Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1663: If Baseball Were Different, it Would Be Blaseball

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Justin Dunn’s offseason overhaul and the value of spring training clichés, the Brewers signing Jackie Bradley Jr., why Jake Odorizzi is still a free agent, where he’ll end up, and why he’ll decide the EW free agent contracts competition, and an abominable baseball scene from the new movie […]

Empty stadiums Waiting for players to wake up Waiting for Blaise Ball to come back A cup of coffee by my side I'm ready for the RBL to come alive The siesta's been good but the seasons are better I'm mourning for Parker He's not dead? Whatever. Here's a solo. Hello and welcome to episode 1663 of Effectively Wild,

a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you? Doing all right. Did you read Ryan Divish's story about Justin Dunn? No, I have not had a chance yet. Well, Justin Dunn, he has checked every box on the spring training storyline bingo card,

which is pretty much how Ryan put it. So Ryan made fun of himself for writing this story. So I am not punching down or anything here. This story has everything that you could want for a player who comes into spring and says that he's gotten better in some way. So best shape of his life, you've got different diet, different workout plan, increased velocity, different pitch grip. I will just read some of the highlights here. So he says, arguably the best shape I've ever been in my life.

I've made a lot of life changes nutritionally, putting more of an emphasis on that and getting my body right. I learned some really interesting things about my body over the off season. He dropped about 10 pounds, but also reapportioned the weight on his body. So he has reduced his fat level around the legs and core area and replaced it with lean muscle. Love when we get really specific about like where the fat was or is and where the lean muscle is now. So there's that. Let's see. He got back in the gym.

He started moving weights. He got faster. He got stronger. He got some athleticism back. And he was apparently challenged to improve in various ways by Scott Service, Jerry DiPoto, people with the Mariners. And so he's answered the challenge in every possible way that he could. Then there's the nutrition. He underwent some testing under the founder of Precision Foodworks and Macro Human,

whatever that is. And Dunn says, I learned a couple of small things. There was an amino acid I was lacking in my body for burst energy production. I wasn't able to be as fast twitch or explode down the mound as fast as I wanted to be. He found out that he's allergic to cheese and eggs, so he had to stop eating pizza. He's a New Yorker, so it's tough to give up pizza, but he did it for baseball. As a result, I guess, he has reduced his fat level around the legs and core area. Don't know if that was worth it. And then he has increased his velocity because of the strength increases, I guess, and the conditioning improvements. So he's throwing a good deal harder than he was reportedly. And then there's the new

pitch grip and the new grip or the new pitch. That's always among my favorite storylines. So here's his story it's a blessing from god man honestly i was holding a baseball in my car while i was driving one day and talking to him him being god not the baseball the h is capitalized he told me i blessed you with three people in your life pedro martinez frank viola and trevor homan. Now take all three of those grips and blend them into one. Whoa. This is great advice from God to take the three of the best. So he took Hoffman's palm ball grip.

Then he took the hybrid circle change using the two close seams of the ball that Frank Viola taught him when he was with the Mets. Cool. two close seams of the ball that Frank Viola taught him when he was with the Mets. Cool. And then Pedro, he offset his fingers to get the middle and ring fingers on top of the ball. So he put them all together. And now he has the Justin Dunn Franken pitch grip. Wow.

And it does everything. It's the three great pitches combined into one because of this moment of epiphany. Well, I will give Ryan and I guess Justin Dunn, by extension, a little bit of credit, which is that he did not say that he went to driveline to find that change script. So in that respect, it does not live up to recent cliche. But yes, it does seem to roll a bunch of off-season improvement you know i

i get why we goof on guys for this stuff because like what else are they gonna say but also what else are they gonna say yeah you know i think and i'm not saying that you're trying to goof on either ryan davish or justin dunn all that harshly with this but i find it i know that the perception is that these are like kind of softball questions and then softball answers but you know i sometimes this stuff really does bear fruit and the change is always interesting even if it doesn't end up sticking because like that's interesting too right when guys show up in the best shape of their life the reason we scoff is because some of those guys you know by the end of april they look like they're in the normal shape of their life the reason we scoff is because some of those guys you know by the end of april they look like they're in the normal shape of their life right yeah the previous shape of their life i'm not going to put any kind of judgment on that shape because there are all

sorts of shapes and over the last year some of us have explored new ones so i have no judgment about that shape but you know that's why that's why we kind of scoff at it because it's like well these seem like changes that either aren't going to stick or don't bear fruit but some of them do and when they regress like that tells you something right that's interesting about in some way about the sustainability of the regimen or how effective it really proved to be and so i think i would like to use this opportunity to stand up for the maligned best shape of his life narrative which i I'm very surprised by, Ben. I've surprised myself.

No, I actually agree with you. I've written about this back in my Grantland days. I did a little study on best shape of his lifers. huge effect. It did seem like the guys who showed up in the best shape of their lives had some small playing time boost based on comparing to projections. I looked at what they were projected to do and what they had actually done, and it seemed like the best shape of his lifers actually played more and maybe a little bit better. So there did seem to be a little bit of a boost, as you would expect there to be. I mean, these are professional athletes. If they're getting stronger and faster and better, you would expect that to have some effect.

It's not completely implausible that this might actually matter. And I've written in the past about new pitches, too. And again, comparing to projections, I found that there did seem to be some evidence that players who picked up a new pitch pitched better than their projections, which, again, you would sort of expect in theory. I'm not saying it's a huge effect. And so maybe the reason why it's so often discounted is because there are a lot of players who show up in the best shape of their lives or they have a new pitch or something and then nothing happens. players who show up in the best shape of their lives or they have a new pitch or something and then nothing happens. As you said, they don't stick with it or they do stick with it and it just doesn't have a demonstrable effect. It's not going to turn everyone into Superman. But if you had to choose, would you rather have a player who was in the best shape of his life or

not in the best shape? I mean, it seems like best shape is better, all else being equal. So it is sort of silly because there are certain players who show up in the best shape of their lives self-professed every spring. And then it's kind of like, you know, the player who cried best shape of their life. Maybe they're just constantly getting into better shape year after year after year, but probably not. And then most players are in pretty good shape to begin with. probably not and then most players are in pretty good shape to begin with so yeah maybe it wouldn't have a huge effect or getting in better shape is not going to suddenly help you hit a curveball or something so there's a limit to how great an effect it could be but like i would rather have a player on my team in the best shape of his life than not and there are certainly some cases if it's a player

like vlad j. or something who seems to really have remade himself over the offseason where you'd think that it would be a good sign. So I agree with you. We remember all the times, I guess, where you heard that someone completely transformed themselves and then did not have a transformed season. But I think there are cases where it matters at least a little bit, and we could applaud the effort, right? They put the work in, unless it's eyewash, in which case, which it very well could be.

It's easy to talk to the reporter and say, yeah, best shape of my life, and I lost some fat around my core and my legs, and whatever, unless you're showing them the body fat test, then maybe you're just making it up. Well, this is always such a funny one for normal people, because often, you know, sometimes there are softer bodied guys. And I don't think Justin Dunn falls into this category. This is the weird thing about it. It's like, I don't want to talk about your body. I don't know you. That's very strange to do. He put it out there. concerns that I think we saw borne out and maybe he's actually going to be able to course correct

for Flagler or Junior where it's like that body does not seem like it's going to be able to sort of stick with the rigors of third base right there's a lack of physicality there that's important to actually being able to field but often the guys who come into camp and they're like they're in I'm in the best shape of my life and I was like like, you looked fine before. I don't know. How good a shape do you have to be into being a professional baseball player? Pretty good, but that's how you look. So I don't know. But I also think that players who show, demonstrate a willingness to sort of grapple with what hasn't gone well for them in the past and then try a new thing, whether that inspiration comes from Grantland or is divine. I just think that that kind of both introspection and then willingness to admit that you need

to try something different is a really good thing. And it doesn't always work, but I think that it's like an admirable trait just for human beings and sounds like a really useful one for baseball players. So you have actually taught us something about ourselves and our spirits, Ryan Divish and Justin Dunn. And so don't give yourself any grief, I think. Yeah. There are cases where it'll be like one off season.

