Season 2 Blaseball Election: What Happened?

written by Thraen Boat of Atlantis

With the Moab Hellmouth Sunbeams’ Golden Record Notarized and the election complete, Season 2 of the Coronation Era is now officially a wrap. Let’s take a look at what happened to the League this election.

Decree: Bard Ump

The first big winner of the election was none other than the Bard Umpire, who is now “Bound” to the Book and will serve as the new Crew Chief as we head into Season 3. We don’t know much about what this will mean for the League as a whole, though theories are of course aplenty. 

What we do know: The Bard spent Season 2 cursing players with a “Can’t Lose” curse that left them hopping on bandwagons to join the winning team in each game they play. The sole player who managed to make it all the way to the Championship, Özlem Suttner, lost the curse and is now on the Sunbeams for the foreseeable future.

The other four remain in Awful Evil, the division with the least wins overall in Season 2. (Perhaps they should have gone somewhere else if they wanted to win so badly?)

The Bard Umpire also seems to have a soft spot for Scattered teams. So far, they have not targeted players on Scattered teams with their curse and have ruled in Favor of players on the Tacos, Lovers, and Spies (all Scattered). All three Favored players received stat boosts as a result.

The Big Three Blessings

As for Blessings, going into this election, there were three clear “must try” Blessings that every single team in the ILB seemed to be after. Blessings are a raffle, after all, and all it takes is one vote and a lot of luck. Here are the three teams who cashed in on some great luck this season.

Yellowstone Magic: NEW Pitching Boost

Magic just needed to improve their pitching and defense, or so they’ve been saying. Now, with two back-to-back elections of strong boosts covering both Pitching (S2) and Defense (S1), Yellowstone has everything they need.

LA Unlimited Tacos: NEW Batting Boost

Winning the same boost that helped carry the Sunbeams to their S2 championship, the Tacos are one of the biggest winners of the S2 election. The NEW Batting Boost puts the Tacos’ bats at second overall in the league by stars. Congratulations to Erin Beanbag in particular for learning which end of the bat to hold.

Canada Moist Talkers: Wind Sprints

Wow it really happened again huh. one person in canada typed “vote, wimdy?” into aol dot com and Blaseball said “well you gotta hand it to them, they make a compelling case”. Congrats to the Talkers on receiving Wind Sprints, catapulting them to the highest rated Defense and fifth highest rated Running league-wide.

All According to Plan

There were also three teams with more unique plans this election who managed to win their top picks. From ridding themselves of unwanted players to chasing plot, here are the teams who managed to pull it off:

Houston Spies: Knight Strike

It was all part of ||The Plan||. After wimdying Strike Zero last election and earning “Strike 1,” ||The Spies|| went all-in to find out exactly what happens when someone presses the funny red button labeled “DANGER.” Winning the Knight Strike Blessing, the Spies earned themselves “Strike 2” and sent Mechs’ pitcher Chibodee Alighieri on a mysterious Side Quest in the Shadows. 

The Mechs’ replacement is a small step down but it won’t change much for S3 for the Mechs. For the Spies, it is likely a relief that their own curiosity didn’t have more devastating impacts for their Awful, Evil neighbors.

Mexico City Wild Wings: Shadow Play

Two seasons in a row ain’t bad! With 25% of the votes, the Wild Wings were able to banish Baker Caster to the Shadows, despite the sim deleting them from the game for a short time instead. While they had surely hoped to pull Fletcher Peck or questing Letitia Diop from the Shadows, