History VideoGame / Blaseball

** "Rest in Violence", used to mourn the death of Laundry Violence and all other deaths since theirs, was used as a subtitle for the beta's season 8, although Landry themself did not participate in that season's events (having already being incinerated, after all).

** "Rest in Violence", used to mourn the death of Landry Violence and all other deaths since theirs, was used as a subtitle for the beta's season 8, although Landry themself did not participate in that season's events (having already being incinerated, after all).

''[[https://blaseball.com Blaseball]]'' is an [[Main/{{Absurdism}} absurdist]] HorrorComedy web [[SportsGame Splorts Game]] following the game of blaseball, a game ([[SurrealHumor some]][[SurrealHorror what]]) similar to the real-world sport of [[UsefulNotes/{{Baseball}} baseball]].

Created by The Game Band, Blaseball is a text-based blaseball sim released in July of 2020. The game includes twenty (later twenty-four) original teams, split into two leagues (with ten/twelve teams each), which are then split into two sub-leagues (with five/six teams each).

Every week, a new season of Blaseball begins. Players pick a team to root for and bet coins on the hourly games. With those coins, players can buy items for their own benefit, delicious peanuts, and votes to lobby for Decrees - which fundamentally alter the game and its players - or for Blessings and Wills, which benefit their favored team in various ways.

Fans can also idolize a specific player, potentially gaining additional coins based on their performance. As a side effect, the concentrated fan energies focused on especially popular players have proven to have a multitude of interactions with the ever-fluctuating conceptual structures of Blaseball. This discovery has added additional layers of collective strategy and experimentation as fans make concerted (and not-so-concerted) efforts to manipulate the rankings based on theories about the cryptic markings. which frequently manifest on the leaderboards.

At the end of the season, votes are tallied, the most popular choices (may or may not, according to the whims of the Blaseball Gods) take effect at the beginning of the next season, and the cycle begins again.

While the game offers plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle surreality behind its deceptively simple text interface and official Twitter feed, it's only the tip of the iceberg for a vast world of emergent, fan-driven narrative, which can all be found [[https://blaseball.wiki here]].

After a climactic battle with The Coin that resulted in Blaseball itself being nullified, the game has undergone something of a soft reboot, with the game leaving beta, in order to clean up the many mechanics that were making the game inaccessible to new Fans. This reboot was launched on 8 January 2023.

* AscendedMeme: "Rest in Violence", used to mourn the death of Landry Violence and all other deaths since theirs, was used as a subtitle for the beta's season 8, although Landry themself did not participate in that season's events (having already being incinerated, after all).

* ArtShift: The reboot has brought with it a new updated UI for the site as well as an update to the art of some of the characters as seen with the Monitor.

After a climactic battle with The Coin that resulted in Blaseball itself being nullified, the game has undergone something of a soft reboot in order to clean up the many mechanics that were making the game inaccessible to new Fans. This reboot was launched on 8 January 2023.

* HistoryRepeats: Season 1 during the Beta featured three Decrees: Redistribute Wealth (which shuffles the top five players from the winning team), Relegation (which replaces the last place team with a new one), and Open the Forbidden Book (only stating "It is Forbidden"). Fans chose to Open the Forbidden Book, causing Jaylen Hotdogfingers to be incinerated, a Hellmouth to consume Moab, and the start of the Discipline Era. After the Reboot, these three Decrees were once again put up with slight differences. And once again, fans voted for New Open the Forbidden Book, this time incinerating Anastasia Isnotarobot and causing Breckenridge to break, but also Alternating Terrell Bradley, cursing Zephyr McCloud, and causing Simon Haley to "embark on a side quest in the shadows", marking the start of the Coronation Era.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: Every team began with fourteen players, and twenty teams made up an initial count of 280 players. Incinerated players, of which there are about 80 at the time of writing, are replaced by new recruits, who remain in cases of revival. Now the nature of the game means not every character plays a major role, but most of them still have plenty of both official and fan lore. Add to this various unofficial creations like mascots and team staff and it's clear how ArchiveBinge set in rather quickly for the wiki.

-->''You are now participating in the cultural event of blaseball.''

[[https://blaseball.com Blaseball]] is an [[Main/{{Absurdism}} absurdist]] HorrorComedy web [[SportsGame Splorts Game]] following the game of blaseball, a game ([[SurrealHumor some]][[SurrealHorror what]]) similar to the real-world sport of [[UsefulNotes/{{Baseball}} baseball]].

While the game offers plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle surreality behind its deceptively simple text interface and official Twitter feed, it’s only the tip of the iceberg for a vast world of emergent, fan-driven narrative, which can all be found [[https://blaseball.wiki here]].

