filed by Agent O
Welcome to the second season of the first Short Circuit, fellow Agents! And because Blaseball is a flat circle (in this case, a flat circle where we are making several hundred left turns in very fast vehicles), this is also the last season of this Short Circuit! After this week there will be a period of rest just long enough for us to start missing Blaseball for the holidays, and then we’ll just have to see what happens next.
Amp It Up
We received, as expected, the More Eyes amplification. We have received no Distortions, but that is completely fine (I mean, 12 teams received none) and was part of the Plan anyway. Thanks to all those extra eyes, our defense is literally off the charts: SIBR’s “Stat Squeezer” scatterplot of per-team pitching and defense currently has us falling off the top edge due to our average 3.5 stars of defense!
Jolene “The Grink” Grink routinely hits Link Rodriguez home. Kofi Chocolate actually hit a single earlier today (and this is worth celebrating because… well, you know how Kofi is).
The Commissioner seems confused as to how this could be the second season of Blaseball, and for that matter does not seem to remember “before”, but… you know how the Commissioner is. He’s trying.
Apparently Everyone Is A Philly Fan Now
There’s a new type of betting: betting on the season champion. The site has us at the best odds – according to the bookies, we have a 27% chance of winning the championships – and as such has made betting on us worth all of… 86 votes. I, uh, I appreciate the confidence!
On the other hand, the Philly Pies are presently worth 232 thousand votes for their (checks notes) …0% chance of winning. A lot of people figure that said Pies have rather more than a 0% chance of winning, and have decided to go for that juicy jackpot money. Thus, a lot more people have a stake in Philly winning than usual, and if they win, even Expansion Era vote inflation will be dwarfed by everyone having hundreds of thousands of votes on the table.
That’s a lot of votes. I wonder if we can work this into The Plan somehow.
The Plan
The Plan continues as written. Please continue to bet the same 5-game pattern that you were assigned (probably) last week, as instructed in Operation: Combinatorics. (If you have not yet received an assignment, drop into the Spies channels in the Blaseball Discord server, or our sideserver.)
The Agency supercomputers i.e. SIBR have instructed us that adding a sixth bet on top of the five assigned bets, on the most likely outcome of the most lopsided game, increases average payout slightly. This is not being required as part of Operation: Combinatorics, mostly for simplicity’s sake. But if you’d like to add a sixth bet, it is on average slightly better despite the added risk, and it is physically impossible for any of us to stop you. I’m doing it, anyway.
Power Charge
This week’s election has Circuits, which I presume are the prompts that will be used to construct the next Short Circuit. All four options have “Peanuts” listed, but one can also choose between Mild and Wild Cards, and between Snow and Noise. No explanations of what any of this means have been given. Note that “snow” is another name for visual static – you know, the black and white random pattern on an old analog TV between channels. More mysterious references to digital signal processing!
Then there’s the inevitable Blaseball/Pyre crossover Charges section, where we’re supposed to pick a player from our team to Charge the Microphone. The last time this happened was during the “read-only” Circuit I’ve discussed previously; that time, all picked players Staticked out and disappeared entirely from the site. We have seen neither hide nor hair of them since.
Current thought is as follows: These players we currently have are going to evaporate into thin air at the end of this Circuit either way. Static is at least a different and more interesting way for them to disappear that we have slightly more control over, and comes with a chance that we may somehow be able to smuggle them out of the Circuits and into the main plot of Blaseball. Will this smuggling come in the form of another superteam like the PODS, or them getting airdropped onto our rosters, or another sort of Ascension? Who knows! Either way, many teams have decided to send their best.
Our poll for who to send is, as usual, available in our various Discord channels. I’m not reporting the current results of said poll because it is, you know, Monday and things could change wildly, but it is there and responses have already started rolling in.