filed by Agent O
Agents:
The Houston Spies’ present record is 18 wins to 13 losses. This leaves us in the middle of Molten Sea, because of course we are always going to be in the middle, outclassed by (of course) the LA Unlimited Tacos. (I do love our fellow desert teams, but since we took two other Wild Low teams with us, we have not entirely escaped the Wild Low Bouncy Castle. I call it a bouncy castle rather than a baby jail because Wild Low Solidarity is a great time, but even so, good luck getting out.)
Also the Short Circuits logo now has adorable little falling snowflakes and peanuts behind it, so there’s that.
Wait, there’s three of them?
As this season is spread across two weeks, there are arguably three separate Wednesdays: this Wednesday, the middle of the Blaseball season (which will actually be on Material Plane Friday), and next Wednesday. The effect this will have on the team’s performance is presently unknown.
I still believe the whole “Wednesday Curse” thing is illusionary, a product of the lingering trauma of the S9 reverb, but Wednesday is an extremely common superstition among Spies fans and thus it would be weird for me not to discuss it.
Wednesday doesn’t look like a word anymore. Help.
Weather Report
The Ohio Worms suffered the incineration of Scouse Lemma, who has been replaced by Mindy Buck, who is a better batter than Scouse.
Frequent winter storm warnings herald large numbers of tiny snowflakes mostly boosting lots of players. This seems to work by increasing or occasionally decreasing individual FK stats (the numbers behind the star ratings that determine actual performance – roughly six FK stats determine each star rating), which unfortunately usually increases patheticism instead of decreasing it. Maybe everyone is becoming increasingly frozen so it is harder to swing? Oddly, these snowflakes are stated to “modify the field” despite the fact that the actual mechanical effect is modifying players, which means something we as yet do not know.
According to Peanut Weather flavor text, giant peanuts crash into the field in three distinct locations: “Infield”, “Outfield”, and “Elsewhere”. Other flavor text of Peanut Weather that so far has not done anything includes:
- “A solitary Peanut rolls onto the field. Everybody cares.”
- “It’s raining buckets of Peanuts in the Outfield.” Unlike with giant peanuts, this only ever happens in the infield and outfield – never elsewhere. Why?
We still don’t know what might happen if an entire lineup is frozen/peanutted/otherwise unable to play the rest of the game. Off-the-record statements by ILB staff say that, unlike with the equivalent situation with pitchers, they will not use a Batting Machine. So… if not batting machines, then what?
Stats
Jorge Gottwald is our ace pitcher – not just our best pitcher, but the best pitcher in the entire ILB – with an ERA of 1.17 (at time of writing). Unfortunately, our next best pitcher is Zelda Carman (pregame ritual, appropriately, “delusions of grandeur”), whose ERA is… 4.13. (Blaseball-reference is currently not working for Short Circuit teams, as it only covers the stats of the mainline ILB, but Bricks works just fine for now.)
Meanwhile, snowflakes have increased Clark Heavens’ pitching stats from 0.2 to a whole… 0.3 stars! Is Clark even salvageable? It might take a full Cold Call reroll to get them usable.
And Cy Hardcore is tied for second leaguewide in total number of snowflakes received (though Jason Sauce of the Core Mechanics has 19 to Cy, Prometheus Bug, and City Giles’s 16).
An Aside
The Garages have opened submissions for a future Away Games album – a guest album open for submissions by people from other teams. If people ask for it, we could unarchive the #beat-drop channel for another collab…