They'll be in the best shape of their lives because they bulked up. And then at the end of that season, they'll be like, oh, I got too bulky. And then the next spring, it's like, oh, I did yoga and I did flexibility. So now I can do splits and I'm in the best shape of my life. And then sometimes it's like, oh, I just couldn't keep enough weight on at the end of the season. I lost some strength. So I'm hitting the weights again. So there's definitely a bit of a back and forth there. And I think there's probably more science to the process being applied now because there are like actual sports science departments who are, you know, telling you what your nutrition should be and what your workout plan should be and what you have to work on as opposed

to players just deciding this seems like a good idea or I will talk to someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about. So, yeah. I, you know, the concept of reverse projection is a thing for a reason right that like we've we've never seen either major league teams or sort of the the trainers and and nutritionists and what have you in the sort of broader baseball ecosystem be sharper about this stuff and better equipped to to help guys out which isn't to say that there isn't still some snake oil out there but um i think in general you know part of why we talk about this generation of players being

among the best we've ever seen is that they've just you know been able to apply really smart conditioning and nutrition programs to themselves in a way that does enhance their performance pretty demonstrably so yeah that part is not surprising to me. I do like it when they are like, oh, yeah, I did yoga and then I could touch my toes. And I'm like, I can't do that. And I feel like that's a place where I should be able to match you as a professional athlete and I still can't. And then I feel humble.

I've never been very flexible. I'm not flexible at all. I've never minded not being flexible. Why do I have to be flexible? I want to be flexible. It seems like it would be cool to be able to touch your toes, but I have a busted hip. It's a whole thing.

It's fine, but it does make you have to grapple with your own limitations as a person when you're like the one thing that i should be able to do that a professional baseball player can also do yeah when we used to have to do the the presidential fitness tests i don't know if you had to do those as a kid yeah they they spare the current kids from doing those i think but you know there were various tests and one of them was the sit and reach. And that was the one that I was not great at, but also the one that I just didn't really care about because it's okay if I can't reach that far while I'm sitting, I'll just get up. I'll just move a little bit.

So I don't know. I'm not a gymnast or anything. I don't need to be that flexible. It's never seemed to be that big an impediment to me, but I understand why it would be if you are a baseball player and you have to do a split at first base or something that can come in handy. Anyway, regardless of how Justin Dunn pitches this season, I admire the origin story for his pitch because we're getting a whole lot of, well, I threw off a mound with Rapsodo and Trackman and Edutronic and all of that. And I admire the work ethic there too. And there's a science to that also, but it's not the most entertaining origin story. Whereas this one, just the divine epiphany, like the burning bush in the tablet, and it told him to throw like Pedro and Frank Viola and Trevor Hoffman. I mean,

it sounds easy if you can just throw it like all those Hall of Famers did it. But once in a while, it actually works that way. Like, you know, Mariano Rivera will teach Roy Halladay his putter. Sometimes it actually is that easy. So I will be curious to see how that works out, but it's a good story at least. So we do have an interview to get to shortly. We will be talking to Sam Rosenthal and Joel Clark, who are game designers for the Game Band. They are the co-creators of Blaseball, which I think we probably should have discussed on this podcast before now because it is philosophically and spiritually

aligned with what we do here. And it's hard to explain what it is. That will be a subject of our interview. But basically, it is a baseball simulation, internet-based game that has become sort of a viral sensation and has developed a lot of lore and a thriving, rich community. So it's basically, as I will say, like if you took Effectively Wild hypotheticals and made them into a sport. So that's a fun conversation that we will get to very soon. I guess briefly we could mention that Jackie Bradley Jr. has a job now, which is probably a good thing because we're less than a month away from opening day. The Brewers were the ones who won the very slow-moving Jackie Bradley Jr. sweepstakes for two years and $24 million with an opt-out.

Yes, and I think that this makes Milwaukee better. It makes their outfield defense better, although it wasn't as if they had a bunch of slouches out there. They were outfield defense better, although it wasn't as if they had a bunch of slouches out there. But the amount of money here makes me really still very confused about why the Mets did not further upgrade their center field situation. Or the Phillies. Or really pick them, because this isn't exactly a huge contract. He does have the opt-out after the first year, you know if he has a really stellar one he might test the market again but it's good for milwaukee i wonder it's like it's jackie bradley jr the difference in the central who could say yeah might be true yeah that seems like slim margins there so

anyone could be the difference but yeah i mean he's uh coming off a very good offensive season, especially by his standards. And so I think he was hoping it seemed like he was seeking a longer term and more lucrative deal. And, you know, I think probably teams looked at the longer track record of him being a below average hitter and assumed that that's probably who he is, which he's still been a very useful player, even as a below average hitter because of his base running and defense. And it seems like he still provides a lot of that. So I don't know if he's disappointed with the terms he ended up on here. If he is, he can turn it into

a pillow contract and he can go have a great year and opt out and hit the market again. But yeah, it's the official end of the killer bees, Red Sox outfield. So end of an era there, but the Brewers will be the beneficiaries. For sure. Gotta hand it to those Brewers. They're always active. They're always trying to find ways to get better. They've managed not to be bad for quite some time. It's hard to upgrade your defense more in two moves than by signing Colton Wong and Jackie Bradley Jr. And there's really only one prominent free agent left, right? The tragedy of Jake Odorisi still on the market. And I am personally invested in his free agency because as friend of the show and official stat keeper of Effectively Wild, John Chenier informed me this morning,

he is going to be the decisive player when it comes to the offseason free agent contracts draft that Sam and I did back in November. All of Sam's picks have signed and all of my picks have signed except for Jake Odorizzi. And we are very close. We're neck and neck. We're both a little bit over $100 million in the right direction. So I guess we did okay. But as opposed to last year where Sam totally cleaned my clock, I am within striking distance here. And if I picked right on Odorizzi, then I will win.

And if I picked wrong, then Sam will win. So it's really coming down to the wire. I took the under on the MLB trade rumors prediction for Odorizzi at the start of the offseason, which was $39 million. So I am in the position of not rooting for Jake Odorizzi to make less money than he wants to make, but I stand to gain in an intangible way the bragging rights that I would get from this. And it's really like, I don't know what he can expect now, but he was said to be seeking something very much in that range. I think Ken Rosenthal reported back in January that he was hoping for and expecting a three-year deal in the $36 million to $42 million range,

three-year deal in the $36 million to $42 million range, which if he's still holding out for that, that is right in that decisive range. So I'm on the edge of my seat here, but he's really had to wait quite a long time. And I feel for him. Last year, he took the qualifying offer coming off of a strong season. And in retrospect, I don't think that was the greatest decision. It seemed like from what I've read, there was a lot of interest in him before he took it, but the timing being what it was and the uncertainty about how free agency works these days, he ended up taking that. I would have to think based on how the rest of the market played out and some of the deals that comparable pitchers got that he could have done better if he had tested the market. So don't know if he regrets that decision.

But then now he hits the market again without the qualifying offer attached. And yet he is coming off a season that he missed most of with various injuries, not arm injuries, but a bunch of nagging things that limited him to very little time and he didn't pitch well when he was pitching. So just bad timing. Every now and then you have players who just sort of seem to hit free agency at the wrong time. And that has been the case for Odorizzi. So in that sense, I'd like him to do well, even though I've got something riding on it here. And you wonder if he might end up, I know that they're sort of flirting with the luxury tax threshold if they sign him,

but the Astros look like they maybe are losing for Valdez for the whole year. Yeah, that would be a big blow. Yeah, with his finger being broken. And so when you look at the sort of collection of available free agents still on the market, you have Odorizzi, you have Cole Hamels, I guess. I'm definitely forgetting someone.

And someone right now is like, Meg, didn't you edit Ben Clemens writing about the phenomena of the Houston rotation this very morning? And didn't he say in that piece who the best remaining free agents are? And you would say, yeah, I would say, yeah, that's definitely true. But I'm forgetting one of them, and I can't scroll fast enough. Here we go. You got Rick Porcello and also Anabel Sanchez.