* HoistByHisOwnPetard: The Salmon Cannons’ renovation for ballparks has a chance to get rid of those pesky salmon (thus preventing the salmon from accidentally negating some of a team's points by rewinding time) and Consumers, but it also has a chance to get rid of ''players'' from the opposing team.

---> Halfway through season 13, Estes swallowed a stray peanut falling from the sky and suffered a crippling allergic reaction. A couple of weeks later a burst of feedback shuffled the Jazz Hands’ roster so that Combs wasn’t a pitcher anymore, but a batter, which they were real bad at. Eight days later they had their blood drained in a game against the Houston Spies. And then on the second to last game of the season, two days from a well-deserved rest, Combs caught fire and died.

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: Blessings that can be granted to the teams include Performance Enhancing Demons[[note]]improves overall stats[[/note]], Exploratory Surgeries[[note]]randomizes stats for the team's three worst pitchers[[/note]], and... Team-Building Exercises[[note]]randomizes the hitting stats of the team's three worst batters[[/note]]. from pitching machines to collectible replicas of favorite players only scratches the tip of the absurdity iceberg.

* AscendedMeme: The fanbase has unofficially tracked a "title belt" in various seasons, generally passed between low-ranking teams based on the winners of certain game days. (The precise rules vary.) The belt finally made an offical appearance in the third Short Circuit season, as a mod that guarantees a place in the season-end tournament, passed to the winner of special matches held every fourth in-universe day.

* AudienceParticipationFailure: Very rare, owing to the fanbase's tendency to vote for mysterious options and plot decrees whenever they come up. Of note, though, is the fact that the fans failing to vote in Forum (upshelling events for "coins and prizes") delayed the introduction of pickled herring for multiple seasons.

* BalancingDeathsBooks: When Jaylen Hotdogfingers was revived, she came back with Debt, which resulted in her being responsible for the deaths of others. Ingame text reads "A Debt was collected", and on Twitter the Commissioner reports "PAYMENT PENDING". In total, Jaylen Hotdogfingers killed ten other players. Other types of Debt have occurred since, but they all result in other types of chaos or disappearances.

* CursedWithAwesome: Upon losing to the Shelled One's Pods after winning the 9th Internet Series, the Charleston Shoe Thieves were given the Flinch modifier, forcing them not to swing until they take their first strike. While this did lower their batting averages, it also had the unintended effect of greatly improving their plate discipline; as of the midpoint of Season 10, eight of the nine lineup players were within the top 10 in the league in walks taken, including the entire top 6, and the Shoe Thieves' would go on to the grand final, losing to the Crabs this time.

* {{Irony}}: A player named Pitching Machine was traded in season 12, and ended up batting [[NonIndicativeName instead of pitching]].

** At the end of Season 17, York Silk and Nagomi McDaniel were above the squiggly line of the Idols leaderboard- but instead of being upgraded to Ego+++++, they were upgraded to Legendary and were "Vaulted", completely removing the two of them from the rosters of their teams and making it impossible to idolize them. The Boss' welcome back speech at the start of Season 18 revealed that the now ''thrice-incinerated'' Chorby Soul, who had burned to ashes for the third time on Day 1 of Season 17, had been Preserved- in other words, what happened to York and Nagomi had now happened to them as well. Other players have been Vaulted under similar circumstances. The newly-introduced Gift Shop then began minting Replicas of vaulted players.

** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playoff_berth Teams who qualify for the playoffs]] in a given season earth a "Postseason Birth," meaning a rookie player "hatches from the Field of Eggs" to join the team's backup roster.

Gameplay is simple. Every week, a new season of Blaseball begins. Players pick a team to root for and bet coins on the hourly games. With those coins, players can buy items for their own benefit, delicious peanuts, and votes to lobby for Decrees - which fundamentally alter the game and its players - or for Blessings and Wills, which benefit their favored team in various ways.

Since Season 6, fans can also idolize a specific player, potentially gaining additional coins based on their performance. As a side effect, the concentrated fan energies focused on especially popular players have proven to have a multitude of interactions with the ever-fluctuating conceptual structures of Blaseball. This discovery has added additional layers of collective strategy and experimentation as fans make concerted (and not-so-concerted) efforts to manipulate the rankings based on theories about the cryptic markings. which frequently manifest on the leaderboards.

At the end of the season, votes are tallied, the most popular choices (may or may not, according to the whims of the Blaseball Gods) take effect at the beginning of the next season, and the cycle begins again.

