filed by Agent O
We have a video. We have a date. We have an announcement.
Also we have drafted two more OG Blaseball players with prominent names: Esme Ramsey and Rivers Rosa.
An Animated Anchor
Firstly: There is a new Blaseball Roundup! Well, sort of. It’s really more of a trailer? It’s got a new artstyle. One where the Anchor is more… two-dimensional.
It’s over here. It’s less than three minutes long, and it has good closed captions. So if you are capable of watching video, go watch it, then come back here. I’ll wait.
As seen at the end of the video: New Blaseball will launch on January 9th, 2023.
Allegedly we will learn further information about Blaseball’s new iteration leading up to said date; notably this includes the mobile app (for both iOS and Android), which should apparently be released sometime before the start of the new Season.
If you haven’t been reading recent Debriefings, I have previously discussed most other confirmed details of New Blaseball here (see the “Out-Of-Band Communication” section).
And Here’s Some Extensive Overanalysis
Also, there are several things in the trailer that visually confirm more about the new Era than one might naïvely expect:
- The Anchor holding a ball that drips blood, along with the images attached to some of the other press articles, lends further credence to the idea that “Blaseball” is a portmanteau of “blood” + “Baseball”.
- Weather conditions appearing in this trailer (and thus, basically confirmed to return) include blooddrain, birds, and a weird lightning strike on the field that this writer is guessing may be Feedback?
- There appears to be a Hades Tigers fan among the animators, as their emblematic sitting-and-looking-over-one-shoulder tiger appears during the betting section.
- Betting to directly earn votes, with no coins as intermediaries, will remain the order of the day. I mean, we did kinda murder the concept of currency at the end of the Expansion Era.
- Dice and playing cards both make an appearance, which is probably a visual metaphor for the betting/gambling nature of the gameplay but could conceivably be an actual thing?
- The Squid appears.
- The Microphone though given the end of Short Circuits I guess it’s supposed to be the Macrophone now? also makes an appearance.
- There is also a peanut. Probably the Nutling.
- There is a joke that player trades are more upsetting than player deaths. Grain of truth to that one…
- It has been promised that Blaseball statisticians will lose their minds. Again.
- The Anchor is seen in the process of falling into the Black Hole, a thing that was only previously implied to have happened on Twitter.
- As previously noted – Blaseball will be returning on January 9th.
Two OGs
We received a Fall last week, as well as a Fall this week. As I did not cover last week’s lack of news, let me talk about them both.
Esme Ramsey, formerly a staple of the Charleston Shoe Thieves, had the dubious award of having the longest career of never having moved from their position. (Reese was in second place after Voicemailing in Season 23.) She was also famously Haunted, but that had been Reformed several seasons ago. She is allegedly also a good baker? And has a good practical knowledge of how to get people pointed in the same direction due to a de facto co-captainship of the Thieves.
Rivers Rosa, an OG Chicago Firefighter with a brief stint on the Ohio Worms and a stay to cool her heels in the shadows of the LA Unlimited Tacos, has also showed up. It is alleged that she has been getting along surprisingly well with our other Rivers, Rivers Javier, despite the latter’s thrill-seeking, due to bonding over studying fire science and weather science respectively.
Alongside Margarito Nava, that makes three season 1 OGs with extensive leadership experience on one team. One presumes that the Spies’ regular meetings to maintain and document their horizontal organizational structure (as requested and instructed by Wyatt Mason IV, who read every file on procedure and practice while wandering through an empty Agency) are coming in handy to make sure none of them feel the pressure of needing to be in charge, and – just as importantly – preventing any of them from instinctively accidentally doing so.
Outbox
Last week, two unlored Spies Shadows, Grit Freeman and ill-gotten gain from the Phantom Thieves Guild Atma Blueberry, fell to the Hades Tigers and Mexico City Wild Wings, respectively.
And in this week’s Fall the Philly Pies are already having fun with Marco Escobar – more specifically, with the fact that Escobar only knew the Philly Pies through the stories of Morrow Wilson, whose relationship with the Pies was… fraught, to say the least. Aside from this they are also talking about a Columbo aesthetic, Burn Notice except in Philadelphia with two wizards (the other being Bevan Wise), and wondering if Escobar fell to Philly to attend PAX.
I think Marco will do just fine.
In Which I Directly Contradict The Anchor’s Advice, As Well As Almost Everyone Else’s
And finally, an Agent O Editorial.
In my personal opinion, when you are recruiting friends of yours to Blaseball, don’t recommend the same team to them as the one you are already on. Recommend them a different team that suits them. Yes, you are handing them off to a totally different welcoming party and a totally different internal culture. This is the point.
See, I find it is significantly more interesting when “the group chat”’s #splorts-illustrated channel has multiple teams represented in it. Aside from the joking rivalries and the rooting against each other until you end up rooting for each other, everyone bringing fragments of their own teams’ stories and happenings to the table is actually a lot of fun. When someone shows up to report that “the Crabs are having a normal one”, or to ask for help with an interteam plot to reform Jaylen Hotdogfingers’ Flickering – it really makes Blaseball feel… bigger, you know?
And if we are to take care of our own – our own being all the league – we need as many crossteam connections as we can get.
See You Next Unknowable Unit Of Time
As previously discussed: I may skip Fall Ball Debriefings if there is no news to be had. So see you either next week, or the week after, or whenever there turns out to be anything interesting to report.