And so of that group, I would imagine that Odorizzi is the one who you feel the most confidence in. There's injury issues to be had and performance issues to be had with all of them, but by virtue of that, you might end up with Odorizzi on the outside looking in in a situation like Houston, if they're like really wanting to be strict about not passing the luxury tax threshold. So I feel like there are opportunities to be had, which feels silly to say. It shouldn't take, you know, an exciting young pitcher breaking his finger for that to be

true, because every team needs more pitching than they start the year with so it's bizarre that he doesn't have a you know a suitor sort of already in hand but he might it might be okay ben he might do well yeah i mean he must have some level of interest i guess it's just not meeting what he thinks it should be j jaffe broke down potential destinations a few days ago, and you probably edited that too. Didn't edit that one. Okay. Well, Nationals, he mentioned Phillies, Red Sox, Rays, Cleveland, Angels, Astros, Cubs. There are a lot of teams that would be better if they had Jay Cotarizzi, not just for depth, but because he's a pretty good pitcher.

Right. Aside from 2020. So as Jay mentioned, there's some precedent for players and pitchers going into spring training and signing deals in March that worked out okay for them. Like Alex Cobb a few years ago when he signed with the Orioles for a four-year $57 million deal, or Jake Arrieta did a three-year deal, and Kyle Loesch had that well-known deal back in 2013 when he signed with the Brewers. So it has happened. There are also a bunch of guys who've had to settle for one-year contracts at this point. It's just in March with the market being what it is. And as Jay noted, Trevor Bauer is the only pitcher who got a three

year deal this off season, three or more years, which is very unusual. Usually there are quite a few who get a multi-year deal for more than two years. And this year it was just Bauer, which is, you know, partly perhaps a reflection of the pitchers who were on the market but also probably a reflection of the market itself so given that it's march and that no one else has signed that sort of deal i don't know that it's realistic for odorisi to expect that but he deserves it based on the past track record and probably would have gotten it in a different year yeah i mean someone else will get hurt that's a terrible thing or don terrible thing to do don't try to catch the baseball with your bare hand

don't do it sometimes it's fine and sometimes you break your thingy and then you're going to be out for the whole season maybe they don't know for sure but that is how it looks like it's trending at this moment yeah alright it is that uncomfortable position of like if you're still waiting for a deal now it's like okay who moment. Yeah. All right. Yeah, it is that uncomfortable position of like,

if you're still waiting for a deal now, it's like, okay, who's going to hurt his elbow or something that I can take advantage of that. I'm sure he's not actively rooting for anyone. I'm sure he is not. But that's where the opportunities come from. So we'll see what happens there. We have one more thing that we need to talk about before we get to our guests here. This is going to be tough. So this is a result of an email that we got from listener Aaron. Great email. Thank you very much to Aaron for bringing this to our attention. There is a baseball scene in a newly released film, Tom and Jerry.

Tom and Jerry available on HBO Max and also, I guess, in theaters if you're going to theaters these days. There's a baseball scene and it's not the best. It's just not the best. So we have to do one of our little reviews of what went wrong here. So I'm going to play a quick clip.

It's about 30 seconds and it's pretty impressive that they managed to cram as many mistakes into this 30-second clip as they did. You will not be able to tell all of the mistakes from this sound clip. You will have to watch the clip, and I will provide that on the show page. But for now, I'll just set the scene here. They show Yankee Stadium. Tom and Jerry are going to a game. Did not watch the rest of Tom and Jerry to get the context for this excursion. Tom and Jerry, from what I understand, not the greatest critically acclaimed film of all time.

But this scene, they go to Yankee Stadium and they sit in the outfield stands and here's the sound. Beautiful day at Yankee Stadium. Top of the ninth inning, two out and the Yankees up by one. Big Alex Gordon at the plate. That ball is rushed. This might be it. The ball game may be over. The Yankees could move on.

And oh, what's this? A hairy fan has reached over and caught the ball. Mayhem unfolds at Yankee Stadium. Two baseball fans seated in right field interrupted what could have been the final out for the Yankees. The culprits were later taken away by animal control. Okay, so if you couldn't tell what happens here is alex gordon is up he hits a fly ball to left it's supposed to be a ball that is like at the warning track and the yankees outfielder is reaching up to get it and then tom wait which one is tom

which one is jerry i think that i think the cat is Tom and the mouse is Jerry. Yes, I think that's right. So Tom reaches over and snags the ball. Looks like it's going to be a home run, and it's not. He catches it, and then he gets thrown out of the ballpark, and everyone's mad at him because it looks like this is going to be the last out of the game. And instead, at least in the universe of the movie, Tom has made it a home run by reaching over and catching it, or at least preventing the outfielder from catching it. So where do we start here with What Went Wrong? Okay, so my first issue is very, well, my first issue is I don't

know why we needed this movie. Tom and Jerry is like an incredibly violent cartoon that I thought we kind of weren't watching anymore. Like my sister won't let my nieces watch Tom and Jerry because they beat the shit out of each other for 20 minutes at a time. She's like, basically. Right. Yeah. This is what itchy and scratchy is based on. So that's, but that's neither here nor there. The first issue is that the audio track appears to be saying that this is going to right. Right? Yeah. Right. And it is not. They are, it is going to left field. This ball is going to left field.

So that's the first issue. The second issue that i have with this is that the way that it is shot it kind of looks like they're sitting in foul territory yeah i thought that too so i don't i guess like the volume and animation with which this is being called seems out of out of sync in that respect the the other problem is that and it's a little hard to tell from the angles that we have like i assume the replay center in new york had more angles but it sort of looks like tom we established that tom is the cat it looks like tom is reaching into the field of play to obstruct the fielder from catching a catchable

ball which would be spectator interference, and the batter would just be out. So I don't understand why there is any controversy to be had here. Right. Now, I suppose that if they are meant to be sitting in foul territory and Joe Buck is just getting really excited about a ball that's going to hook foul, that perhaps people

would be mad because maybe he didn't reach out as far as it seems when you watch the clip and so i don't know like it seems as if either he committed fan interference in which case this is not a problem or he just caught about a ball in foul territory in which case i don't understand why anyone is mad at him it's like fans do that all the time i also find it very disquieting ben that they start by referring to them as fans and then at the end when they are being rushed into an animal control cage they are referred to as animals they they have a glove they have concessions they presumably went to purchase those concessions at no point in their Yankee Stadium experience did someone say, no, we will not sell to this mouse and this cat who are improbably friends and maybe are going to beat the shit out of

each other while they're at this baseball game. They were just fans there to enjoy a day at the ballpark. And then as soon as they do something wrong, they are reduced to animals. Very upsetting. Yeah. I have a number of problems with this, which you mentioned some of them, and Aaron mentioned some of them in his email as well. As Aaron pointed out, Joe Buck refers to Alex Gordon as Big Alex Gordon. Yeah, what's that about? Which is odd. It's definitely not his

nickname. Big Alex Gordon. I tried to Google that, and all I found was people saying they were Big Alex Gordon fans or something. I'm surprised by that too. Or a big Alex Gordon hit. So that was not helpful. But the point is he's not that big. He's 6'1". 6'1". The average position player is 6'1".

I actually looked that up. So he is average height. He may be beefier. I mean, he's certainly strong and fit, but I wouldn't say he's big, Alex Gordon. There are much bigger players out there. So that was semi-weird. But also, the ball that is hit, this is a real play.

