Season 3 Blaseball Basics (Part 2)

Okay, before we truly begin, I want to take a moment to explain Blaseball's mechanics and current-as-of-Season-3 lore. I didn't understand everything at first, but I think it's more fun for the reader if I explain at least some of the moving parts here. Also, the mechanics themselves can be pretty funny.

(As a note, the Blaseball Wiki is still a useful resource for checking events & looking through fanlore. It doesn't have everything, but it has a lot! If you want to explore Blaseball yourself, the wiki is a good place to start. I referenced it a lot while writing these pages, especially for details I forgot or events I didn't witness.)

Blaseball the game began on July 20th, 2020, but in the universe of the Immaterial Plane, Blaseball has existed forever. In the lore, this first season is the Return of Blaseball. The players can never rest, unless there is a Siesta (often used in the game for breaks between seasons, or website outages). During Season 1, Blaseball functioned pretty much the same as regular baseball. Don't know how baseball works? That's okay, I didn't either! I'll try my best to explain mechanics of actual baseball as they become relevant.

The fans had the ability to vote on changes to the game with their earnings from betting on the games. You could buy 1 vote for 100 coins, as well as items to boost the amount of coins you got from your gambling. (As a note, this never involved real money.) Your votes went toward Blessings for your team, usually to improve their performance, but sometimes to hinder another team's. One of the Season 1 Blessings was to have pitchers grow an extra finger (which is represented mechanically in the stats). Blessings were given out in a sort of raffle system, meaning more votes would increase your team's chance of getting it, but not guaranteeing it.

You could also vote on Decrees. Only the highest-voted Decree would go into effect, and in Season 1, your options were:

• Redistribute Wealth, a decree that would give the top 5 players in the league to random other teams.
• Relegation, a decree that would vaporize the weakest team in the league and replace them with a newly-generated team.
• The Forbidden Book. There was no information about The Forbidden Book, aside from a note that it was Forbidden.

So you can imagine what people decided to go with.

At the end of Season 1, the Pies swept the Firefighters to win the first championship of Internet League Blaseball. They were the only ones who were able to rejoice, because the Election was the very next day, and the fans learned exactly what opening the Forbidden Book meant for all of them.

Suddenly, the sun was blocked out in a surprise eclipse. The umpires' eyes turned white, and in a flash of flame, the Seattle Garages' star pitcher Jaylen Hotdogfingers was incinerated, gone in an instant. Her replacement, Derrick Krueger, was forced into the light from her massive shadow. But that wasn't all, as the Hellmouth swallowed the Moab Desert that the Sunbeams used to call home, turning them into the Hellmouth Sunbeams. The last line read: The Discipline Era begins.

Opening the Book set the tone for the rest of the game. Other noteworthy things happened in that first Election, too— Jessica Telephone and PolkaDot Patterson became hitting and pitching legends, respectively, from their blessings. They would keep their reputations as fearsome foes to face until the end of the Expansion Era.

The Book is a pretty important thing to look at, as it contains the Rules of Blaseball. However, most of it looks like this.

(The Book as of the end of Season 3 can be read here, and it seems to be the earliest archive the Wiki has.)

I guess I'd suggest reading it to get the gist of how the game worked? But also, it's just funny. If questionably-placed text redactions are funny to you, you're gonna love the experience of Blaseball. (Houston Spies fans made this a whole Thing, too.)

Season 2 was the beginning of the Discipline Era, which is now considered to be the first 11 seasons of Blaseball. The main gameplay change was the introduction of Weather, namely Solar Eclipses, which brought the constant risk of any player randomly being Incinerated, just like Jaylen. Nevertheless, play continued.

The Pies won once again, and the Election brought many fun gifts, like a Gunblade Bat (later renamed the Vibe Check) for the young York Silk of the Hawai'i Fridays, and a Literal Arm Cannon for Axel Trololol of the Breath Mints. These items maxed out York's batting and Axel's pitching. Jessica Telephone was stolen by the Tigers from the Pies, and PolkaDot Patterson was stolen by the Moist Talkers from the Crabs.

