Line #1 VideoGame/Blaseball


1	->''You are now participating in the cultural event of blaseball.''
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3	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/blaseball_banner.jpg]]
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5	''[[https://blaseball.com Blaseball]]'' was 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]].
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7	Created by The Game Band, Blaseball was a text-based blaseball sim released in July of 2020. The game included twenty (later twenty-four) original teams, split into two leagues (with ten/twelve teams each), which were then split into two sub-leagues (with five/six teams each).
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9	Every week, a new season of Blaseball began. Players picked a team to root for and bet coins on the hourly games. With those coins, players could buy items for their own benefit, delicious peanuts, and votes to lobby for Decrees - which fundamentally altered the game and its players - or for Blessings and Wills, which benefitted their favored team in various ways.
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11	Fans could 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 had proven to have a multitude of interactions with the ever-fluctuating conceptual structures of Blaseball. This discovery added additional layers of collective strategy and experimentation as fans made concerted (and not-so-concerted) efforts to manipulate the rankings based on theories about the cryptic markings. which frequently manifested on the leaderboards.
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13	At the end of the season, votes were tallied, the most popular choices (may or may not, according to the whims of the Blaseball Gods) taking effect at the beginning of the next season, and the cycle beginning again.
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15	While the game offered plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle surreality behind its deceptively simple text interface and official Twitter feed, it was only the tip of the iceberg for a vast world of emergent, fan-driven narrative, which can all be found [[https://blaseball.wiki here]].
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17	After a climactic battle with The Coin that resulted in Blaseball itself being nullified, the game had 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, though it paused and entered hiatus once again not long after. Blaseball would never leave this hiatus; on 2 June 2023, it was announced that development on Blaseball would cease, as it proved difficult to continuously sustain with rising literal and metaphoric costs on the developers' end gradually accelerating its retirement.
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19	----
20	!!This game provides examples of:
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22	* {{Absurdism}}: A splorts league in a WorldOfChaos where the players have significantly more than ten fingers, players can be incinerated by rogue umpires or entombed inside giant peanut shells, runs and wins are physical objects that can be stolen, and whether or not you have a bat is entirely incidental to your ability to hit the ball.
23	* AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: The price of a snack increases in proportion to how much of it you already possess. Selling your stockpile of a snack earns you [[KarlMarxHatesYourGuts far less than what you paid]], or for non-upgradeable ones, nothing at all.
24	* AerithAndBob: Thanks to the randomly generated names, players like Allison Abbot and Reese Clark exist side-by-side with Blood Hamburger and Comfort Septemberish.
25	** Team locations also range from places with actual sports teams (New York, Dallas) to very small or large places that wouldn't normally have a competing team (Breckenridge, Colorado; all of Canada) to exotic locations like Hades and Atlantis.
26	* AmbiguousGender: No players have canonical genders, though some have normal(ish) names that imply one.
27	* AmbiguouslyHuman: Most of the players have several odd characteristics (most notably, many Blaseball players have more than ten fingers), indicating those players are not human.
28	* ArtifactOfDoom: The aptly named The Forbidden Book. It's arguably responsible for all the chaos that Blaseball is known for.
29	* AnotherDimension: The Short Circuits, temporary "pocket universes" used for two-week trials of new game mechanics.
30	* AnyoneCanDie: There is no known criteria (if any) for a Rogue Umpire to incinerate a player beyond that the current weather must be a solar eclipse. Only players who have acquired Fireproof or Fire Eater are safe from their wrath (if an umpire tries to incinerate a Fireproof player, the ''umpire'' dies, though this seems to be just FlavorText). In season 13, a player with Fire Protector was incinerated, even though it claims to protect their whole team from vengeful umpires (apparently not including themselves), so even seemingly-safe players could be at risk.
31	** Fire Protectors being able to die was also further confirmed with the reveal of the Library, displaying how Fire Protector player Agan Espinoza saved their ''entire team'' from being incinerated... by being incinerated themself, leaving their teammates alive.
32	* ArcNumber: 14. The number of players on a regulation Blaseball team, the number of Lottery Pick, and the season when the Wyatt Masoning happened.
33	* ArmCannon: Axel Trololol was blessed with a [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Literal Arm Cannon]] during the Season 2 elections, turning him from an average pitcher to one of the league's best.
34	* 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]].
35	* 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 [[EldritchAbomination Monitor]].
36	* AscendedGlitch: A significant amount of the plot of the Discipline Era was made of these, such as the Grand Unslam and the Wyatt Masoning.
