BASEBALL MAD or; had the fever and had it bad
Hello, friends!
Here’s about 1000 words regarding my recent obsession with baseball.
The 2024 baseball season has come to a close in the United States. Congratulations to the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers on their World Series Championship win.
They are a great team, and I'm very happy for Shohei Ohtani for winning in his first year away from the Angels. I hope he recovers his arm for next year so he can return to the mound.
This year was my 2nd year as a “real” baseball fan, all things considered. I grew up with a disdain for sports and any sort of outdoor activity. I just never understood it as a kid, and also really didn’t identify with the people I was growing up around who did understand sports. I decided that sports were not something I was particularly interested in. I was interested in sports video games to some degree, mostly because I received a lot of them as presents or rented them from Blockbuster for a week to try them out. I played a lot of Madden and a few NHL 2K games. However, I never got into baseball video games.
At some point in late 2020, the internet phenomenon known as BLASEBALL hooked me with its interesting "gameplay" and immersive storytelling.
Blaseball, at its purest, is simple to describe. You create an account on the website, and you pick a favorite team based on location or just vibes of their silly names. Hourly baseball game simulations were run with those teams, and you could bet in-game currency on the results of each game. You then use your winnings to influence the following week's games in a "rules" vote. Each week, the rules of baseball would change. On the weekends, the season would culminate in a playoff tournament, and then a team would win the championship. Votes were tallied for the rules and awards every team received, and the new season started on Mondays.
Oh and also the umpires incinerated players at random, there was a second secret website where another dimension was playing games, and capitalism gods put people into peanut shells during at-bats which prompted people to try to get every pitcher on a single team put into a shell and when it happened the game spawned a player named pitching machine and it was a pitching machine. It was a wild fantasy game filled with wacky humor and unpredictable outcomes.
The fanbase of Blaseball was Blaseball. They made fan artwork of all the characters, gave them backstories and motivations, wrote and recorded songs, unlocked the secrets of the game's programming to get really, really obsessive about the statistics.... some deep baseball stuff!
I was obsessed, and especially into it during the slow season of my work-from-home desk job in the first year of the Pandemic. I rooted for the Philly Pies and voted every week.
Blaseball tried to grow past its original scope as it gained momentum and popularity, but it didn’t work. If only they had a mobile app about 6 months into it, we might still be betting and voting on the Philly Pies today.
Blaseball is dead, long live Blaseball.
Jon Bois wrote a hypertext sci-fi story called 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future in 2017. I had read that when it was gaining popularity and enjoyed the writing and style a lot. So when SBNation released a documentary called The History of the Seattle Mariners on YouTube, also written by Bois, I had to check it out. It is a wonderful piece of documentary filmmaking, taking Ken Burns’s style into a modern age of satellite views, animated 3D graphs, and humor. I really recommend it to everyone if you haven't seen it.
Then, I moved to New York in 2022. Baseball is the New York game, afterall. I got a littttttle bit too inebriated at a Mets game (https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN202204200.shtml) and pretty much saw God, got an idea for my Great American Novel, and something in my brain clicked and said “you should probably get extremely into baseball.”
So, ever since, I’ve been researching and testing out what being a baseball fan will look like for me. I watched Ken Burns Baseball, I watched several full game archives from the Phillies’ 1993 season, I played like 400 hours of Out of the Park Baseball Simulator, and have attended as many live games (mostly Yankees, Mets, and the single-A Cyclones) as I can.
I’m a Phillies fan, and it has been a fun few years for the Phillies. We have a great line-up of interesting characters. Bryce Harper is so fun to watch. Zack Wheeler is captivating on the mound. These guys have been so good. They’ve gotten into the postseason and were major contenders, but I have been humbled by the baseball gods.
The Philadelphia Phillies are not going to give me the satisfaction of celebrating too much on the bandwagon while the tires are spinnin’ hot. Extremely disappointing collapses and cold streaks have defined the last few years of Philly baseball.
They also have UGLY City Connect alt. uniforms.
This year was exciting, but they fizzled out early in the postseason. I got to watch a pretty bad loss surrounded by Mets fans at Citi Field. But even though we lost, I was having a great time. I was with my friends, I was chatting with all the other Philly fans I could find, and I felt really alive and excited, even in the face of my team’s defeat.
The sport is fun to experience. It has improved my smalltalk game 100x. Now, people know me as a guy who likes baseball.
I regularly attend the Brooklyn Cyclones games in Coney Island. I try to go to the season home opener every year (it’s usually around my birthday!).
I also support a few teams in Japan’s league. I enjoy the DeNA Yokohama BayStars and the Nippon-Ham Fighters a lot, and I just figured out how to follow their games a little more.
Next year, the Phillies will be trying to keep their dream alive. They need to make some big roster moves to get the team in fighting shape. I hope to attend a home game at Citizens Bank Park. It just wasn’t in the cards for me this year, unfortunately.
In Japan, the season isn’t quite over. The BayStars might win this year, but they have 2 or 3 more games left to play against the SoftBank Hawks. I hope to catch the final innings of that series (typically at 8 in the morning). (I’m considering doing a lot of NPB posting next year, because it might be fun to try to write about an under-reported-in-English sporting event!)
It is an exciting time for baseball, and I’m glad I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to enjoy it.
I have the fever and I have it bad.
THE END.