This Election instated the first Team Modification, the Fourth Strike. You may know from the classic American tune Take Me Out to the Ball Game that baseball games have 3 strikes, but with the Fourth Strike, the 4 worst teams in the league were now allowed 4 strikes, allowing them a slightly better chance of winning. The extra Strike was given to the Millennials, the Breath Mints, the Sunbeams, and the Lovers.

But there was another mysterious decree that passed: Peanuts. As it turned out, this added Peanuts into the game in various ways. For one, you could buy an amount of peanuts with coins, and then click on your Peanuts to eat them. You could also buy a Squirrel of Devouring, which was a squirrel that let you eat 2 peanuts when you clicked on them instead of the default 1. The ticker now showed a count of how many peanuts the fans had collectively eaten.

This is Blaseball, though, so of course that's not all. In addition to Solar Eclipses, Peanut weather made its debut, along with Lots of Birds, who gathered to eat the fallen peanuts. Players could have an allergic or yummy reaction to Peanuts during Peanut weather, which resulted in a decrease or increase in stats respectively. Birds weather didn't seem to do anything other than display various ominous bird-related messages.

The other immediate effect of the Peanuts decree was that every player with "Dan" in their name now had "Peanut" in their name instead. This affected Peanut Holloway, Peanut Bong, and Peanutiel Duffy. The wiki questions the nature of this change.

And with that, Season 3 began. Fans began to order peanuts, and at this time, peanuts were buyable at a fluctuating 1:1 coin ratio, aka 50 peanuts for 50 coins. Why is this specific detail relevant, you may ask? Because, apparently, the price fluctuated into negative numbers. Fans were losing peanuts and gaining coins, all while a mysterious, unknown cheater committed what the wiki refers to as one of the seven deadly Blaseball sins: peanut fraud.

Not even three hours into Season 3, play was stopped as Umpires [some of the Blaseball staff/devs call themselves Umpires, for fun] called out the peanut trickery. The cheater did not come forward, and no one seems to know exactly what happened… except for The Blaseball Gods. According to the Umps, the Blaseball Gods would remember this day. And remember they did, as apparently even more peanut cheaters showed up within the next hour, plunging the site into a purposeful darkness.

When the Siesta message disappeared, there was a new message: "BLASPHEMY."

If you're wondering about that weird string of letters under the peanut, it's a reference to all the incinerations that have happened so far. Click this for specifics.

• JH: Jaylen Hotdogfingers
• FM: Fitzgerald Massey, of the Hawai'i Fridays
• TO: Tyreek Olive, of the Chicago Firefighters
• JM: Jenna Maldonado, of the Miami Dale. Funnily enough, the wiki lists them as being incinerated before Olive.
• NP: Nora Perez, of the Baltimore Crabs
• SM: Scrap Murphy, of the New York Millennials
• LM: Lars Mendoza, of the Dallas Steaks
• DG: Dickerson Greatness, of the Houston Spies
• FO: Famous Oconnor, of the Yellowstone Magic
• SE: Sosa Elftower, of the Yellowstone Magic
• ZD: Zi Delacruz, of the Dallas Steaks
• TM: Trevino Merritt, of the Canada Moist Talkers
• JW: Jessi Wise, of the Hawai'i Fridays, notably replaced by York Silk
• HP: Hurley Pacheco, of the Boston Flowers
• AD: Alexandria Dracaena, of the Breckenridge Jazz Hands
• AA: Aldon Anthony, of the Miami Dale
• CG: Cedric Gonzales, of the Philly Pies. Replaced by Dan Holloway, a guy who got to have maybe 2 in-game weeks of being named Dan before he became a Peanut.
• RT: Rhys Trombone, of the Hellmouth Sunbeams, the first incineration of Season 3.
• BB: Bennet Browning, of the Seattle Garages, replaced by Tiana Cash.

Play continued when the site went back up, but the Season 3 tagline of "Peanut Plague" changed to "Uncertainty". The price of peanuts went up to 1 million coins, which is functionally unattainable. The Forbidden Book and the Ticker's peanut counter both updated.