37	* AscendedMeme:
38	** "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).
39	** During a trial for Parker [=MacMillan=] III in the game's Discord, someone suggested that the ruling be sent as the file "parker_memoriam_ruling.riv". This triggered a chain of events where [[https://salmon.sibr.dev/steve.html fans in the Society for Internet Blaseball Research discovered that the file extension was used in a program that tracked salmon as well as get one of the people who developed that program into Blaseball]]. The devs responded by adding salmon as a new form of weather in season 15.
40	* AudienceParticipation: Aside from the above-mentioned decrees and blessings which people vote on, Blaseball has also been subjected to coordinated action by the fanbase to mess with the game in ways not intended or expected by the developers. The resurrection of Jaylen Hotdogfingers, below, is probably the crowning example.
41	* AudienceParticipationFailure: Very rare, owing to the fanbase's tendency to vote for mysterious options and plot decrees whenever they come up. However, fans failing to trade Uncle Plasma and Liquid Friend onto the same team for eight seasons significantly delayed the redaction-investigation subplot.
42	* BackFromTheDead
43	** In Season 6, a Blessing called "Lottery Pick" was introduced, which would allow whoever got it to steal the 14th most idolized player. Fans found a way to idolize dead players. Jaylen was rapidly pushed to #14 and stayed there for the rest of the season, and they came back with the ominous condition "Debted".
44	--->FIRE AND SMOKE
45	--->AN EGG
46	--->HATCHING
47	--->JAYLEN HOTDOGFINGERS RETURNS
48	--->MIKE TOWNSEND RETREATS TO SHADOWS
49	*** Jaylen died again at the end of the regular season in season 10, but then she played a game against the Peanut's team, switched onto their team during the game, and after they were dispersed, she ended up on the Lovers.
50	*** 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.)
51	*** 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.
52	** [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]] by Sutton Picklestein, who was resurrected for all of nine seconds and then immediately died again at the conclusion of that very same election.
53	** On a few other occasions, players can be resurrected in situations that do not cause Debt, such as the MassResurrection after the Semi-Centennial Exhibition Match.
54	** Players with "Roaming" can just decide to walk out of the afterlife and back into play, with (seemingly) no consequences whatsoever.
55	* BalancingDeathsBooks: When Jaylen Hotdogfingers was revived, she came back with Debt, which resulted in her marking players for death by hitting them with pitches. Ingame text about the resulting incinerations 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.
56	* BigBad: At first, the Peanut who shelled players simply wanted the fans to repent. After its defeat in Season 10, the Coin seems to have taken over as the main antagonist.
57	* 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 happened as much as ever in Season 13, and had in fact gotten worse, as players now sometimes return from being washed away with letters missing from their names.
58	* 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".
59	* ButtMonkey: In Season 15, poor Chorby Soul's immensely long soulscream made them a favorite target of the Consumers, shark monsters that steal stars from players. Chorby was attacked nearly ''every game'', sometimes more than once, and as a result has zero stars in ''everything''. (Unfortunately for everyone else, Chorby's pitching stats don't seem to make a dent in how often they can cause the Observed condition.) By extension the Garages (and later the Millennials) were also this--their position at the bottom of the league meant theoretically the Consumers should leave them alone[[note]]A team's attractiveness to Consumers is determined by a lot of factors, not just wins, but they were doing ''much'' worse than many teams without the dreaded red dot of Consumer attention.[[/note]], but Chorby's soulscream remained prime sharkbait, meaning they spent most of Season 15 both losing the most and being attacked the most.
60	** Chorby Soul accounted for [[https://twitter.com/nymillenials/status/1383020845912752131 seventy-seven percent of the Consumer attacks that occurred following their first resurrection]], and was incinerated in the first game of Season 17 following their second.
61	* 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?[[note]]Blaseball being a WorldOfPun, it governs how often you're able to force double plays.[[/note]]
62	* {{Calvinball}}: Downplayed. Players can vote for rule changes for the next season via Decrees, which are often permanently put into effect. On at least one occasion, a rule change has occurred before the election even happened.
63	* CapitalLettersAreMagic:
64	** 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".
65	** Appears in a number of other places for bizarre Blaseball concepts like "Free Refills" (used to "Refill the In"). Wins, Runs, and other basic concepts of normal baseball are also capitalized, and in this universe are supposedly considered physical objects.
66	* CaptainObvious: The Chicago Firefighters' motto, "We Are From Chicago".
