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.

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

@blaseball hey so what does ascension mean exactly

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

what

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020 BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020, 2:58 PM

huh

After some debate on whether or not Parker had ever actually read the Forbidden Book, he replied with, “uh they go up or climb”, following up with “or like they rise through the air. ‘we had ascended 3,000 ft’”.

BLASEBALL NEWS NETWORK @BlaseballNews Sep 26, 2020

PARKER, HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK.

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

in fairness to parker, It is Forbidden

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020, 3:02 PM

yea

📱New York Millennials📱 @nymillenials Sep 26, 2020

Yeah wait, you guys have read the book? You know that book is forbidden right?

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020 Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

okay but that was pre-discipline era surely you peeked once we opened it

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020

parker has definitely read the book

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 24, 2020, 11:05 PM

a. The game of Blaseball should be played between two teams.

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

I mean I’ve looked at it since

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

parker what do you think happens when a team, and Blaseball, ascends

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

uh they go up or climb

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020, 3:08 PM

or like they rise through the air. "we had ascended 3,000 ft"

Paula Turnip—a fan-run twitter account roleplaying as a blaseball player—noticed a potential source for this particular definition, the Google definition for “ascend”.

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020

did you just google the definition of ascend?

BLASEBALL COMMISSIONER @blaseball Sep 26, 2020

no

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020

so this is just a coincidence

Society for Internet Blaseball Research 🔮 @SIBROfficial Sep 26, 2020

oh I get it, the championship team becomes a credit union

Paula 🍳 📚Turnip @TurnipOnBlase Sep 26, 2020, 3:11 PM

thank you for figuring this one out sibr

This joke eventually even got referenced on the Blaseball website itself. After the Baltimore Crabs had won their first championship and were set to Ascend, the Shelled One³ taunts them by saying:

Part of my incentive for reuploading this is because the only source for any of this happening is the original Twitter thread. Twitter—currently X: The Everything App—is no longer indexed on Google or publicly accessible, and is no longer used by anyone who produced or was a fan of Blaseball. A number of former fans have since deleted their accounts in protest, disinterest, or due to general internet rot. Blaseball as a game is surprisingly well archived, in part due to the efforts of people at SIBR putting in the work to create persistent long-term archives of almost every part of Blaseball, including the game, the wiki, and many other parts of fan culture. However, a lot of Blaseball was the experience of being involved in the cultural event that was Blaseball, which has suffered a lot more rot. Part of my hope with this series was that I could help in archiving some of these piece of Blaseball history on a real website. If you would like to read the original twitter thread, you can read it at this link.

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 performance

This concept is a lot harder to translate to a game like Blaseball. Nobody tracked stats during the first season and most of the second season of the game. This made it impossible to figure out what “replacement-level” player would be like in the game. The only situation where a player would be “replaced” is if they die in the game through some form or another, which would result in the game will rolling a new player to replace them.⁷ This is not ideal, and for many seasons, the stats nerds at the Society for Blaseball Research would not be able to find a way to recreate WAR due to lacking any sort of substantial data on the performance of baseline replacement-level players.

Blaseball finally gets a baseline

At the end of season 10 of Blaseball, the Baltimore Crabs won the Internet Series championship.⁸ With that win, they would be the first team to have 3 championship wins, which means they would “ascend” to somewhere, be removed from the game, and get replaced with a brand new team who would occupy their place, the Tokyo Lift.⁹ This was a freshly rolled team, and their performance on the following season would get used as the baseline for what a hypothetical replacement-level team would do in Blaseball. The Tokyo Lift would proceed to finish season 11 with a record of 28 wins and 61 losses, being both the worst team in their division and the worst team in the whole game.

While their record was unfortunate, it helped stats nerds create a WAR-like statistic to figure out approximately how good a player was by comparing how many wins that player would give you compared to the historic winrate of the season 11 Tokyo Lift. This stat would be christened the name, “Wins (historical) Above Tokyo Lift” or WhAT. This name was also a reference to the catchphrase of the official Blaseball Twitter account¹⁰, “what”.¹¹

I think WhAT is an exceptionally funny stat. It checks all the boxes: it has a funny background, a funny name, it’s somehow actually useful, yet I have not seen extensive use of it across discussion of players, outside of arguments over which player is best and miscellaneous factoids. This is not a negative quality to me.

As a bonus little tidbit, years later, the stats nerd at SIBR have mostly finished their “Nominative Determinism” project, which aimed to comprehensively reverse-engineer the simulation running Blaseball.¹² Now that they know how teams are generated and how the game itself works in code, it would be possible to generate an infinite number of replacement-level teams, simulate them all against real players, and determine a precise metric of exactly how many wins a player would have above its replacement.

While this would be exceptionally funny, I have been told that it would not actually be that much more valuable than WhAT as a stat. Somehow, the Lift was about as average as you could get.