The Commissioner Is Doing A Great Job (Patreon)

I've been writing more nonfiction lately than I ever have before.  I'm not sure why, exactly.  But it's very cathartic to share some of these slices of my reality with all of you.

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I want to take a minute out of your day to talk about Blaseball.

If you’re one of the people who hangs out on the discord server, you have almost inevitably seen me bring up my newfound love of this *thing*.  But if not, and you aren’t familiar with it, I’d like to be your doorway into a small piece of magic that I’ve found on the internet.

It is, as many of you may have noticed, the year twenty twenty.  And there is a sense of time and place that I don’t really remember experiencing since I was a kid.  It isn’t just another year going forward, or a year that’s special for me but mundane for everyone else, or ‘a kind of shitty year’ like twenty fifteen was.  No, twenty twenty is just vicious and hurtful and stifling.  It’s like being strangled by an entire calendar.  And there isn’t exactly an easy end in sight.  The date might tick over, but this feeling of time and place, with the time being “nowhen and never” and the place being “in our homes, because we cannot leave” isn’t going to go away.

And into this year, in the middle of struggling with woes both global and personal, Blaseball stumbled its way into my life.

When I first found the website, I was in the middle of being distracted by some idle game or another.  “No,” I thought, “I don’t really need another game like this, soaking up my time.  And I don’t like baseball.”  I bounced off it, and that was that.

A week later, a Twitch streamer that I follow started talking about Blaseball.  At first, I kinda rolled my eyes, because I didn’t care about baseball.  And it was just baseball, right?  Baseball is mundane, boring, and somehow omnipresent in the culture of America, which isn’t exactly a selling point for me.

I have never been more incorrect about something in my life.

As the streamer talked about the team they supported, I caught a stray word, and had to double-take.  Sorry, did they just say that someone was *incinerated*?

They had.  That was a thing.  During a solar eclipse, sometimes, the umpire will go rogue, and incinerate a player with their eye lasers.  That is a problem that you must be prepared to contend with in Blaseball.

“Oh.”  I thought.  “I’m in.”

Over the next week, I delved into a world of forbidden lore, gods and heroes, peanut fraud, and birds.  I went from an attitude of “Well I guess I have to pick *someone* as my team” when I’d made an account, to “Fuck yeah, go Crabs!  Claws up!”  over the course of about three days.  I have not shut up about Blaseball to the few people whom I still interact with for the last month.

Something about this innocuous little stage play draws me in.  And it is, that.  The game is supposedly baseball, but with the continual rules changes, blessing raffles, players voting on how the game warps itself, teams writing fan canon and doing art for their rosters, and small sparks of emergent gameplay that drags the fanbase in, there is no way this could stay mundane baseball for long.  It is a *production*.  The humor is surreal, almost absurd.  But every half hour, the teams step up to a perfectly normal simulated plate, and play a game that is recognizable.

It’s a performance, with the thousands of people watching as part of the play.  After all, whose fault is it that the Forbidden Book was opened?  Who lowered the microphone?  Who manipulated the idol rankings to return the fallen to life, bringing a dark curse with them?

We did.  We are all complicit.

But we’re complicit in a hell of a wild ride.

I’m paraphrasing Randall Munroe when I say that sports (or splorts) are a random number generator designed to tell us bedtime stories.  I never really got that before.  It wasn’t like I hated the existence of sports or anything; I’ve long since grown past being the kind of asshole kid who makes fun of other people for what they like.  If someone wants to enjoy a good game of baseball, then I wish them a fun time.  I, personally, would not know what a good game of baseball would look like.  But I know what a good game of Blaseball is.  I know what it means, now, to holler in delight or frustration or incredulity along with your fellow team fans.  I know how you can love a team, even as its players change.  How you can love a player, even as their banner shifts.  I have come to understand sports, I think, in a way I never could have if I had not been able to experience it at the rapid-fire pace and with the preposterous panache of Blaseball.

It’s been very easy, this hell-year, to lose friends.  Not just because there’s been more fatalities than there ever should have been, but also just because we are so out of contact with each other.  Time passes, and we don’t talk to each other.  We lose touch, and everyone is so exhausted that we don’t know how to seize it back.  And even then… what are we supposed to say?

A friend of mine, who I have known for over half my life at this point, messaged me on Friday.

“Are you watching this travesty.”  He demanded flatly of me.  No question mark.  It was unneeded.

I wasn’t.  I’d forgotten.  Now I was, though.  We watched our team go down in a blaze of Blaseball together.  Commented about what we’d witnessed, talked about the weather, (I decided not to vote for birds for this season’s weather) and generally carried on like our friendship had never been interrupted.

The two of us haven’t seen each other in person in almost a year.  We haven’t really messaged much either over the last few months.  I’ve never been good at fixing that kind of thing.  And I spend a lot of time missing my friend.  But for half an hour yesterday, I didn’t have to.

With the championship game yesterday where my personal team, the Baltimore Crabs, were beaten out by the Charleston Shoe Thieves at the last second, the first Era of Blaseball was supposed to come to a close.  But it didn’t.  Much like this stupid year that just keeps going, spewing out disaster after disaster, we instead got to witness what I can only describe as a JRPG style boss fight against a malevolent giant peanut and its mind controlled servants.  In the form of baseball.  Or perhaps we have truly evolved fully to *Blaseball*, now, and will never be able to return.  The door is open.  The threshold is crossed.

But sitting on the Blaseball discord, watching people scream defiance at an angry god, reaching for any long shot way that we could influence the game, inciting their fellow fans to idolize the Shoe Theives pitcher, to eat the last of their peanuts, to vote for *something*, to *tweet at the squid thing to come eat the Shelled One*.  Well, it was a hell of an experience.  And it wasn’t unlike watching the real world recently either.  We are, all of us, ready to take a few long shots to start making things better.  We’re watching our world burn down in real time, but there’s a huge number of us who are both able and willing to stand up and start shoveling buckets of peanuts to douse the fire.

Twenty twenty has been a living nightmare.  But Blaseball has helped me to embrace the silly, the joyous, and the absurd.  This bizarre splort and the community around it has kept me going, made me laugh, made me *feel*.  It’s taught me more about sportsmanship than I ever expected to need to know, and it’s taught me about how to craft mystery and surprise in ways that I am sure I can make use of as an author.  But most importantly, it’s shown me that when you get to that boss fight that you weren’t expecting, that none of us were *ever* expecting, then you skip over the menu options for ‘fight’, ‘item’, and ‘run’, and go straight down to the bottom, and select ‘play ball’.