67	* CatchPhrase: The Commissioner has a few:
68	** "are you sure about this"
69	** "uhhh"
70	** "what no" and "oh no"
71	** "👁️✍️"
72	* CameBackWrong
73	** Upon her first return from the dead, Jaylen Hotdogfingers gained the unfortunate tendency to aim her pitches directly at batters, which caused them to become Unstable if they were 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".)
74	*** York Silk and Chorby Soul also gained Debt when they returned via being Plundered in the Season 14 election, and both were capable of making players "Observed", resulting in mysterious disappearances in [[ItMakesSenseInContext coffee weather]].
75	*** Niq Nyong'o also Returned with Debt after being resurrected in the Season 23 Elections, now pitching as well.
76	** Players washed away by "Flooding" may return with some letters in their name missing. What this means is unknown, other than the fact that it causes Consumers to take away far more stars than from unscattered players.
77	* CapitalismIsBad: Anticapitalism is an actual 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.
78	* 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 a pretty good batting average.
79	* ConvenientlyInterruptedDocument:
80	** While there is a "Book of Blaseball" containing what are allegedly the rules, most of it consists of nothing but gray spoiler boxes.
81	** The Library also contains gray spoiler boxes instead of large swathes of text. The contents of these boxes can sometimes be revealed by [[ItMakesSenseInContext putting enough pickled herring into them.]]
82	* 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.
83	* CursedWithAwesome: Zigzagged with Flinch.
84	** 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.
85	** In the early Expansion Era, pitchers threw a lot more pitches directly into the strike zone, meaning that Flinch was equivalent to having one fewer strike. This meant that Flinch destroyed batting averages.
86	** In season 13 the Baltimore Crabs acquired temporary Fourth Strike, which negated this effect entirely and turned it back into plate discipline (at least for that season). This netted them another championship.
87	** The Reform will allowed teams to turn Modifications into random other Modifications. Sometimes Reform would turn Flinch into something genuinely useful, like Affinity for Crows or High Pressure. Sometimes it would turn Flinch into something rather less useful, like Haunted. But there was this one time it turned Flinch into ''Debt''. Yes, the one that marks players hit by pitch for death.
88	* TheDeadHaveNames: Hooooo boy. This game puts ''CannonFodder'' to shame.
89	* DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu: At the end of Season 10, the Hall Stars, a team composed of the dead players who were given the most peanuts in the Hall of Flame, ''demolished'' the Shelled One's Pods, which until then had been unbeatable (and had just one-hit-killed the Baltimore Crabs). Dominic Marijuana, formerly of the New York Millennials, struck the final blow to the Pods with a home run, upon which the Monitor arrived and ''ate'' the Peanut.
90	* DynamicDifficulty: Teams that are "mathematically eliminated from the playoffs" enter Party Time, during which players can randomly start Partying and receive permanent stat buffs. This makes weaker teams more likely to win in the next season, since they will reach party time earlier; sometimes teams' fans will ''want'' to lose to take advantage of this, though of course the human players can't really control their team's performance.
91	* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: In-fiction, as the League library reveals some interesting things about the Leagues that were held before the current one:
92	** Teams included the Alaska Immortals and Canada Artists.
93	** All games were played with five bases.
94	** Rogue Umpires had the power to incinerate entire teams at a time.
95	* EldritchAbomination: The Blaseball Gods.
96	** Players with no coins left could beg for their mercy to receive a few coins.
97	** The Peanut, better known as the Shelled One. First appeared after the Peanut Fraud incident (during which several fans cheated to gain an incredibly large amount of peanuts), it took over the game's main page as a large, rotating peanut with the words BLASPHEMY underneath. It would appear sporadically to deliver cryptic messages, and again on Day X to challenge the upstart mortals. [[red:IT SPOKE EXCLUSIVELY IN RED ALL-UPPERCASE LETTERS AND NEVER USED ANY PUNCTUATION SAVE FOR QUESTION MARKS]]
98	** 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 It's also the Food and Beverage Director - in other words, there's a giant squid running the concessions stand.]]
99	** Boss. The Monitor's boss, specifically, who is an ancient Roman coin. [[gold:She communicates with properly punctuated messages in yellow, speaks with the Royal We, and Capitalizes Important Words.]]
100	** Lōotcrates, pronounced like Socrates, is 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 inside quotation marks."'']]
