Here's another piece where I'm publishing work I did years ago explaining entries on the Blaseball Iceberg, which I also made years ago. This one is way up near the top of the iceberg, so it's meant to be short and really simple to understand. This is good, because I'm not yet ready to explain eDensity.[^1]

Since the start of season 2 of Blaseball,[^2] there has been a section of the website titled "The Book of Blaseball" (located under the book tab of the website, of course). Inside is what is supposedly the rules of the game, although they are heavily redacted. Of note is section 5b, which reads "If a team wins three championships, they, and Blaseball, shall ascend." This was noticed by the Society for Internet Blaseball Research, who decided to tweet about this topic at the Blaseball commissioner, at the time Parker Macmillan III, on September 26th, 2020.

Years ago, I worked on a concept for a video breaking down an iceberg meme¹ for Blaseball,² a roguelike³ incremental³ management³ horror³ game with creative story prompting elements³ that I was deep into for basically its entire runtime. While this project never saw the light of day, I think it'd be fun to share some of the stories from it that I enjoyed writing. This is one of those stories.⁴

WhAT

WhAT is the Blaseball version of a sabermetric⁵ statistic called wins above replacement (WAR). While I am not a baseball expert, the concept behind WAR is simple: it’s a “meta-statistic”⁶ of how many more games of baseball you have won having a specific player on your team compared to a hypothetical ultra-fungible average baseball player. If a player has a high WAR, you could make the assumption that firing that player would result in the team they were on losing significantly more games, and if a player has a low WAR, then replacing them would have negligible impact on the team’s overall perfo…