* {{Absurdism}}: Describing the premise as a splorts league in a WorldOfChaos whose players and staff run the gamut

* ArcNumber: An AscendedFanon version of such: 14. Originally the number of Lottery Pick, season 14 then ended up being the

** [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]] by Sutton Picklestein, who was resurrected and then immediately Returned to being dead during the same election, resulting in a second life that was nine seconds long.

** Players with "Roaming" can just decide to walk out of the afterlife and back into play, with no consequences whatsoever.
* BalancingDeathsBooks: Revived players return with "Debt", which results in them being responsible for the deaths or disappearances of others. Ingame text reads "A Debt was collected", and on Twitter the Commissioner reports "PAYMENT PENDING". Jaylen Hotdogfingers eventually resulted in the death of ten other players.

* CallAHitpointASmeerp: [[https://twitter.com/jjaffew/status/1288542282443104257 Several enterprising fans]] have datamined the stats that governs a player's star rating. Who knew that [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespearianism]] was a factor in your pitching ability?

* CameBackWrong:

** Players washed away by "Flooding" may return with some letters in their name missing. What this means is unknown, but it seems to wear off after a while.

* GenreBusting: Blaseball is one as a whole. Is it a sports game? Is it a betting game? Is it a simulation game? Is it even a video game, or is it a WebOriginal series? All these questions and more will more than likely go unanswered, since the one thing everyone agrees on is that [[ShapedLikeItself Blaseball is Blaseball]], and it's cool because of it.
* GrandFinale: Holy crap, was Season 10's postseason ever one of these for the Discipline Era. To summarize it...
** After the Crabs were reverse-swept by the Shoe Thieves in the Season 9 finale, Season 10 found the two facing off in the postseason once again. The Crabs proceeded to win the best of 5 three to ''negative one'', an impossible feat made possible by their opening a Black Hole upon reaching ten runs in the third game - despite Black Hole being a decree that had not even yet been ''passed'' - and allowing the Crabs to finally claim Ascension.
** Following this, the Peanut mocked and challenged the Crabs, showing no mercy. The Crabs didn't even get an entire inning, as a mere ''single'' from Wyatt Quitter obliterated their Team Spirit.
** And then, when all seemed lost, the Hall Stars - the 14 dead players with the most peanuts tributed to them in the Hall of Flame - rose with a declaration of "A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES". With Jaylen Hotdogfingers constantly flickering between the two teams to infiltrate the SHELLED ONE'S PODS as a saboteur, and several impressive feats such as Landry Violence becoming Magmatic and Sebastian Telephone being incinerated a second time in the fight (with his sister Jessica Telephone on the other team, no less), the Peanut was defeated and eaten by the Monitor, ending the Discipline Era and ushering in a new era of "Peace and Prosperity".

* KilledOffForReal: In the wake of the Season 10 finale, all players on the Hall Stars after the final fight became Released. While not officially dead, they have presumably been completely, irreversibly removed from the game, not even being present on the Hall of Flame's dead player list.

** Several seasons after Pitching Machine was [[PutOnABus Vaulted]] and numbered Replicas of them became available in the seasonal Gift Shop, bizarre luck with the New York Millennials' fax machine led to all of their active pitchers being Elsewhere and unable to pitch, leading to their next game being pitched by... a different player named "Pitching Machine",

** And then the Second Wyatt Masoning happened during the Season 14 Latesiesta, creating 13 new Wyatt Masons, dubbed Wyatt Mason I through Wyatt Mason XIII, each of them "pulled through the rift" to join the teams who chose the "[=PsychoAcoustics=]" renovation for their ballpark... and then it all went horribly wrong. An ominous, fully-capitalized purple message appeared in the feed of the Forbidden Book: [[purple:OVER AND OUT.]] This was followed by ''the Microphone going offline'' for the first time, and the problem only got worse from there. Throughout the rest of the season, nearly all of the new Wyatt Masons, along with Wyatt Quitter, Echoed into Static, which removed them from the league entirely, leaving the teams they had just joined with no replacements. By the end of Season 14, only two of the new Wyatt Masons remained: Wyatt Mason IV on the Unlimited Tacos, and Wyatt Mason X on the Seattle Garages (often called Ivy and [=MaX=] by the fanbase, respectively).

* SelfDuplication: Players

** Due to mishaps involving Flooding, Kelvin Drumsolo ended up on first base, second base, third base, and then batted themselves in three times with a triple.

* {{Absurdism}}: Describing the premise as a splorts league in a WorldOfChaos whose players and staff run the gamut -from cryptids to mad scientists to ambiguously sapient appliances - only scratches the tip of the absurdity iceberg.
* AscendedMeme: The fanbase has unofficially tracked a "title belt" in various seasons, generally passed between low-ranking teams based on the winners of certain game days. (The precise rules vary.) The belt finally made an offical appearance in the third Short Circuit season, as a mod that guarantees a place in the season-end tournament, passed to the winner of special matches held every fourth in-universe day.