Play continued normally, until it didn't. On Day 73, a few real-life days after the peanut fraud, a very long game between the Shoe Thieves and the Tacos happened. The game had been going for 54 minutes, causing people to watch specifically to see if the spillover rule would happen for the first time. The game was tied in the 15th inning (baseball games normally go for 9 innings and any more is called a spillover), 13-13. The Shoe Thieves finally broke the tie, getting their score up to 14, then 16, then 20 after a Grand Slam from Morrow Doyle. Then… the score was 16-13 again. The game froze, and the site went down. What now?

The site went into a siesta… but a now-familiar shell appeared.

This was the second appearance of The Shelled One. They called themself "formerly benevolent", and called the players "insatiable". The site was down for three more hours, and when it came back up, the standings suggested that the Shoe Thieves had won twice, and the Tacos had lost twice. The Grand Unslam, as it would come to be known, tore a hole in spacetime over Los Angeles, and we were only beginning to see the effects.

(Also, you may notice the Shelled One is never in the same direction in any screenshot. This is because the Shelled One spins, a motion I can't replicate in .pngs.)

But play continued into the finals. This is where my own memory of Blaseball picks up, actually— I remember seeing people react to the events of the final rounds. Because of who won? Technically, because the Hades Tigers got their first Internet Series win, beating out the Pies in the semifinals! But in the finals, Tigers vs. Millennials, something bigger happened… an incineration. The Tigers' star player Landry Violence was burned, and I remember seeing mourning, for the first time in my Blaseball experience. "Rest in violence," people said, and that phrase would live on.

The first winning Decree in the Season 3 Election was Interviews, simply described as "GET TO KNOW THE PLAYERS," which I remember voting for because, y'know, that sounds fun! The second was Eat the Rich. It redistributed the funds of the top 1% of fans to the 99%. This was such a popular mechanic, it caused a (jokey, in-universe) court case later when it stopped working.

You'll remember from the first page that TTRPG podcast Friends at the Table sponsored Season 3 of Blaseball. As the first sponsor, they started a trend of also sponsoring a Blessing.

Anticapitalism is one of the stats, by the way. It helps with defending bases.

But Season 3 couldn't end on a simple note. The rip in spacetime caused by the Grand Unslam widened, and the site said it "weakened the bridge". Not only did the Tacos become Unlimited, but the players were scrambled, with everyone's name changing to Wyatt Mason, an underperforming Tacos player. (Apparently this was the result of code going awry, which is basically a spacetime tear in itself.)

A few days after the Election, the official Blaseball Twitter tweeted that he needed the fans' help to "recalibrate" the names of the Tacos players that were lost in "feedback", through numbers that correlated to the amount of Retweets and Likes. It… helped! The official status as reported by the account was "Good Enough." Some players kept their original names in full, but most had some kind of change.

The original Wyatt Mason was, apparently, unable to be localized with the technology of the Commissioner. They became NaN, a computing term short for Not a Number. (Kinda like how Missingno. stands for Missing Number.) They kept this name for all of Blaseball, and gained a fan following due to them being cool and glitchy. I'm fond of them for obvious reasons.

But if you can believe it… this isn't the funniest part of the whole thing. This is:

You may be wondering: Which Wyatt Mason was which in this screenshot? They weren't fixed yet here, so this could be referring to anyone.

It's the same Wyatt Mason. This is the Wyatt Mason who was formerly Comfort Glover, who would become Wyatt Glover. It's them three times. And they got worse every time.

Anyway, after Season 3, the Game Band (the team behind Blaseball) realized that this game had just gotten a big boost in popularity, and they needed to take a break to figure out what to do next. So Blaseball took about 3 weeks off…

… but that starts a whole new chapter of the Blaseball story. That's for next time. For now, I hadn't gotten to the teams themselves yet!

There are 20 teams, sorted into Leagues based around the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system. There was the Good League and the Evil League, with subdivisions of Lawful and Chaotic for each. This serves as a summary for where every team was at by the end of Season 3.

