No Kneeling For the National Anthem Here

Pennsylvanians all tend to be addicted to the high quality pastry products of Philadelphia’s Tastycake Baking Company. Tastycake pies are, in particular, renowned for their long keeping and their role as the perfect universal iron ration. You can eat them for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Now, what do you know? the Inquirer reports that Tastycake Pies are the mascot of a blaseball team.

While pro sports are getting back underway (Go Flyers!), Philadelphia already has a team that’s won two championships this year — and they did it with a three-headed dog for a catcher, a third baseman who’s actually seven gnomes in a single uniform, and a starting pitcher who “was cloned from a Cretaceous Period trombone preserved in amber found in a Peruvian mine.”

The Pies — who play for their “flans” in Tastykake Stadium (aka “The Oven”) under the direction of Coach Hoagie Schuylkill — are the first back-to-back champions of Internet League Blaseball, which is a weeks-old “absurdist, player-driven, corruptible, online game of baseball,” according to creators Sam Rosenthal, Joel Clark, and Stephen Bell of The Game Band, a Los Angeles-based video game studio. The team answered questions via email from The Inquirer.

Games among the 20 teams in the league, like the Canada Moist Talkers and the Breckenridge Jazz Hands, are simulated on the hour every hour by a program that writes out every play as it happens on a game log on the score board (”Kennedy Cena hits a Single!”).

Each regular season starts on Monday and ends Friday, with the postseason on Saturday. The Pies won the first two seasons, making them not only the first team to win Blaseball but also the first team to win back-to-back championships. But last season (i.e., last week) the Pies just couldn’t slice it and they were beaten out in the semifinals by the Hades Tigers.

In a Dungeons & Dragons-like twist to the game, it’s the Blaseball fans who choose a team to support and then create the lore surrounding that team and its players using Discord (a group-chatting platform), Blaseball Wikipedia fan pages, and social media.

“The key difference between Blaseball and baseball is player participation. Gambling is allowed and encouraged. Players will earn and lose virtual Blaseball currency by placing bets on games, and they’ll cash in earnings to make changes to the league,” Rosenthal said. “The teams, the players on the team, the rosters, and even the rules of the game can be changed by the community.”

RTWT

HT: JWB.