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: Blessings that can be granted to the teams include Performance Enhancing Demons[[note]]improves overall stats[[/note]], Exploratory Surgeries[[note]]randomizes stats for the team's three worst pitchers[[/note]], and... Team-Building Exercises[[note]]randomizes the hitting stats of the team's three worst batters[[/note]].

* BackFromTheDead: In Season 6, a Blessing called "Lottery Pick" was introduced, which would allow whoever got it to steal the 14th most idolized player. A bunch of fans found a way to idolize Jaylen Hotdogfingers--the first player to ever be Incinerated, and not intended to be accessible. Jaylen stayed at #14 the whole season, and yes, they’re back, with the ominous condition "Debted".
-->FIRE AND SMOKE
-->AN EGG
-->HATCHING
-->JAYLEN HOTDOGFINGERS RETURNS
-->MIKE TOWNSEND RETREATS TO SHADOWS
** Jaylen died again at the end of the regular season in season 10, but then she played a game against the Peanut's team flickering onto their team and after they were dispersed she ended up on the Lovers.
** The Election at the end of Season 14 resurrected two more players: the recently incinerated York Silk, who then played for the Baltimore Crabs, and Chorby Soul, who was incinerated all the way back in Season 3, and then played for the Seattle Garages before being reclaimed by the New York Millennials before being incinerated again in Season 16. (Chorby Soul was resurrected again by the Boston Flowers at the end of the season, then traded to the Crabs, where they were incinerated in the first game of Season 17.)
** Lottery Pick appeared as an option ''again'' during Season 23, where it was used to resurrect incinerated Atlantis Georgias player Niq Nyong'o, commonly lored as the team's original captain. She was resurrected by the Philly Pies.

*** York Silk and Chorby Soul also gained the Debted condition when they returned via being Plundered in the Season 14 election - [[OhCrap and Chorby Soul is now a pitcher.]] Niq Nyong'o also Returned with this after being resurrected in the Season 23 Elections, now pitching as well.

* CapitalismIsBad: Anticapitalism is an actual, tracked stat for individual blaseball players. One blessing in an early season caused the receiving team's players to be fully anticapitalist. The new BigBad from Season 11 onward is the Coin, who seems to be some kind of avatar of neoliberal capitalism.
* CompanionCube: Pitching Machine[[note]][[InsistentTerminology Never preceded with "a" or "the"]][[/note]], brought in to serve as pitcher when all of the Unlimited Tacos' pitchers were trapped in giant peanuts, rapidly became one of the most popular players in the league - and one of the most feared pitchers. And had [[BeyondTheImpossible a pretty good batting average]].

* EldritchAbomination:
** The Blaseball Gods themselves. Nothing is known about them, but players with no coins left can beg for their mercy and receive some money back.

** Lōotcrates, pronounced similarly to Socrates but with a silent t, a seemingly sentient pile of loot crates surrounded by stars that bestowed bats upon every player in the league after the Season 15 elections. [[gray: ''It speaks to us in properly punctuated and capitalized all-gray text.'']]

** After the Crabs were reverse-swept by the Shoe Thieves in the Season 9 finale, Season 10 found the two facing off in the postseason once again. The Crabs proceeded to win the best of 5 three to *negative one*, an impossible feat made possible by their opening a Black Hole upon reaching ten runs in the third game - despite Black Hole being a decree that had not even yet been *implemented* - and allowing the Crabs to finally claim Ascension.
** Following this, the Peanut mocked and challenged the Crabs, showing no mercy. The Crabs didn't even get an entire inning, as a mere *single* from Wyatt Quitter obliterated their Team Spirit.
** And then, when all seemed lost, the Hall Stars - the 14 dead players with the most peanuts tributed to them in the Hall of Flame - revived themselves with a declaration of "A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES". With Jaylen Hotdogfingers constantly flickering between the two teams to infiltrate the SHELLED ONE'S PODS as a saboteur, and several impressive feats such as Landry Violence becoming Magmatic and Sebastian Telephone being incinerated a second time in the fight (with his sister Jessica Telephone on the other team, no less), the Peanut was defeated and eaten by the Monitor, ending the Discipline Era and ushering in a new era of "Peace and Prosperity".