It's real footage. So I'll give them credit for that, at least. You know, when we talked about Cobra Kai and they were trying to pass off a Dodgers-Giants game that was really just a minor league game. This is not that. This is an actual major league game at Yankee Stadium, so some points for that. But I found the play. I found the clip, which was easy to do at Baseball Savant, and it's a ball that Gordon hit off of Jay Happ in 2018, and it's a can of corn. It is just a lazy fly ball to left field and i do not understand why if you are

trying to make this a home run robbery or a home run interference why you would just choose a lazy fly ball there's so many options there's so many fly balls hit to the warning track in yankee stadium with the juice ball you could go on savant and find one in five minutes. So I really don't understand, like, if they had, you know, whatever clearance that they had to use a clip from this game, why could they just not use a clip that actually looked like it matched the situation? It's clearly off the bat, not a home run in any way, shape, or form or close to it. Gardner is nowhere near the warning track, let alone the wall when he caught that ball. So that's one problem. And then yes, as you mentioned, then the news broadcast says it was hit to right field when it was quite clearly hit to left field. And you make a good point about the fan interference. But all of these things, it's a 30-second scene. So it's

really impressive that they screwed it up in this many ways and like they got joe buck for this like right they they were not sparing expense in that way like if you're gonna go get joe buck and you're gonna use a real game like why not just get this right it would be so easy to just fact check that is it left field or is it right field or does this bat at ball look like it actually fits the situation that we have concocted here so i just don't get it and we repeat this over and over and no one ever takes us up on our offer to help them as baseball scene consultants and look i don't want to discourage people from putting baseball scenes in their movies not that anyone

in hollywood is like listening to us skewer the scene and saying oh i'll choose a basketball scene instead because i i want to stay off of effectively wild's bad side or something i think it's a a good thing for the sport that these scenes exist especially like with ostensibly a kid's movie like Sonic the Hedgehog last year had a baseball scene and it was a good, fun baseball scene where A, Sonic is watching a little league team play and he really wants to get involved and then he plays by himself and he's so fast that he can play every position and hit the ball to himself and field and round the bases and do it all. And it's cool. I enjoyed that scene and that was a very successful movie and a lot of kids saw it and good publicity for baseball, right? We talk all the time about, you know, baseball not reaching a young audience. So if there's a baseball scene in a movie like Sonic the Hedgehog, or even a movie like Tom and Jerry, great. I'm glad that kids are getting exposed to those things. Audiences are getting exposed to those things. If kids still care about Tom and Jerry, which I don't know. But it seems like a good thing. And I think, if anything, baseball is still probably overrepresented in film and TV relative to its popularity, it seems to me. My perception is skewed because people tell us about all the baseball scenes and not about the basketball and football scenes.

But it seems to me like there's probably more baseball in movies. And I don't know if it's just sort of the romance of baseball or the America's pastime lingering reputation or whether it's seen as wholesome and tradition and family or what. But I think it's a good thing for the sport. I just wish that they would get the details right. And I'm not saying that this will bother any kids or turn kids off of the sport, but if you're going to spend $80 million or whatever on a movie, and if you're going to hire Joe Buck to broadcast your scene, just get someone who knows anything about baseball. I'll let Joe Buck off the hook here. I'll assume that he just recorded his lines in one minute and that was that, and they didn't give him a final cut on

this or something. But someone, it doesn't take someone who is the managing editor of a baseball site and hosts a baseball podcast to see these things. Any baseball fan could see these things. I don't get it. I just don't get it. Why not get it right? I'm just watching this clip on mute over and over and over again as you're talking. I think they're definitely sitting in foul territory. That makes the left field, right field confusion even stranger. I also don't understand like this movie was clearly not filmed during the pandemic so i'm a little surprised that they didn't say to like they didn't want to go to aaron judge and say hey aaron judge we're gonna pay you for a day on the set to try to rob a home run as a person who frequently does that right just by standing and reaching up. Right, and then have you be

mad at the cartoon cat and be like, ah, and then it would be a real Yankee and kids would be like, wow, look at that big tall man who plays baseball. I shall be a baseball fan. And then we'll all sing and cheer and it would be so great. So there's that part. Did Joe Buck push back on the big Alex

Gordon line at all? He may have thrown that in there.e buck has a strange sense of humor which i quite enjoy actually and for all i know he may have suggested the big alex gordon or you know if this is him ad-libbing then then i change my opinion of it but if this is him getting it on a script and going yeah i may as well do this maybe it's like kershaw on the hancock tire commercial where it's like this does not make any sense but the check is gonna clear so let us get on with our business so i just also there are so many people so close together when will i get over that yeah it's gonna take some time to get used to gonna take a little bit of time also i feel like they're

doing j-hop dirty in this scene-Hap got an easy out here. He got an easy out. He's just trying to get an easy out and go about his business. Do you think that they picked the Yankees because they can have an anonymous Yankee and people will be like, well, he doesn't have to have a name on the back of his jersey because he's a Yankee. Whereas if they had done this with the Mets, then it wouldn't have gone as well because they have names on the back of their jerseys, right? Maybe he is.

Yeah. It at least looks relatively like a baseball player and it looks like a Yankees uniform. Sure. I don't fault them for not paying Aaron Judge's appearance fee for this if he was not eager to be in Tom and Jerry, but I do fault them for just getting the very basic details wrong because it would be so easy. Not even asking for you to have a bigger budget. It's not like the scene itself is my problem with this. It's such avoidable mistakes here.

It's, hey, choose a different clip instead of this one. Say left field instead of right field. It costs you no more money to do those things. So I don't understand that. Yeah, that part they need to get right. Also, I know that cotton candy is light, but I don't think that tiny mouse could hold up all that cotton candy. I just don't believe that at all.

Yeah. Anyway, it continues to mystify me. Please call us. Our rates are very reasonable. I don't even know what they are because no one has ever taken us up on this they might be free this might be just a fun sideline for us I wouldn't mind buying a new dining room table so they wouldn't be free but they would be reasonable

yes very reasonable yeah just to spare me the angst of having to see this and wondering. The two of us cost less than Joe Buck. Yeah. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. Anyway, I guess I forgive them for the fan interference thing to some extent just because

narratively speaking, I guess they needed them to get thrown out of the park and some excuse for that. Right. What else could they really do? Yeah. Unless they were heckling or throwing beer at people or something, which is something Tom and Jerry would do probably. Right, because they're violent little jerks. I guess they can't streak because they're already naked. Right, yeah.

Anyway, I like baseball being in movies. I like the sonic scene. It really makes baseball look fun but this just please call us next time just anyone did they fix Sonic's weird human teeth yes they did

alright I will link to this by the way so you can all go watch it it's on the show page as is the actual big Alex Gordon clip that it came from. So if you have any further thoughts, please feel free to write in and let us know. And thanks to everyone who informs us of these things. Because frankly, I was not planning to take in Tom and Jerry anytime soon. I guess it's a mixed blessing because this almost made me mad.

I am not quick to anger, but this almost got me there. But still, thanks to the network of people who watch bad baseball things and tell us about them so that we don't have to. And I feel for Aaron because his email signature says that he is majoring in cinema studies. And this is probably not what he imagined when he chose that major, that he would do a close reading of the baseball scene in Tom and Jerry. But thanks anyway, Aaron. So we will take a quick break and we'll be right back with Sam Rosenthal and Joel Parker to talk about baseball. Let me into the place.

Oh, let me into the stands. The crackle of peanuts, the crack of the gun blades. All right. We are back and we're ready or as ready as we'll ever be to talk about Blaze Fall and who better to explain the wonders and oddities or attempt to explain them of this semi-inscrutable and mysterious sport than the fellas who created it

Sam Rosenthal and Joe Clark of The Game Band, an LA-based video game studio Sam is the founder and creative director at The Game Band, an LA-based video game studio. Sam is the founder and creative director at The Game Band. Hello, Sam. Hi. And Joel is a game developer and designer also at The Game Band. Hello, Joel. Hello.

And together, they gave birth to this thing. It sounds like neither of them completely understands, and probably no one else does either, but we're all trying to explain it and understand it together. So we'll get to that. I guess if we could start maybe with your origin stories as baseball fans, as reality league baseball fans, the old fashioned boring baseball that we grew up with. I assume that you both care deeply about that sport too, or it would have been difficult to give birth to this variant of it. So. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Sam, if you want to go first or just kind of tell us how you came to like it or what you like about it or what you're a fan of and how that led to baseball. Sure. I mean, baseball has kind of been in the periphery of my life for a really long time.

