enjoy cheering on their team anyway. The only real difference here is you get the comfort in knowing that everyone else is just as confused as you are.

Blaseball is internet Calvinball, and that’s what makes it amazing. Somehow, in a time when we were all so isolated, in a world that made no sense at all for over a year, Blaseball was there to perfectly channel all that chaos and make it something to celebrate for once. And the fans responded in the way that only fans can. Countless pieces of fanart exist of all these fictional players. Entire backstories of individual players, teams, even the history of the league itself get created and shared on communal places like the Blaseball wiki. There are Discord servers full of fans of each team, watching the games live and discussing their election strategies to help their team rise to the top. There’s even multiple albums entirely about Blaseball created by Blaseball team and band the Seattle Garages.

Oh, and don’t forget the excellent official league roundups deployed on the Blaseball youtube channel, which are worth watching if any of this insanity sounded appealing at all.

So in the end, it’s not even that Blaseball is internet Calvinball. It’s just the internet. In this most chaotic time we’ve been going through, in the most chaotic realm in the world, along came a sport that captured that chaos, and a fanbase that channeled it into creativity. The world is a confusing place, but at least Blaseball makes the confusion fun. And in a time when we’ve all been separated from each other and living in isolation, coming together as a community is exactly what everyone needs, even if the sport and its players are fake.