* IdleGame: Other than betting, the main means of making money is through upgradeable snackfood items that give you payouts when your team wins/loses or when your idol does something notable, even if you're offline at the time.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: Every team began with fourteen players, and twenty teams made up an initial count of 280 players. Incinerated players, of which there are about 80 at the time of writing, are replaced by new recruits, who remain in cases of revival. Now the nature of the game means not every character plays a major role, but most of them still have plenty of both official and fan lore. Add to this semi-official creations like mascots and team staff and it's clear how ArchiveBinge set in rather quickly for the wiki.

* MindScrew: The Secret Base modification for stadiums, introduced in Season 15, is this. When a player actually enters it, things get weird. Lenny Spruce of the Boston Flowers entered the Base, came up to bat, then ''two'' of him came out of the Base, and then he batted one of his other selves in.
* MultipleChoicePast: Every player. The official wiki takes pains to be inclusive of all written fanon backstory via the "Interdimensional Rumor Mill", which randomly selects a different fan-written history section to load every time their page is visited.

* NotSoOmniscientAfterAll: Despite supposedly being ''the'' supreme authority on Blaseball, many of the Commissioner's posts show that he can be just as confused as the fans.

** And then the Second Wyatt Masoning happened during the Season 14 Latesiesta, creating 13 new Wyatt Masons, dubbed Wyatt Mason I through Wyatt Mason XIII, each of them "pulled through the rift" to join the teams who chose the "PsychoAcoustics" renovation for their ballpark... and then it all went horribly wrong. An ominous, fully-capitalized purple message appeared in the feed of the Forbidden Book: [[purple:OVER AND OUT.]] This was followed by ''the Microphone going offline for the first time since the Localization tweets of the Unmasoning, and the problem only got worse from there.'' Throughout the rest of the season, nearly all of the new Wyatt Masons, along with Wyatt Quitter, Echoed into Static ''and were completely removed from the rosters of their teams with no replacement and could no longer be idolized.'' By the end of Season 14, only two of the new Wyatt Masons had yet to be lost to the Static: Wyatt Mason IV on the Unlimited Tacos, and Wyatt Mason X on the Seattle Garages (often called Ivy and MaX by the fanbase, respectively).

** After the defeat of the Shelled One in Season 11, only allergic reactions (and superallergic reactions) have been recorded to eating a peanut.

** Players can also be sent to -- or retrieved from -- the Shadows, usually through election swaps. It's essentially a holding zone for a team's unused players, only visible to the team's own fans who have the Apple snack.

** At the end of Season 17, York Silk and Nagomi McDaniel were above the squiggly line of the Idols leaderboard- but instead of being upgraded to Ego+++++, they were upgraded to Legendary and were "Vaulted", completely removing the two of them from the rosters of their teams and making it impossible to idolize them. The Boss' welcome back speech at the start of Season 18 revealed that the now ''thrice-incinerated'' Chorby Soul, who had burned to ashes for the third time on Day 1 of Season 17, had been Preserved- in other words, what happened to York and Nagomi had now happened to them as well. Nobody knows where the heck the three of them are now, but they're likely not coming back, considering that the newly-introduced Gift Shop had Collector's Editions of the trio up for grabs.
** The Baltimore Crabs "ascended" to the Big Leagues after winning three Internet Championships, though they quickly returned after two seasons.

* ShapedLikeItself:

** Many conditions are also this. The explanation of "Shelled" was just "player is shelled" until the season 6 elections concluded (it now actually explains what's going on).

* TomeOfEldritchLore: The Book of Blaseball itself. A decree to open it was passed during Season 1, which was immediately followed by a Solar Eclipse, the umpires' eyes turning white, a player being spontaneously incinerated, and Hellmouth swallowing Moab, heralding the start of the DISCIPLINE ERA. (Most of the Book is redacted, but just enough is readable to be seriously worrying.)
* TraumaCongaLine: "Consumers", eldritch sharklike creatures that diminish players' stats, were introduced in season 14. They tend to target players with large Soulscreams, and for season 15, Chorby Soul -- who has an absurdly long soul -- was resurrected. Poor Chorby became the consumers' favorite target for chomping, getting attacked over a hundred times in one season. Long after all of Chorby's stats hit zero, the sharks kept on biting. Chorby was incinerated again in season 16, resurrected during the elections, and then incinerated ''again'' on the first day of season 17. That's a whopping three incinerations, on top of their record as the most-chomped player.
* WeHardlyKnewYe: The record for shortest time between introduction and death goes to Kiki Familia of the Canada Moist Talkers--Kiki replaced another player who was incinerated about a third of the way through Season 7, and was incinerated herself the very next day. Due to the fact she appeared halfway through one game and died halfway through another, she only got to play ''five innings''.
* As of Season 24, the least amount of time between introduction and death currently rests with Wyatt Mason XI, who didn't play a ''single game'' before Echoing into Static. Kiki Familia still holds the record for shortest active time of play, however.