And Joel and I actually went to a ton of games together back when we could do that. And that was actually where a lot of the seeds for baseball came. We would go to a bunch of Dodgers games. And when they were winning, we would be to a bunch of Dodgers games and you know when they were winning we would be really invested when they weren't winning we'd start talking about other stuff and there was one game in particular I remember I think it was a postseason game that they were losing pretty badly and we just started to to riff a bit and to say like what if the sport was was different and stranger and um came up with all these crazy ideas like you know players holding water jugs above their heads and and all of that

um but yeah i mean you know sports have been are just a great way to to connect with friends and and get together with a bunch of people regardless of you know what their overall interests are in life it's always kind of been a really good unifier so i think it was a really natural place with a bunch of people regardless of what their overall interests are in life. It's always kind of been a really good unifier. So I think it was a really natural place for us to turn to when we were looking to create a game that could bring a lot of people together. Yeah. You have anything to add to that, Joel? Yeah. Well, Sam didn't even mention he's an Orioles fan.

I feel like that's important to note here. No wonder you've turned to baseball. High percentage chance of them going to the postseason, you see. Right. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yes. And then I'll add, yeah, I've always enjoyed baseball. I'm a Royals fan. I live in Kansas City. I always went to games as a kid and then baseball, sorry, I get the words confused these days but baseball became a bigger you know part of my life and i paid attention a lot more when the royals got good a while back and uh you know had hosmer and moustakas coming up and you know won the world series

shout out to 2015 royals it was clothing now yeah i, I knew I wasn't going to make it through this without mentioning the 2015 Royals. So there we go. But yeah, baseball itself has been a huge part of my life for a while. And so the minute we started talking about making a game baseball related, it was the right direction. It just felt so natural for us to run with. You wanted to make a game that was baseball related and you wanted to take baseball and make it stranger.

You created Blazeball. Now we have to ask you, what is this thing that you've made? Try to explain for our listeners who know baseball very well what it is that you have actually done here. So I think one kind of easy way to kind of grasp your head around what this game is, is it's like if you took fantasy baseball and then put like an absurdist horror kind of spin on top of it. So it's like what if fantasy baseball was actually fantasy like what if there were black holes that could open or umpires that went rogue and could incinerate players with their eyeballs like all the sorts of kind of cosmic horror types of things

that you would see if you were reading like a lovecraft story but mixed in with with baseball and then or with baseball and then with then with the community part of the game is kind of the thing that makes it really special and different. So every week when you're playing baseball, what you're really doing is you're placing bets on these simulated games that are just kind of simulating 24 hours a day. So you're watching what kind of looks like if you're following along with the ticker on the ESPN or something, you know, just the play by play.

And as you're watching, you're placing these bets, you're cashing in your earnings. They're all fake money and you're buying a bunch of different snacks for this new era. But one of the things that you can buy are votes. And every single week we have an election. And there's a few things that we put up for vote. There's decrees, which change the overall course of the league. So you can vote for things that might say add a fifth base or open the forbidden book and all sorts of crazy things. And then we also have blessings, which are kind of a raffle that the different individual teams can win, and wills, which is another more strategic element. So what the fans end up doing is they band together on social media

and through Discord to come up with the strategies that they want to pursue and the direction that they want the game to go in. So it's sort of like a massively multiplayer choose your own adventure with a baseball spin. Yeah, if I were to say kind of the same thing, it's sort of like a massively multiplayer, choose your own adventure with a baseball spin. Yeah. If I were to say kind of the same thing, it's really just baseball with the promise that the team communities can change the game. And combine that with kind of a community storytelling experience, and you've got the starting point for baseball. And was there anything that the two of you sat down when you were starting to sort of map this out and think about the construct of the game and the rules where you said this thing from

actual baseball shall remain pure within the universe we're creating? Is there anything that is off limits in terms of the changes that you would allow community members to vote on to make to the game and its rules? Right. I've thought about that a little bit. It certainly has to have bases. And a ball, possibly. Right. I think you would need at least two bases, right? You need home and at least another base to go to. We haven't gone below four bases.

We have gone above four bases. But in my mind, i think you need at least two at all times you need players that's probably important you need players i think the pitch team has to be thrown yeah and and someone has to have a bat where they can hit the ball like beyond that i feel like nothing is sacred okay Yeah. One reason why we wanted to have you on is that I feel like we've had a lot of these conversations on this podcast. We've definitely had the, what is baseball? What are kind of the core irreducible elements that you can't remove and have it be baseball

anymore? And all of the odd hypotheticals, we have a saying on the show, if baseball were different, how different would it be? And then we run through these various strange scenarios. And what if Mike Trout had fewer fingers? And what if they ran the bases backwards? And weirder ones than that. What if everyone had an extra hand somewhere on their body?

And where would you put it to be the most advantageous? And basically, this is what that is. It's a league like that, where it's not just two people on a podcast talking about what it would be like, but you've actually created it and you have in collaboration with many people who enjoy it, shape this thing together. And it's a wonderful, beautiful thing. So I feel like a lot of our listeners, if they are not already into baseball, would find a lot to like here because they like to indulge us when we go on these wild flights of fancy about baseball. And this is what that is. And I imagine it's also pretty appealing to actually have some input into the structure of the sport because that is something that frustrates baseball fans, that they want things to change. Everyone always has things that they would change about baseball, but we can't change them.

We can't vote. The book really is forbidden and the commissioner is not always right. And there's nothing we can do about it. But in baseball, you can. And that's got to be a pretty empowering feeling. It is. Yeah. And there is this promise that things will always change because, I mean, you're

totally right that there's always this urge to change baseball, right? To be able to, as a fan, affect the rules. But I think we find a lot of the time in baseball that some of the changes that you want don't actually turn out to be that good. Right? Like, my best example is when we did add that fifth base. That was one of our earliest things of just like an example of how we could change the sport very simply. You had a fifth base. And it excited us so much. We were so excited to put in, we finally got in like season seven or something. And it was such a nightmare. It was just, it made every game just so grueling, like home runs were just basically the way you would score now. Rallies were so much

harder. And so then, yeah. And then the fifth base went away after that season. So it's like, even if a rule comes in and you don't like it, in baseball, you can take it back out in some form. It's always changing. It's always evolving. Some things become permanent and some things are just only there for a short time. So how do you implement these things exactly? Because you're simulating these games, right? So how were you simulating them at the start when it looked more like regular baseball?

And how do you decide, well, there's a fifth base now, so here's how the game is going to play out? Well, I'll speak to the tech level a bit, and then I'll let Sam talk to the design side a little bit more. But we just built the simulation from the ground up. We just built a simulation of baseball and built it in every way, knowing that we were going to try to change everything, right? And when you're like designing a code base and from that perspective, there's a way to do it. You keep everything very simple, but you just leave hooks everywhere to change it. So we're just constantly adding on to this complex simulation now. And there's just all of these different weird rules hiding in there that could be triggered by a player getting a special ability or a team getting a special ability or like some weather pattern appearing.

So we just keep adding to this pile of rules and systems and it's worked out. Yeah. On the design side, we have a writer's room every day. It's usually a few hours long and we discuss or we're usually like kind of monitoring what the community is doing and latching on to. And we discuss where, you know, we could take things. And often in those meetings, you know, we'll throw out a bunch of ideas. Joel will help us realize what is possible within the simulation, what is not

possible, so we can weigh them down a little bit there. But what we do sort of know just kind of as our core framework is that we have a couple different areas where we can get a lot of mileage out of changing things. So a really good example of this is the modifications. So if you have a player that you want to behave differently, or you have a particularly special attribute, like, let's say we have, we have a modification that was called unstable, that was more of a narrative focused modification, it made players more likely to be incinerated in our previous era. And those types of things, they're very cheap for us to make and we can throw them on to a player.

They suddenly, it totally changes how you feel about that player, how they're going to behave in a game from just like one small little attribute. So then the election is the last piece of this. There's basically, there's a global change every season. That's the decree.