101	** The Reader is... something... that originally did not have a symbol. It seems to enjoy antagonizing the other Gods and causing chaos in Blaseball itself, such as introducing unwins and promoting negative scoring. [[purple: it talks in unpunctuated purple text and communicates almost entirely in mixed metaphors involving other sp(l)orts]]
102	* 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 (later renaming themselves again to the LA Unlimited Tacos).
103	** There's also the place where Blaseball itself takes place, the Immaterial Plane. First, there's the bizarre and sometimes deadly weather, not to mention the existence of multiple Suns. Second, there's the fact that it's a flat two-dimensional plane unlike Earth. Lastly, there's the lands of Blaeball 0 and Blaseball 2 that are bounded to the top and bottom of Blaseball respectively. All in all, the Immaterial Plane is really weird.
104	* EmergentNarrative: Most of the game - aside from elections, various bidding events, and the occasional meddling of gods - is run by a (weighted) random number generator, including names, stats, plays, and even incinerations.[[note]]This has been verified by reverse-engineering the RNG.[[/note]] Similarly, the developers try to let bugs become {{Ascended Glitch}}es unless they actively mess with the stability of the simulation itself. When asked why, the developers stated "The sim is a better writer than any of us" - Socks Maybe gaining metaphorical shoes, Paula Turnip's Super Idol becoming Credit to the Team, and Rat Mason evading Preservation three times were all ''random''.
105	* ExactWords: Everyone assumed that the Coffee Cup was a [[BonusMaterial noncanon event with no permanent effects]]. The actual announcement stated that it would have "minimal bearing on Season 12".
106	* [[FictionalSport Fictional Splort]]: It may look like baseball on the surface, but Blaseball has several key differences that makes it... unfeasible in our reality, to say the least.
107	* 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.
108	* GenreBusting: Blaseball is one as a whole. Is it a sports game? Is it a betting game? Is it a simulation game? Is it an [=ARG=]? 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.
109	* HellGate: The town of Moab was swallowed by a Hellmouth after the Season 1 elections. This didn't affect their ability to play Blaseball.
110	* 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 Pitching Machine on their lineup.
111	* 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 Isarobot 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.
112	* 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.
113	* HoldYourHippogriffs: Blaseball is not a "sport", it is a ''splort''.
114	* IdleGame: Other than betting, the main means of making money was 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.
115	* {{Irony}}: A player named Pitching Machine spent more of its career as a batter than a pitcher.
116	* 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 been completely, irreversibly removed from the game, not even being present on the Hall of Flame's dead player list.
117	* ManaDrain: When the weather is Blooddrain, there's a chance for players to steal stars from each other for their own.
118	* MeetTheNewBoss: Despite her claims that she would usher in "peace and prosperity", the Boss Coin retained and repurposed the Idol Board, left all the weather in place including the dangerous ones, and
119	* MultipleChoicePast: Every player's fanon. The 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.
120	* NamedWeapons: Well, bats, actually. Jessica Telephone owned a Legendary Bat dubbed the "Dial Tone", while York Silk's Gunblade Bat was named the "Vibe Check". (Both of these items were removed with the introduction of the Item system during the Expansion Era.)
121	* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: Plenty of them, but the Hades Tigers' former star Landry ''Violence'' might take the cake.
122	* NotSoOmniscientAfterAll: Despite supposedly being the Commissioner of Blaseball, many of Parker [=MacMillan=] III(I)(I)'s posts show that he can be just as confused as the fans.
123	* OffTheRails: The Reader's weird sports metaphors after scattering the Sunbeams in the Desert were ''supposed'' to mean "stay there until your moment comes". Fans saw the three words "charge the mound" and immediately set off to ram the Boss in the center of the map.
124	* OneSteveLimit: Averted with multiple characters; most prominently, there are several players with either the first name Wyatt or the last name Mason, caused by the Wyatt Masoning, where all the Tacos players became named Wyatt Mason, which only got partly fixed.
125	** 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.. except for Wyatt Mason (season 14 birth), who is often called Masone by the fanbase instead.
126	** Two separate teams have existed in Internet League Blaseball under the name "the Baltimore Crabs", one of them deceased.
127	** 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".
128	* OppositeDay: Season 19 featured the "Turntables" Decree, which inverted all Wins into Unwins, causing the Internet Series that season to be populated by the current worst teams in the league.
129	* PhraseCatcher: Any mention of The Commissioner is often followed by fans saying The Commissioner is doing a great job.