* WeirdWeather: the energies released during a game of blaseball create an array of unusual weather conditions, including spontaneous solar eclipses, peanut storms, [[RainOfBlood Blood]][[VampiricDraining drain]], [[TimeCrash Reverb]] and "lots of birds". Also (temporal) salmon, for some reason.

** Lōotcrates, [[ItIsPronouncedTroPAY pronounced similarly to Socrates but with a silent t,]] a seemingly sentient pile of loot crates surrounded by stars that bestowed bats upon every player in the league after the Season 15 elections. [[gray: ''It speaks to us in properly punctuated and capitalized all-gray text.'']]

Gameplay is simple. Every week, a new season of Blaseball begins. Players pick a team to root for and bet coins on the hourly games. With those coins, players can buy items for their own benefit, delicious peanuts, and votes to lobby for Decrees, which fundamentally alter the game and its players, or for Blessings and Wills, which benefit their favored team in various ways.

Since Season 6, fans can also idolize a specific player, potentially gaining additional coins based on their performance. As a side effect, the concentrated fan energies focused on especially popular players have proven to have a multitude of interactions with the ever-fluctuating conceptual structures of blaseball. This discovery has added additional layers of collective strategy and experimentation as fans make concerted (and not-so-concerted) efforts to manipulate the rankings based on theories about the cryptic markings which frequently manifest on the leaderboards.

* {{Absurdism}}: Describing the premise as a splorts league in a WorldOfChaos whose players and staff run the gamut from cryptids to mad scientists to ambiguously sapient appliances only scratches the tip of the absurdity iceberg.

* BigBad: At first, the Peanut who shelled players wanted the fans to repent. After being defeated in season 10, the Coin seems to have taken over as the main antagonist.
* BlatantLies: At the end of Season 12, the Coin assured everyone that she was working on the Flooding problem and players could expect "less" Flooding. Floods happen as much as ever in season 13, and have in fact gotten worse, as players now sometimes return from being washed away with letters missing from their names.
* TheBusCameBack: After ascending in Season 10, the Crabs unexpectedly reappeared in Season 12 through mysterious "flooding" weather, along with three new teams thought to be from the "big leagues."

* CallAHitpointASmeerp: [[https://twitter.com/jjaffew/status/1288542282443104257 Several enterprising fans]] have datamined the stats that governs a player's star rating. Who knew that [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespearenism]] was a factor in your pitching ability?
* {{Calvinball}}: Downplayed. Players can vote for rule changes for the next season. On at least one occasion, a rule change has occurred before the election even happened.

** Used frequently in relation to Flooding. Instead of an actual description like other weather types, its tooltip only says "An Accident." When it activates, it says "A surge of Immateria rushes up from Under!" and some players may be swept to "Elsewhere."

* CaptainObvious: The Chicago Firefighters' motto, "We Are From Chicago."

** Upon her first return from the dead, Jaylen Hotdogfingers gained the unfortunate tendency to aim her pitches directly at batters, which causes them to become Unstable if they’re hit. Not only does being Unstable put a player at higher risk of being incinerated, feedbacked, or repeating, depending on the season, if they are incinerated, ''it spreads''. (This appears to be a direct consequence of the Debted condition, as whenever an Unstable player is incinerated the text says "a debt is paid".)
*** York Silk and Chorby Soul also gained the Debted condition when they returned via being Plundered in the Season 14 election- [[OhCrap and Chorby Soul is now a pitcher.]]
** Players washed away by "flooding" may return with some letters in their name missing. What this means is unknown, but it seems to wear off after a while.
* CapitalismIsBad: Anticapitalism is an actual, tracked stat for individual blaseball players. One of the blessings also turn the receiving team to be fully anticapitalist. The new BigBad from Season 11 onward is a coin who seems to be some kind of avatar of neoliberal capitalism.

* CosmicPlaything: An odd example straddling the line between a meta-example and an emergent one, the Unlimited Tacos have been the subject of many of the stranger mishaps, fan experiments, and just plain unlucky RNG rolls.