And that sometimes adds a big global rule or it adds, you know, a special ability to maybe the bottom four teams or something. But then there's a set of raffles in the election called blessings. And every fan of every team is voting for these raffles, trying to win all these special abilities for their team. So that's usually how these abilities and these rule changes make it into the simulation. We're as designers just offering them up as potential things and then the community is running towards them and choosing which ones they

want and playing with it. I just have so many questions about this. But I'm going to start with a simple one because it maybe addresses one of the things that I think makes us all crazy about normal baseball, which is, are there any powerhouses that have emerged in the baseball universe? Are there teams that are always contending in your simulation versus ones that are just always in the, you know, that are cellar dwellers? Or is there a lot of turnover? Like is every fan base able to sort of have an experience of winning, even if it's a fleeting one? Or are there teams that are emerging as bullies? Is that even a good

question? I feel like I don't even know if that's a good question. Yeah. I'll start off by saying it's a league of baseball-ish sport. So of course, there's like all these power dynamics in it and things are constantly evolving and there's tons of fandoms in it that there's good teams and there's historically bad teams and you're going to get that with any league, I think. What's different is we get to play with competitive balance in the weirdest possible ways. And the first example, I think we should talk about specific teams because talking about the teams will be very fun, but I want to talk about party time first. And that's this rule.

It's like, I think it's one of the best rules in our game. That's a permanent fixture. It's anytime a team is mathematically eliminated from the postseason they enter party time and that just means any game from that point on that they're playing they'll just receive random stat boosts throughout the season so like it'll say you're what your player is partying and suddenly they're better at batting just randomly during one of their games and that's it's such a good competitive balance thing because it's like the earlier you're eliminated, the more parties you're going to have

and the better team you're going to be. We have a bunch of teams that were really good for a little while. And just like in real sports, you have a lot of fans with very short-term memories. So, you know, it might seem like, we always would laugh at seeing the comments, like this team comments like this team

like this this team is the yankees of of uh placeball and early on first team that was the yankees of placeball was the philadelphia pies then it was the hades tigers and then the baltimore crabs and that was within you know the course of like a month and a half or so so it shifted dramatically very very quickly and you know sometimes the fans organize really, really well, which helps make their teams much more powerful. We definitely saw that with the Baltimore Crabs, who were the very first team to win three championships. But there's a lot of randomness and chaos that happens within the league that nobody

can expect. So no matter how much you plan, you're just kind of trying to steer the ship the best you can, but a giant wave might come and hit you at any point. Where did this sort of eldritch, welcome to Night Vale, slightly unsettling, surrealist aspect to it come from? Did you build that in from the start or did that sort of develop organically? It was pretty organic. I think we have to give a lot of credit to Stephen Bell, who's also a designer and writer on the game. Stephen came on very early and was just sort of trying to push us and see how far we would let him go. So he would throw out ideas like, hey, what if we had umpires that could incinerate people?

And we would say yes. And then he would continue to add more and more to that. And we would just keep going and going. One of the very first ideas that we had, a lot of the fun in baseball comes from wordplay. And we were having fun early on with just the idea of the Blaseball gods, since we always, you know, talk about like praying to the baseball gods. And, you know, we decided very, very early that we were going to make the Blaseball gods like actual characters and entities in the game. And I think that was one of the very first points where we realized that this was not going to be just like a whimsical,

weird take on baseball. It was going to have some more sinister elements to it as well. Right. How did you decide to just stick that L in the name? All usual. I mean, like most decisions, most design decisions in baseball, because things move very quickly. It was built very quickly, every season's a week. Like all decisions, it was just a spur of the moment thing. So I think it was in the first conversation Sam and I had about this game and came up

with the idea. I think I just said Blaseball because it just sounded absurd. And we tried on other names like that day. We threw it around in our Slack and we we're talking about what could it be. I can't remember what the other ones were. The word peanut might have made it in there. I don't know. But I think it just felt like Blazeball was the only thing that it could be.

Yeah, it fits, I think. Was there anything that was too far? You mentioned that Steven's trying to push you to add new things to the game was there anything where you just said no you had to veto it or you have so far oh yeah we yes there's i feel like a lot of times i have to take the role of vetoing all the i have to filter through the chaos of the idea train here. Steven keeps pitching fusion, which

as I understand it, every time he pitches it, it's slightly different, but it's always just fusing two players together somehow. Oh no. Right, and it's just, there's so many it's every, it could go in a bunch of directions and they're all wrong. On top of it being very difficult, like people care a lot about these players. A lot of the fandom just, they love the players. They love these silly names that they've generated and they write a lot of these stories for them.

concerns about how it would work, what does it mean to be fused. It's kind of like you lose two players at once, right? You get a third one. It's a touchy concept. But think about what you gain, Joel. Do you have a third leg? Or do you just have one half of you and then it meets in the middle but two heads somehow?

See, I don't know. I'm going to have to get involved in this. Very good question that's why if you veto it then you never have to answer this question there's only one way to find out well you mentioned the like the stories that community members are telling about these players and there's this very active discord and it feels like, and I don't want to jinx anything, but like you have created this sort of unicorn of an online community that seems to be raucous and engaged and involved, but mostly pretty kind to one another and invested in each other's well-being. And I just wonder when in the process of all this did you start to realize what exactly you had when it came to the community that was growing up around the game? It was pretty early on. When we were first

just testing the game with friends and family, we were seeing certainly a lot of investment into the stories that people were coming up with. And then when the game actually launched, we had a small but very dedicated group that really attached to it very quickly. And then when the game actually launched, we had a small but very dedicated group that really attached to it very quickly. And then we started to see fan art and we started to read the fan fiction and we started to hear the music that people were making around the game. And it was just such this kind of wonderful outburst of creative energy. creative energy. And I think, you know, on one hand, we got really, really lucky in that we ended up with a community that naturally wanted to just be in good faith and help each other and be kind. We also did our best to lead with our values and be very clear about what would be tolerated and what would not be tolerated. So there was no ambiguity with that at the very beginning.

And we also had an amazing moderation team of volunteer community managers and our keepers who came on board and they moderate the Discord and they do a ton of work and just making sure that the community stays like a really safe, fun place to be. What percentage of the responsibility for making this thing what it is, do you feel like you had? I mean, it seems to have expanded and spiraled past what you envisioned at first. And of course, you've kind of kept your hand on the rudder and you're writing it, of course, but you're also responding to the community. So do you feel like you are in control of this thing? Or do you feel like you're just sort of a partial steward and it's just going wherever it will? That's a very good question. Yeah, it's hard to, I think in our first era, we were so caught up. We ran 11 seasons and obviously

like when Sam was talking about like all the fan art coming out, we started to caught up. We ran 11 seasons and obviously like when Sam was talking about like all the fan art coming out, we started to feel overwhelmed. That was season two. And so like it started to move so fast and we were just constantly laying the train track out in front of us. And I felt partially in control of it, I think, but it really felt like it took on a life of its own. And I don't know, we just, we've adjusted a little bit at this point. We took a long break. We called it the grand siesta. Siesta is our word for like when there's a pause in play or,

it was actually when our site crashed, we would call it siesta. Yeah, I should mention season 12 just started on March 1st. Yeah. Oh yeah. It is well underway. There's some wild events. The expansion era just began. A season is one week. The regular season is Monday to Friday. The post season is Friday night and then all of Saturday and then the election is on Sunday. Yeah. Like after that grand siesta, we took off, we took a long break and we made a lot of changes to site and we were able to plan ahead a lot more. So I think now I feel back in control of like the narrative and what we're trying to do with this. But we are still, it's still a very collaborative thing. And it's still like we want the community to be driving this just

as much of us and just meet in the middle in that handshake between developers and community. Internally, we often say that there's three different writers on the game. There's us at the game band, there's the simulation, and then there's the fans. And I think a good model for thinking about that dynamic is like a tabletop role-playing game where you have somebody that is the game master that's sort of laying out the shape of the actual experience, figuring out where it is that the players could go. And then you have the players that are responding to certain things and not others, and the game master has to adapt to figure out what direction to take it.

to certain things and not others. And the game master has to adapt to figure out what direction to take it. And then there's the die rolls, just the actual randomness that happens that nobody could predict. Well, I guess like normal baseball, there is a growing body of folks keeping track of stats. But I'm given to understand that the stats and numbers that Cyber, the Society for Internet Blazeball Research, which is just terrific, tracks are a bit more expansive than what you would see on a stat page at Fangraph.

