Hlorrible Hlistories: The Meanest Trade in Blaseball
By: May
Welcome to Hlorrible Hlistories, a series about less-known weirder moments in Blaseball, statistical outliers that didn’t quite get noticed by other than a handful of people. We’re gonna talk about it when Blaseball isn’t happening to fill the void in our hearts.
In the early Expansion Era, if you were great at Blaseball, you likely were gonna switch teams at the end of the season. Wills were introduced in Season 12, among them Plunder and Exchange. Plunder allowed teams to take any player from the Idol Board in exchange for someone from your team. Exchange did the same, but with anyone from the League.
Blessings that allow teams to exchange players weren’t new, but never before had every team had a 47% chance to do that. Obviously, teams wanted the League superstars to play for them, and soon the most famous players were moving teams at an unprecedented pace. Of the top 5 in on-base plus slugging percentage leaders in Season 12, three were wearing a different jersey next season. One of them was Aldon Cashmoney.
This is the story of how they were involved in possibly the meanest trade in Blaseball history.
So, Aldon Cashmoney was a great batter. Easily one of the greatest ever. And at the time of Season 12, their stock was rising like never before. After having a Yummy reaction in Season 8, and then gaining the Spicy mod in the Season 9 Election, Aldon transformed from a merely good batter to top in the League. Aldon Cashmoney was #1 in the ILB in OPS in Season 9, Season 11, and Season 12. And in Season 10, they shattered the record for stolen bases at 132, getting caught only one time the entire season. In Season 12, while leading the Hades Tigers to their third Championship, Cashmoney had their third 30 HR/30 SB season, the first player in the ILB ever to achieve that, and scored 9 home runs in the postseason, the second consecutive time. Virtually everyone would have loved Aldon on their team, but the ones who got their hands on them are the Hellmouth Sunbeams.
The Sunbeams and Tigers are generally considered the opposite of rivals. You wouldn’t expect that one of them would sabotage the others. And the Sunbeams, as far as I can assume, weren’t trying to take the Tigers’ best player— or anybody’s player. Yet with only 1% of the vote, the Plunder will activated to bring Aldon Cashmoney to Hellmouth. And, as cruel irony (and wimdy) would have it, the person they sent back was Nerd Pacheco.
Nerd Pacheco wasn’t an all-time great like Aldon, but they were a pretty good batter. In Season 11, they batted in 108 runs, were on the batting average leaderboard with 0.335, and drew 54 walks, in addition to having their fourth consecutive season with 25 or more home runs. But there was a problem with Nerd Pacheco— they were in a giant peanut shell.
In the top of the 10th inning in a Season 12, Day 56 game against the Tacos, as Nerd walked up to bat to open the inning, the opposing pitcher, Peanut Bong, tasted the Infinite and Shelled them before throwing a single pitch at them, only the second player in the Expansion Era to shell an opponent. And so, the Sunbeams got possibly the greatest batter of all time, and the Tigers got virtually nothing. Not even a batter who was bad at hitting— a batter who physically couldn’t hit. For being unintentional, this looks like the meanest thing to do to a Blaseball team.
The Tigers struggled without their superstar batter in Season 13, scoring just 418.2 runs— the second lowest in franchise history since Season 1. They were in post-season contention but ended up losing to the Wild Wings on Divine Favor. The Sunbeams, with Aldon Cashmoney and Dudley Mueller, the two greatest hitters of the season… finished 5th in the division, only above the hlistorically awful Worms.
Nerd Pacheco never played a single game for the Tigers— in next season’s Elections, Pies exchanged for them in return for pitcher Nicholas Mora. That same season, Aldon was brought back to Hades for team favorite Richmond Harrison. Nerd spent another 4.5 seasons in a shell, then got unshelled in Season 18 and played a great season as a pitcher, then got a Superallergic reaction in a postseason game that brought their combined star rating from 15.9 stars to 0.6. After the season, Nerd got retired to the Shadows, likely for the foreseeable future. The same season, Cashmoney was Vaulted.
The trade ended up not really mattering at all. Most trades in Season 12 didn’t. Of the 8 Exchange/Plunder targets, 4 spent only one season with the team that yanked them. It’s still, however, one of the funniest trades ever to look at. And that is pretty hlistorical to me.