** The Monitor, a squidlike...being...whose attention was caught by the resurrection of Jaylen Hotdogfingers, and apparently followed her to the immaterial plane. Directly contrasting the Peanut/Shelled One's bloodred all-uppercase messages, [[teal:the monitor communicates only in all-lowercase blue letters, save for when referring to their Boss, though they also never use any punctuation except question marks]] [[MundaneMadeAwesome He's also the Food and Beverage Director - in other words, there's a giant squid running the concessions stand.]]
** Boss. The Monitor's boss, specifically, who is an ancient Roman coin. [[gold:She communicates with properly punctuated messages in yellow.]]
** Lootcrates, [[ItIsPronouncedTroPAY pronounced similarly to Socrates but with a silent t,]] a seemingly sentient pile of loot crates surrounded by stars that bestowed bats upon every player in the league after the Season 15 elections. [[gray: ''It speaks to us in properly punctuated and capitalized all-gray text.'']]
* EldritchLocation: Whatever happened to Los Angeles during the Grand Unslam tore spacetime apart and refracted the city into infinite realities. Accordingly, the Los Angeles Tacos renamed themselves the Unlimited Tacos.

* FromBadToWorse: Following their Season 14 resurrections, Chorby Soul and York Silk became Debted, which is bad enough--they can randomly cause other players to become Observed, which may result in those players vanishing from the league as if they never existed. Observed at least wears off and was contained within the Mild League, but then Wyatt Mason X echoed the Debt, upping the number of Debted players to 6 and spreading it into the Wild League too.

** After the Crabs were reverse-swept by the Shoe Thieves in the Season 9 finale, Season 10 found the two facing off in the postseason once again. The Crabs proceeded to win the best of 5 three to *negative one* an impossible feat made possible by their opening a Black Hole upon reaching ten runs in the third game, despite Black Hole being a decree that had not even yet been *implemented,* and allowing the Crabs to finally claim ascension.

** And then, when all seemed lost, the Hall Stars - the 14 dead players with the most peanuts tributed to them in the Hall of Flame - revived themselves with a declaration of "A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES". With Jaylen Hotdogfingers constantly flickering between the two teams to infiltrate the SHELLED ONE'S PODS and several impressive feats such as Landry Violence becoming Magmatic and Sebastian Telephone being incinerated a second time in the fight (with his sister Jessica Telephone on the other team, no less), the Peanut was defeated and eaten by the Monitor, ending the Disciplinary Era and ushering a new era of "Peace and Prosperity."
* HellGate: The town of Moab was swallowed by a Hellmouth after the Season 1 elections. This didn't affect their ability to play blaseball.
* HeroicSacrifice: During Season 7, the Unlimited Tacos launched the "Snackrifice" campaign, deliberately getting every single one of their pitchers shelled as an ad-hoc strike. The Blaseball gods declared that "play must continue" and put the Pitching Machine on their lineup.
* HoistByHisOwnPetard: The Salmon Cannons’ renovation for ballparks has a chance to get rid of those pesky salmon (thus preventing the salmon from accidentally negating some of a team's points by rewinding time) and Consumers, but it also has a chance to get rid of ''players''.

* IdleGame: Other than betting, the main means of making money is through upgradeable snack-food items that give you payouts when your team wins/loses or when your idol does something notable, even if you're offline at the time.

* ManaDrain: When the weather is blooddrain, there's a chance for players to steal stars from each other for their own.
* MindScrew: The Secret Base modification for stadiums, introduced in season 15, is this. When a player actually steals it, things get weird. Lenny Spruce of the Boston Flowers stole the Base, came up to bat, then ''two'' of him came out of the Base, and then he drove one of his other selves in.
* MultipleChoicePast: Every player. The official wiki takes pains to be inclusive of all written fanon backstory via the "Interdimensional Rumor Mill", which randomly selects a different history section to load every time their page is visited.
* NamedWeapons: Well, bats, actually. Jessica Telephone owns a Legendary Bat dubbed "Dial Tone", while York Silk's Gunblade Bat is named "Vibe Check".
* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: Plenty of them, but Hades Tigers' former star Landry ''Violence'' might take the cake.
* NotSoOmniscientAfterAll: Despite supposedly being ''the'' supreme authority on Blaseball, many of the Commissioner's posts show that they can be just as confused as the fans.

** After the Second Wyatt Masoning, the addition of Roman numerals (Wyatt Masons II-XIII, then any Replica player) became the most prominent convention for avoiding confusion.
** Two separate teams have existed in Internet League Blaseball under the name "the Baltimore Crabs," one of them deceased.
** Several seasons after Pitching Machine was [[PutOnABus Vaulted]] and numbered Replicas of them became available in the seasonal Gift Shop, bizarre luck with the New York Millennials' fax machine led to all of their active pitchers being Elsewhere and unable to pitch, leading to their next game being pitched by... a different player named "Pitching Machine."
* OppositeDay: Season 19 featured the "Turntables" Decree, which inverted all wins, causing the Internet Series that season to be populated by the current worst teams in the league.

