Monday, November 15, 2021

Blaseball Mondays: The Seattle Garages (are a credit to the league)

Logo by Zandterbird

Season two of our first Short Circuit is done, and it brings league victory for The Seattle Garages! During regular seasons, the Garages have become best known on the field for having a truly ridiculous rotation: 8 pitchers at its largest. 5 is the standard number, and during the wibbly wobbly team sizes of the Expansion era, many teams went down to just 2 or 3 in order to keep their best on the mound as much as possible. With delightful names like Durham Spaceman, Summers Pony and Alaynabella Hollywood on that rotation, scrolling past a Garages game in progress was always a delight.

This circuit, the Garages have become best known to me, the important protagonist of this column, for absolutely creaming our poor Georgias nearly every time we played. This is because the current Seattle Garages rotation, while not boasting high star counts, knew exactly how to nullify our one strength...


Here's the five pitchers from the Garages in Season 2, arranged into a lovely table form courtesy of Blaseball Player Viewer. The numbers all correspond to those "forbidden knowledge" stats we talked about last week, and thanks to the Player viewer we can see that the relevant stats for Pitching are coldness, overpowerment, ruthlessness, shakespeareanism, suppression, and unthwackability.

There's a lot of red numbers in this rotation, which is very common for "new" players like all of the short circuit generated players are. In particular, this set score really low on unthwackability, which is what makes their pitches hard to hit. These kids are all chucking nice, easy, underarm pitches to our batters, and any decent batter from the regular game would probably love that.

But! Look at that middle column, with those 0.9s and even a 1.0! That's Ruthlessness, and Ruthlessness is what makes pitchers accurate, ensuring they pitch the ball within the strike zone every time. If a ball is within the strike zone, it can't be a ball, and pitchers are far less likely to pitch the four balls which a player needs to walk to first base.

Remember what I said about the Georgias strategy? How our high moxie meant that our players had great discipline, letting them convert the many balls of the Short Circuit pitchers into walks by not trying to hit them? Well, that doesn't work against Miria Senior, Berger Bronzebell and Malin Jolly. Instead, we needed our lineup to hit the ball, and... well. They prefer not to.

So the Garages won! Which is great for them, seriously. Couldn't have happened to a better team (except for ours), and they came from our Solid Evil league and everything (second coolest team in it, if you ask me). Go Garages!

We did get to do this to poor Goodie Funday on the Dallas Steaks. I'm so sorry, Steaks!

The Garages Suck

On a related note, did you know that the Garages aren't just a fictional Blaseball team, but also an IRL music band playing songs about the fictional Blaseball team? Fans of the DIY punk music aesthetic and those who want to dive into a musical exploration of the cultural event of Blaseball are in luck, because the Garages (the band) combine both and they do it in spectacular grungy style.

Take the classic "We'll Suck Forever", an anticapitalist anthem about doing your best and getting mixed-to-negative results and having a great time doing it: 


And here's their second most recent release, a four-sided musical retrospective on the Discipline Era. It's seriously good stuff:


Broadcast Interrupted

Because we were forewarned about the short circuit ending this season, we knew that this election wouldn't be about changing our players, but preparing for the next circuit in some way. The election therefore gave us options on two things: we voted across the league for what kind of circuit we wanted next, and we voted in our teams for a player to "Charge the Microphone".

We don't know what "charging the microphone" means, but the Georgias sent our tiny mouse Agnes Caster to do it. Are they our best player? Very far from it! But they are the player of our heart and we're sure that sending a really poor Blaseballer with one amusing quirk to do a plot relevant thing will never come back to haunt us.

Sadly, the end of the short circuit means we've said goodbye to a lot of cool players this season, like pitcher duo Everly Mitchell (a demon summoner) and Mags Kemp (demon, cute):

Art by @gabbazael

Or the obligatory shark Georgia, Carmella Baskerville (also a pitcher, wearing a scarf because this version of Atlantis is frozen and cold)

Art by Shogun Fish

Yes, yes, the whole point of Short Circuits was to not get attached to players, but the players are the best bit and having more players means making up more weird shit deep and thoughtful backstory! From noir hero Jamaal Piazza to charismatic base stealing Wes Whirlie, this was a super fun team to spend a fortnight with.

And with that (and some weird betting bugs, but what's a few million extra votes between Blaseball friends?) we draw the curtain on this circuit of Blaseball. These kids will keep playing but the Microphone is taking us somewhere new now, and it'll probably be December by the time we meet our new players and get to do it all over again (with a win this time. I can feel it.)

See you then!