130	* PlanetOfSteves: The end of Season 3 saw the Wyatt Masoning hit the Unlimited Tacos--''everyone'' on the team was suddenly renamed to Wyatt Mason, seemingly by accident. This was eventually fixed, although not every player had both their names reverted. (The original Wyatt Mason ended up renamed to [=NaN=], referring to the error code "not a number".)
131	** 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).
132	* ThePlague: The third season was subtitled Peanut Plague. One of the most notable effects was 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.
133	* PutOnABus:
134	** If the weather is Flooding, players on bases may be washed away to Elsewhere. This isn't permanent, but there's no way to tell how long they'll be gone. Salmon Cannons may also send players Elsewhere.
135	** Players can also be sent to -- or retrieved from -- something called "The Shadows", usually through election swaps. For the longest time this was an inaccessible and deeply mysterious place, though the Apple snack later made them more visible to fans, and eventually Fax Machines and Voicemail essentially made them relief players/backup rosters.
136	** 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." Shelled players are also immune to being Incinerated.
137	** The Baltimore Crabs "ascended" to the Big Leagues after winning three Internet Championships, though they quickly returned after two seasons.
138	** Players who vanish after being Observed or losing their entire soulscream are Redacted. They're not dead, but they're off their team's rosters completely without any notification (as opposed to Shelled or Elsewhere players, whose names remain but are labeled over, and whose disappearances/imprisonments are noted in the feed).
139	** The Black Hole(Black Hole) burps out players randomly. Some players may take longer than others to escape, which results in them not being seen for a while.
140	* RandomNumberGod: Except for Decrees, elections do not choose whichever option got the most votes; instead, a vote is chosen randomly as the winner. So, piling more votes onto something increases its odds of success, but it's always possible for a single vote on something no one else wanted to get picked. This is mainly meant to stop the most popular teams from always winning, though it also allows for some degree of chaos and sabotage.
141	* 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.)
142	* ReforgedIntoAMinion: The Shelled One's Pods, the team assembled from those claimed by The Peanut on Day X.
143	* RetGone: During a match with the Magic in Season 24, 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 as well; any team starting a game for the rest of the season (as the schedule did not change) against "nullteam" was granted a win by default, due to, well, their opponents no longer existing.
144	* RuleOfThree: Parodied by "Coffee 3s" weather, which gives both pitchers the "Triple Threat" modification. Whenever there are 3 runners on base, a runner on 3rd, or 3 balls in the count, the batting team scores ''negative'' 0.3 runs (or "unruns"). At the end of the 3rd inning, there's a [[LudicrousPrecision 33.33% chance]] of the mod disappearing.
145	* ShapedLikeItself
146	** The Chicago Firefighters' slogan is simply "We Are From Chicago".
147	** Many conditions are initially described as this to avoid {{InterfaceSpoiler}}s. The explanation of "Shelled" was just "player is shelled" until the season 6 elections concluded (it now actually explains what's going on).
148	* SeasonFinale:
149	** Holy crap, was Season 10's postseason ever one of these for the Discipline Era. To summarize it...
150	*** 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.
151	*** 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.
152	*** 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".
153	** The end of the Expansion Era was a spectacular confluence of events involving extensive foreshadowing in the Library, a Semicentennial Exhibition Match where Vaulted players played one last game, the explosion of the Sun(Sun), the release of a dangerous player who kept roaming between teams and leaving them Unstable, a new "Supernova Eclipse" weather that could and did result in the incineration of entire teams, Parker IIIII picking up the Microphone and defying management for the first time, teams becoming extradimensional spaceships steered by votes, and rules, teams, and eventually the entire League being sucked into a black hole.
154	* SelfDuplication: Players can appear at bat even if they are already on base. This most commonly happens when the roster is too small for every player to appear uniquely.
155	** During the Coffee Cup, Liquid Friend was the only batter for BC Noir. Every time a player came up to bat, it was just another copy of Liquid Friend.
156	** The Secret Base modification for stadiums, introduced in Season 15. 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.
157	** Due to mishaps involving Flooding, Kelvin Drumsolo ended up on first base, second base, third base, and then batted themselves in with a triple to score three runs.
158	* SerialEscalation
159	** The Expansion Era was a teetering stack of increasingly ludicrous game subsystems, such as multiple wins per game, fractional scoring, multiple resurrections, performance-increasing items, and excessive amounts of suns. Eventually this caused the league to collapse into a black hole.
