This week we technically had two Falls. The second one was our players, as with previous weeks. The first was a peculiar list that at first seemed to be Material Plane baseball defensive positions but became increasingly deranged as time went on.
We still haven’t unlocked anything past the Artifact, though…
Stranger Positions
The first Falls were marked with, instead of a team icon, that one Blaseball logo with two of the bases filled in.
1st Base. 2nd Base. 3rd Base. 4th Base. So far so normal.
Then we received “Shortstop”. A shortstop in Material Plane baseball is a player who fields in between the second and third bases; this is generally considered to be the most demanding defensive position. (The “2nd baseman” actually stands between first and second.) This seemed to establish that we were looking at a list of defense positions, though “4th Base” remained unexplained.
Next: “Center Infielder”. An expert in Material Plane baseball suggested that this was a somewhat ambiguous term that could refer to either the shortstop or the pitcher, though given that the former exists already it’s probably the latter. (Said expert also stated that “4th Base” would get you strange looks but would be understood as referring to the catcher.)
The next two – Flanker and Guards – may refer to positions from the Material Plane sports of football and basketball respectively – though the second one is more commonly called a “point guard”. This required guidance from those familiar with other Material Plane sports, as attempts by this writer to look up “guards sports” repeatedly returned results for mouthguards.
Left fielder, right fielder, and center fielder are entirely normal defensive positions in Material Plane baseball.
Then things got stranger. Highfielders. Midfielders. (Cat from BNN speculated that these two could refer to flying players who could field balls directly in the air.) Liners. Rangers. Wallrunners. Midstop. Longstop.
Then fans of Material Plane baseball were briefly relieved to see one more recognizable term: “Backstop”. This, however, is not a defensive position; it is the fence behind the catcher and home plate, which prevents balls that the catcher misses from rolling away.
Further incomprehensible names followed: Midflanker. Longflanker. Backflanker. Cornerfielders. Outerfielders. (Woosh from Tumblr has some hypotheses about where some of these other terms are from and which positions they might refer to, though this writer disagrees with several of their conclusions.)
5th Base, something Blaseball has quite a bit of history with.
And finally, 0th Base. What is this? The secret base?
0th base briefly disappeared entirely instead of showing up in the “Last Falls” list; a roughly 30-second-long panic ensued, before it did… and then the list of Player Falls started.
Dadley
The Fall then continued with our usual 24 players to 24 teams. (The Hellmouth Sunbeams’ new player didn’t initially appear, though refreshing the page revealed that they received Cory Ross and the Fall just didn’t show it for some reason.)
Ours is Terrell Bradley. A player who began life on the Hawaii Fridays, then Feedbacked across the League several times, Terrell is a fellow practitioner of “we don’t need parties, we have office equipment” – which is to say, a repeated patron of the fax machine and the shadowdip buffs thereof. He is sometimes also referred to as “Dadley”, as rumor has it that he could be a Father Figure in the same way that Son Scotch was a Son Figure. Also, he may or may not be a grillmaster, to match Esme’s baking and Margarito’s mixology.
Others Of Note
There are no other unclassified Spies players in this Fall. So here’s some other news:
- Brisket Friendo has been returned to the Seattle Garages. Similarly, the Miami Dale again have Sixpack Santiago.
- Jesús Koch has decided to follow the Fifth Base downwards, landing on the Breckenridge Jazz Hands.
- Ji-Eun Loubert, now of the Chicago Firefighters, has had his first and last name swapped around, because “Ji-Eun” is a Korean given name and not a family name.
- Chiclawgo continues, with the Baltimore Crabs immediately accepting Declan Suzanne’s bastard reputation but also making her trans.
- Bottles Suljak is yet another player that the New York Millenials and the Core Mechanics have in common, fueling speculation that this may be the next interteam marriage. We’ve decided to “commit tax fraud” with the Thieves instead.
Space
The list of defensive positions suggests that in the next Era, teams with small numbers of lineup players will no longer have their average defense spread out across the field, and will instead be substantially worse at fielding, as would seem to be reasonable.
After the Fall, the Commissioner tweeted a grid of squares. Inspecting the alt text for it, interestingly, revealed slightly more information: “Space made. Positions claimed. Orbit established. Image description: a diamond grid of 36 positions”.
We then discovered that the Blaseball front page now has a “team” called “The Field”, populated with all the strange position-words from above. Its description is the same as the previously mentioned alt text:
- SPACE MADE
- POSITIONS CLAIMED
- ORBIT ESTABLISHED
Wait. I thought we destroyed the concept of orbit?