So what are some of the wilder stats that that group is keeping track of? And what is interesting to them, as you just said, start to inform the things that you guys think of for future seasons and iterations of the game? Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, there's, I mentioned the fifth base. So quadruples is a stat that we're tracking.

That's one of the easiest ones to describe. Cyber is, let me just start by saying I love cyber. Let me just start with saying I love cyber. They do like statistical analysis of some of the election items and like write a white paper on like how it would change the game and why it's unbalanced and why we shouldn't be doing it and things of that nature. I always go to wins per win. That's a great stat that they track and graph over time because in season 11, we mechanics called um sun 2 and black hole and basically i won't explain the whole thing but it's if you scored too many runs you could earn an extra win or steal a win from another team so you basically ended up having more wins or more points i guess would be the easier way to describe it than games you actually played.

And so we started tracking wins per win, meaning like total accumulated wins per game that you actually won. And that just blew people's minds. Like wins per win is iconic. The last one I'll give you is total fingers. That was just, again, like anything in baseball was just like a one-off joke by us. We were like, it would be funny if like when you boost your pitching stats, you also gain a finger. And then we forgot that we put that in. And then suddenly, like accidentally players had like 87 fingers

and so then like cyber found that early on this is like season three or something they found the number of total fingers and started like tracking that for players and so now that's a core a core statistic of players is like oh cool how many total fingers you have and i guess we should mention that of course cyber has created blazeballReference.com, where you can look up stats and schedules and standings and a record of every player who's been in the game. Did anything prepare you for making this in your past lives? I mean, your baseball experience helped to some extent, I guess. But in terms of making games, you've both built games before. And Sam, you had a hand in making one of my favorite games of the past several years,

What Remains of Edith Finch. So is there anything in your previous game design experience that helped you there? Or did you base this on anything in fiction, like the Robert Coover book, the Universal Baseball Association, something like that, where there's a fictional league that someone really gets into. previous game that we released as a studio, Where Cards Fall, but I do think that the experience of working together on that game very much prepared us to make this one, and that it taught us how to trust each other and what we're all good at, and just kind of going through the often grueling process of making a game builds a ton of just camaraderie and and trust that's really irreplaceable so you know blazeball is a game that we had to make very quickly and we continue to have to to make very quickly as we're always adapted to things on the fly but we're not

starting from square one with a like team building uh from a team building sense. We know exactly what everybody's roles are, what they're great at doing. And there's such an ease about making decisions that allows us to act in a really quick way. Yeah. And then from a design standpoint, I would add on, I think we all play a lot of systems-driven or emergent narrative games. The example I'll give is that the Civilization series I played all the time as a kid. And it's like you, it's, there's so many different interlocking systems all in one place. And it creates just the wildest stories.

I think playing those sorts of games and like my whole life kind of prepared me for this, I guess. And it's the same rules of any sport, right? It's just a bunch of weird systems and rules colliding to make some random outcomes. So being a sports fan and playing those kinds of games certainly prepared us for designing this game. Yeah, well, that sort of segues into one thing I wanted to ask, which is, are people who like baseball sports fans, are they baseball fans? It seems like there's a significant demographic that isn't really into real sports, but is into baseball anyway.

So what have you been able to tell about that? I'd say the overlap between baseball fans and voiceball fans is not the majority of our audience. It's a very diverse audience, so it's hard to speak generally for them. But, you know, we have a lot of people that are really into tabletop role-playing games. We have a lot of people that are really into cosmic horror and a lot of people that are just very into strange new things on the internet, which voice well certainly falls under. But I think one of the things that that it's been able to do is provide a safe and welcoming environment for for people to realize what it's like to be a fan of a team. And you know, I think a lot of professional sports can be turnoffs for certain people

because maybe it's just like there's too many machismo elements or they present themselves in kind of an overly conservative fashion or just there's a million different reasons that on the surface level, you might just say, okay, this isn't for me. So we wanted to be an alternative and we wanted to kind of create a different direction and see if people would be able to latch on to what we find so appealing about sports through the way that we presented it. So someone has listened to this and says this odd thing sounds like a thing for me. What is your recommendation for folks who want to get into the game? Because I can hear you at times saying, do I need to spend 10 minutes explaining this as part of my answer? Or should I give a wins per win, which is easy to digest? So if people are trying to unpack some of the minutiae of the game, what is your recommendation

for people who want to get involved? the game? What is your recommendation for people who want to get involved? We did a lot of work this particular era to make it easier to jump into. So I would say the best thing to do is to just make an account, log into the website, and start following along with your favorite team. There's an actions panel on the homepage that's a brand new feature that will tell you some certain things that you can do at the very beginning, how to place bets, how to buy snacks, how to vote, things like that. So the game will kind of walk you through the basics. And then once you're there, once you have kind of a grasp for what's happening, there's a few really amazing places that can kind

of explain the different directions that Blaseball has gone in. And if you check out our Twitter account, it's The Game Band, we actually have a pinned tweet with a bunch of great explainers that talk about some of the different aspects of Blaseball. So one of them that talks mostly about the community, one of them that really focuses on the game design, another one that's kind of a more personal journey through the entire experience. So there's a lot of great stuff that's out there. But I would just really encourage everybody to not worry about trying to take it all in at once, not worry about trying to study and research the histories of every single player. If you're into that, that is there for you.

But just like real sports, when you get into one for the first time, you don't need all of that context. You follow along with the team, you watch the games, and then the stories that you experience are the ones that you end up remembering. Yeah, exactly. I would add on like, when you go to the site and you make an account, the very first thing it's going to ask you to do is pick your team. It's going to ask you to pick your team based off of just an emoji and a color and a name. And often the team that you pick is just like what you're just aligned with as a person, just in general. It somehow works out very well.

And then just watch a game, right? Like that's a lot of sports. You're going to have your team and you're going to be a fan of that team. And you just fall into like what makes that team fun. So I would encourage you to just pick your team and click on them and look at the players and just get acquainted. People will notice that as you were giving those instructions for getting into the game there, you did not say and enter your credit card information and buy some virtual currency. So from a business perspective, which I almost

hate to bring it down to the mundane finances, but what was your plan going in? I know that you're Patreon supported as we are. So was that your hope that it would just be a community funded effort or at first did you have other plans? Honestly, we didn't have huge plans for it going in. We were in a pretty tricky point for our studio where we were pitching other projects and we were trying to get something off the ground. And we're an independent game shop. You know, it is very, very challenging to just keep the lights on. So for Blaseball, to just keep the lights on. So for Blaseball, one of the reasons that we made it was to buy us some more time. And the expectation was, okay, like best case scenario, we're going to be running some ads on this through sponsorships. And best case scenario, the game takes off and

it'll get us a few more months, a few more months to pitch other things. And it took off in a way that we never could have imagined. So now, you know, we do realize that we want to keep making this game and we want to make it better and we want to bring more people on to help out with it. So how we actually monetize it in a way that doesn't compromise our values is something that we're spending a lot of time thinking about right now and working on going forward. is something that we're spending a lot of time thinking about right now and working on going forward. What reaction did you find? Because I think you guys launched in sort of mid-July of last year when we were all experiencing the lack of sports. And then when they did return, it was hard for them to not feel kind of icky, even as we were enjoying them, just given what else was going on in the world. Was that an you know, was that an element of the community's reaction,

do you think, to this, that they were able to enjoy a game that, you know, for those of them who might have been sports fans, sort of resembled sports, but didn't come with them worrying about, you know, whether test kits were going to athletes as opposed to community members? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in a lot of ways, it was a product of this pandemic. It's from start to finish. Like we ideated this during when right when the pandemic was starting and designed the whole game and launched it. I mean, we're still in it. So yeah, like we we've definitely played off of that. I mean, if you go to the site, before you log in, the first thing you'll see is just this intro text about, you know, how this in this game, players never sick, they never tired, they just they never stopped playing. And so, I mean, we kind of built this as a reaction to what was happening in the real world and what was happening with sports. And like it is, I didn't watch the last season of baseball.