160	** Star inflation. Elections let teams improve their players, and Enhanced Party Time boosts the stars of the worst-performing teams. This resulted in the average star count of the League increasing over time, turning a five-star player from a top-of-the-league ace to a decent but unremarkable player. As of the end of Expansion, the highest rating a player has achieved is just short of ''ten stars''.
161	* SoftReboot: The first season out of Beta acted as one gameplay-wise. While it continued off the story from the Beta (with Moab still being inside the Hellmouth and Los Angeles remaining infinite, among other things), all gameplay mechanics but the most important ones were kept. Most players lost all their modifications and had their stats randomized, and gameplay was in general simplified back to what it was in the Beta's Season 1.
162	* [[SportsStories Splorts Stories]]: The game is about a splort.
163	* SurrealHumor: The main appeal of Blaseball comes from just how bizarre and inexplicable everything around it is, from the ridiculous names of the players and teams, to the nonsensical stats, to the chaotic and reality-altering events that regularly occur during games.
164	* TakeMeOutAtTheBallGame: Blaseball players can be incinerated by rogue umpires at any time during a solar eclipse. As of season 7, 71 players had been lost this way, including the since-returned Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
165	* ThisMeansWar: If you ever hear the fans of the teams start chanting in unison, "Many Teams, One League", ''gods are about to die.''
166	* ThreateningShark: Consumers, represented with a shark icon, occasionally show up to take bites out of players - lowering their Soul ratings as well as their Star count - when their team is heavy enough to sink into the Immateria.
167	* ThrowingTheFight: You win the Underbracket by ''losing'' enough games per round, in a way directly analogous to winning the Overbracket by winning enough games per round. This makes the Underchampion the team that is best at throwing.
168	* 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. ([[ConvenientlyInterruptedDocument Most of the Book is redacted]], but just enough is readable to be seriously worrying.)
169	* TraumaCongaLine
170	** As described in the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OJlOsKHlnk Blaseball Roundup]], Combs Estes had a particularly horrific season 13:
171	---> 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.
172	** "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.
173	* TitleDrop: With the start of a new era of the new rebooted Blaseball, the game drops a title card with after the end of the first season, "The Coronation Era".
174	* UncertainDoom
175	** Players who have been "Redacted" initially just disappeared. (Though they now come back as "Attractors" with vastly inflated star counts.)
176	** 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.
177	** The Wyatts of the Second Wyatt Masoning "Echoed" into "Static" when they encountered each other. However, Static players are not in their teams' rosters and not in the Hall of Flame. Where they are is an open question.
178	*** It later became possible to turn players from the Short Circuits into Static. General speculation is that this might allow them to become {{Canon Immigrant}}s, but nothing has been said one way or the other.
179	* WeHardlyKnewYe
180	** 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''.
181	** 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 in season 14. Kiki Familia still holds the record for shortest active time of play, however.
182	* WeirdSun: The results of the Season 10 Election caused the sun to explode, creating Sun 2, which gave teams extra wins if they scored 10 runs in a single game. The Boss would go on to create multiple additional suns, including Sun(Sun), a square sun that squares all wins, Sun 30, a 30-pointed sun that awards wins for games that go into extra innings, and Sun .1, a tiny sun that adds fractional-point runs based on the inning.
183	* WeirdWeather: Blaseball is played entirely under various unusual weather conditions, including spontaneous solar eclipses, Peanuts, [[RainOfBlood Blood]][[VampiricDraining drain]], [[TimeCrash Reverb]], and "Birds". Also (temporal) salmon, for some reason.
184	* WorldOfPun: Rampantly so.
185	** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playoff_berth Teams who qualify for the playoffs]] in a given season earn a "Postseason Birth," meaning a rookie player "hatches from the Field of Eggs" to join the team's backup roster.
186	** The Free Refill modification granted to batters in Coffee 2 weather causes runs scored by those batters to remove an cut from the count by "refilling the In" -- in the normal course of play, the game denotes the end of each inning with the text "Inning [#] has become an Outing."
187	** Season 14, which began on March 15th and marked the third week of players being swept Elsewhere and returning with letters missing from their names due to Flooding weather, was subtitled "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ides_of_March THE -IDES.]]"
188	** The primary determinant for whether a team is subject to attacks by Consumers is the alphanumeric "Level" displayed on their Info tab. Naturally, the sharks only start to attack once the team drops below C level.
189	** When salmon [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run swim upstream]] in Salmon weather, they occasionally restart an inning, taking away some Runs from either team's total.

Context VideoGame / Blaseball