** And then the Second Wyatt Masoning happened during the Season 14 Latesiesta, creating 13 new Wyatt Masons, dubbed Wyatt Mason I through Wyatt Mason XIII, each of them "pulled through the rift" to join the teams who chose the "PsychoAcoustics" renovation for their ballpark... and then it all went horribly wrong. An ominous, fully-capitalized purple message appeared in the feed of the Forbidden Book: [[purple:OVER AND OUT.]] This was followed by ''the Microphone going offline for the first time since the Localization tweets of the Unmasoning, and the problem only got worse from there.'' Throughout the rest of the season, nearly all of the new Wyatt Masons, along with Wyatt Quitter, Echoed into Static ''and were completely removed from the rosters of their teams with no replacement and could no longer be idolized.'' By the end of Season 14, only two of the new Wyatt Masons have yet to be lost to the Static: Wyatt Mason IX on the Unlimited Tacos, and Wyatt Mason X on the Seattle Garages.
* ThePlague: The third season was subtitled Peanut Plague. One of the most notable effects has been the addition of Peanut weather, during which players may accidentally swallow peanuts while in the field, gaining or losing stats depending on whether they suffer an allergic reaction or not. Also, several players named "Dan" or similar had their names changed to "Peanut", for example, Daniel Duffy became Peanutiel Duffy.

** Players can also be sent to--or retrieved from--the Shadows, usually through election swaps. It's essentially a holding zone for a team's unused players, only visible to its own fans who have the Apple snack.
** Shelled players are in a similar state to Elsewhere ones--unable to bat or pitch, and stuck that way until Birds randomly decide to devour the peanut shell they're trapped in. However, they are somehow still able to perform defensive plays, getting bizarre lines like "[Player 1] hit a flyout to [Player 2]'s shell."

** At the end of Season 17, York Silk and Nagomi McDaniel were above the squiggly line of the Idols leaderboard- but instead of being upgraded to Ego+++++, they were upgraded to Legendary and were "Vaulted," completely removing the two of them from the rosters of their teams and making it impossible to idolize them. The Boss' welcome back speech at the start of Season 18 revealed that the now ''thrice-incinerated'' Chorby Soul, who had burned to ashes for the third time on Day 1 of Season 17, had been Preserved- in other words, what happened to York and Nagomi had now happened to them as well. Nobody knows where the heck the three of them are now, but they're likely not coming back, considering that the newly-introduced Gift Shop has Collector's Editions of the trio up for grabs.

* RedemptionEqualsDeath: Mike Townsend went from being hated to being loved, just in time for him to disappear into shadows when Jaylen Hotdogfingers was revived the first time. Although the Shadows aren't actual death and Mike was able to come back for a time before being sent back to the shadows again.

* RetGone: During a match with the Magic, the Pies were nullified by Black Hole (Black Hole). This caused the pies to completely cease to exist, with their team page being replaced by "nullteam", and all mentions of the Pies being replaced with this non-existent team.

* TakeMeOutAtTheBallGame: Blaseball players can be incinerated by rogue umpires at any time during a solar eclipse. As of season 7, 71 players have been lost this way, including the since-returned Jaylen Hotdogfingers.

* ThreateningShark: Consumers, represented with a shark icon, occasionally show up to take bites out of players with high Soul ratings when their team is heavy enough to sink into the Immateria.

* TraumaCongaLine: "Consumers," eldritch sharks that diminish players' stats, were introduced in season 14. They tend to target players with large Soulscreams, and for season 15, Chorby Soul--who has an absurdly long soul--was resurrected. Poor Chorby became the consumers' favorite target for chomping, getting attacked over a hundred times in one season. Long after all of Chorby's stats hit zero, the sharks kept on biting. Chorby was incinerated again in season 16, resurrected during the elections, and then incinerated ''again'' on the first day of season 17. That's a whopping three incinerations, on top of their record as the most-chomped player.
* WeHardlyKnewYe: The record for shortest time between introduction and death goes to Kiki Familia of the Canada Moist Talkers--Kiki replaced another player who was incinerated about a third of the way through Season 7 and was incinerated herself the very next day. Due to the fact she appeared halfway through one game and died halfway through another, she only got to play ''five innings''.

* WeirdWeather: the energies released during a game of blaseball create an array of unusual weather conditions including spontaneous solar eclipses, peanut storms, [[RainOfBlood Blood]][[VampiricDraining drain]], [[TimeCrash Reverb]] and "lots of birds." Also salmon, for some reason.

* LetsGetDangerous: If you ever hear the fans of the teams start chanting in unison, "Many Teams, One League", ''gods are about to die.''

* ReforgedIntoAMinion: The Shelled One's Pods, the team assembled from those claimed by The Peanut on Day X.\