I'll just admit that outright. It just felt so weird. It just felt so strange. And like it just felt like the right time to pay attention to something like baseball, where it was like, yes, it's chaotic and weird and horrific at times. But it's all this contained chaos, this safe chaos, because it's not real. It's a website, you know, and we're telling stories here. That was definitely a huge part and a huge influence for this game. I asked some of our listeners if they had any questions for you. And one of them was from Aaron, who said, how is it that incomprehension doesn't make it less fun to cheer for? And I was kind of curious about that

because there are people in the thread who said, you know, I tried to figure out what it was and I couldn't. And yet it seems like a lot of people like that aspect of it. A, that you left a lot of it to the imagination and you kind of let people define it however they want to define it. But also, I guess there's sort of an in-group aspect to it. Not that it's exclusionary at all, but just like, if you get it, then you get it,

and other people might not get it. So I'm kind of curious as someone who presumably wants to attract new people to the game, yet probably some of the allegiance that the existing fan base feels toward it is that it is something that may not appeal immediately to everyone, or you kind of have to be in the club to understand it a little bit, how you sort of balance that, making it something that its fans appreciate in a special way with wanting to attract new players. Yeah. I'll just say like, for starters, we, we are trying to, we don't want it to be an end joke. We don't want it to just be, you had to be there to understand placeball. So that's a lot of our current design goals is adding features that let you catch up on things, understand. We added a glossary, which I just find funny that we have. I've never made a game where we needed a glossary, but, um, you know, it's, it's in the spirit of like, Hey, do you not understand something there? It's we will help you. Um, we don't want this to

just be this inscrutable, weird sport. We want anyone to be able to join. Having said that part of the intrigue of voice ball is the mystery of it. Like even for people who've been paying attention from the beginning, there's new stuff that's happening and unfolding in front of your eyes. And like a lot of the fun is figuring that stuff out. So we're trying to strike a balance between those two things. I think like just coming into something so simple and unassuming and then seeing a player get incinerated and being like, wait, what? Why? Oh, it's because it's a solar eclipse. Oh,

sure. There's something fun about that, but you do have to buy in a little bit. I would add onto it too that I think a lot of people, they buy into it because of the community, because we have spaces where it can feel like you can see all the excitement around it. And it's sometimes fun to join in on that excitement. I think we all grew up playing games that had a lot of secrets that, you know, ask players to, to work a little bit, to uncover them and kind of solve the mysteries together. And I think, you know, in a time where we kind of have so much information just at our fingertips, it is nice to have something again, that feels again, that feels a little bit weirder. Like there's something that you have to kind of work for to uncover.

We certainly, as Joel was saying, don't want the core experience of baseball to be exclusionary. We don't want anybody to feel like they need to go read a research paper to understand how to play. But we always want the community to have an incentive to work together to uncover some hidden things. All right. Is there anything that we have not touched on that we should? Because I feel like Meg and I might not know all the best questions to ask. There might be some delights that we have not touched on here. So if there are any aspects of the game any little bits of lore any parts of the community that come to your mind that you'd like to touch on or anything you want to tease coming up lay it on us um i've got one thing um this is this is just an

example of the the um the chaos of the simulation of baseball we've been we launched this new season on monday and i've i've mentioned a bunch of times that there's solar eclipses that where players can be incinerated by rogue umpires, right? We've mentioned that a few times. We've been waiting all week for the first incineration to happen and it just mysteriously hasn't happened. Like the luck of the draw hasn't occurred. Since we started recording this, two players have been incinerated. So i'm very impressed that you can keep track of it while we're on a podcast yeah i've got it out of the corner of my eye i'm never not paying attention but yeah it's just that's just the beauty sometimes just the simulation plays out in the funniest ways

and you get these kind of moments at a certain point you'd have too many fingers to be an effective pitcher i would think like where were they all imagine imagine having 87 fingers and like rolling it off of all of them one by one like yeah yeah the pitch design you could do with that we haven't talked too much about the uh the teams too so i just wanted to mention some of the the team names that we have there's a few new ones that were introduced today the atlantis georgias is one of my favorite new ones the core mechanics and the ohio worms all uh all entered the league today so if you are joining for the first time those are brand new fan bases their stories are being written for the first time, those are brand new fan bases. Their stories are being written for the first time now. So probably good ones to jump into. How did you decide or how do you decide now the ideal size of the league if you're adding teams? That's a great question.

We held off for a while because we wanted to make sure the size of the fan base does matter a lot, you know, in terms of their voting power in the election. So you want to make sure that every team can have a big enough fan base to support it. So it's really based off just the size that baseball grows to. I don't know. In early testing, we actually had 30 teams, like actual baseball. And we scaled down to 20 and it just felt right. But I don't know. Starting this new era, we felt like it was the perfect time to bring in four new teams.

And so far, it's so exciting. I don't know when we'll do it again, but we'll see. We should say that incineration is not necessarily final, right? There are ways you can come back. There's some necromancy, some resurrection that's possible. Yeah, that wasn't something we realized at first but yeah that's one of those beautiful combinations of systems in unexpected ways that happened in the community so like in the shortest possible terms there was one of those raffle

tickets in the election that let you steal a player from the idols board, right? And our idols board is, it's just basically a list of the most popular players. If I were to dilute it down, you can have an idol and it's kind of fantasy element where you earn coins based off of your idols performance. And then the idols board is the leaderboard of the most popular idols. So this raffle allowed them to steal a player from that leaderboard. The community rallied to idolize a dead player, lifting them onto the leaderboard. And then that raffle ticket stole the dead player off the idols board onto a team, bringing them back to life. And that was the necromancy of Jalen Hot Dog Fingers.

and that was the necromancy of Jalen hot dog fingers. It was a beautiful moment. That's really when the true back and forth between us and the community came into play and it really blossomed Blaseball into a brand new thing. Yeah, that's the emergent narrative in action, I guess. Exactly. All right. Well, I don't think we've come close to covering it all, but there's no possible way that we could in one interview. So thank you for coming on. And there was a listener named Patrick who said, I hope you do an episode on it that makes sense of it.

And I don't know if we did, and I don't know if we would want to, really. But I think we gave enough of an overview to clue people into what it is and why they would like it if they enjoy this podcast. So we will link to everything that we've talked about today. You can find The Game Band on Twitter, at The Game Band, and that pinned tweet with some instructions to get started

is at the top. You can find Sam on Twitter twitter at sam rosenthal you can find joel on twitter at joel underscore a underscore clark and guys i guess we'll let you get back to monitoring the incinerations thank you to both of you thank you thank you rest inSports. I'm just catching up now. And Joshua Butt. And Joshua Butt. Yeah. Well, maybe they'll be back like Jalen hot dog fingers. We hope so.

We can only hope. Did he only have 10 hot dog fingers or was this like an 80 fingers sort of situation? I think Jalen had 10. Oh, well, that's probably for the best if they were hot dog sized. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks very much. All right, that will do it for today.

Thanks, as always, for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small, monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Thank you. Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon vesting system if you are a supporter. Thanks to

Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Some of the music you've heard today is by The Garages, which is a global 20-member and counting collective of musicians who have put out EP after EP after LP based on Blaseball. And I've been enjoying some of their tunes tonight. Check them out on Bandcamp, just another example of the thriving fan community surrounding the game. We'll be back with another Team Preview podcast before the end of the week. It'll be the Red Sox and the Reds. Talk to you next time. For unknown reasons, Jalen burned the end of the week. Itned we thank the gods

for we knew the commissioner had done his job because of course you know who owned you you know who you own Sam McDowell Sudden Sam who at times I believe to this day You know who you are. Sam McDowell. Sudden Sam. Who, at times, I believe to this day, was purposely a little wild.

Effectively wild. No, purposely. Purposely? Purposely. Good hands, Abby. Okay.