Seasons 1-3 Team Overview
	Name	League		Slogan	Notes
🍬	Kansas City Breath Mints	Lawful	Good	"Fresh Breath, Here We Come."	Original home of PolkaDot Patterson, stolen by the Crabs right as they became a star pitcher. The same thing then happened to Axel Trololol, stolen by the Firefighters.
🦀	Baltimore Crabs	Lawful	Evil	"Soft Shells. Hard Balls."	Gained PolkaDot Patterson in the Season 1 Election, then gained Nagomi Mcdaniel in the Season 3 election. Underachievers who keep striving for more.
🚤	Miami Dale	Chaotic	Evil	"¡Dale!"	The wiki literally says "There is nothing notable about the Miami Dale's first season." Uh, they got hit by peanuts a few times in Season 3.
🔥	Chicago Firefighters	Lawful	Good	"We're From Chicago"	The Firefighters almost won a Championship in Season 1, but haven't seen any luck since then. But the Season 3 election won them Axel Trololol from the Mints…
🌹	Boston Flowers	Chaotic	Good	"Bloom Goes The Dynamite!"	Didn't do much of note, except when they blocked the Magic from the Season 1 Finals. Magic went on to specifically blame pitcher King Weatherman for this.
🏝️	Hawai'i Fridays	Chaotic	Good	"It's Island Time!"	Unimpressive overall, although Nagomi Mcdaniel of the Crabs defected to them, so there's something we're not seeing. The young York Silk is also full of potential.
🎸	Seattle Garages	Chaotic	Evil	"Smells like Team Spirit."	A band who is also a Blaseball team. Their star pitcher, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, was the first incineration when the Forbidden Book was opened.
👐	Breckenridge Jazz Hands	Chaotic	Evil	"We’ve Got Winning to Do. Just for You."	Got to the semifinals in Season 2, but no further. They had a brush with Nagomi Mcdaniel during the election, before she was immediately taken by the Crabs.
💋	San Francisco Lovers	Lawful	Good	"Let's Go All The Way!"	An unimpressive team until they summoned performance-enhancing demons in the Season 2 Election, making them Season 3 semifinalists.
✨	Yellowstone Magic	Chaotic	Good	"As Above, So Below"	Had a shot at the Season 1 championship before being struck down by King Weatherman of the Flowers. Haven't hit those heights since.
📱	New York Millennials	Chaotic	Good	"Youth Will Save Us"	Mostly notable for having a pretty funny team name. Many of their players become more relevant in the future, like the incinerated Chorby Soul.
🗣️	Canada Moist Talkers	Chaotic	Evil	"SPRAY IT, DON'T SAY IT"	Solid players who became quarterfinalists in both Season 2 and 3. Stole PolkaDot Patterson from the Crabs during the Season 2 Election.
🥧	Philly Pies	Lawful	Evil	"Pie or Die."	Proud champions of both Season 1 and 2. Star batter Jessica Telephone doesn't disappoint.
👟	Charleston Shoe Thieves	Chaotic	Good	"Your Kicks Are My Kicks."	Finalists in Season 2, but were hit hard by 5 incinerations the season after. Got an extra win due to a server error in Season 3.
🕵️	Houston Spies	Chaotic	Evil	"Bang BANG"	Got to the semifinals in Season 1, but haven't touched them since. Their plans in the meantime are [redacted]
🥩	Dallas Steaks	Lawful	Good	"Well Done."	Original home of Jessica Telephone, before she was stolen by the Pies. Have gotten to the quarterfinals 3 times, and have lost the quarterfinals 3 times.
🌞	Moab Hellmouth Sunbeams	Lawful	Evil	"Stare into the Sun..."	A weak team who went through even more misfortune when the Book was opened and Moab was swallowed by the Hellmouth.
🌮	Los Angeles Unlimited Tacos	Lawful	Good	"72° and Spicy"	A middling team that experienced a reality-bending event known as the Grand Unslam in Season 3. Soon after, everyone's name became Wyatt Mason.
🐅	Hades Tigers	Lawful	Evil	"Never Look Back."	Fought hard to win the Season 3 Championship, even as they lost star player Landry Violence during the final games.
🍗	Mexico City Wild Wings	Lawful	Evil	"Wings. Beer. Blaseball."	No incinerations, no blessings, and no postseason appearances. I don't think I have… anything to write about…

(If you're big into Blaseball, you may notice some of these slogans are different from what the slogans became later. They got changed! These are still real, I got them from the wiki.)

Created	Last Updated
June 3rd, 2023	February 13th, 2024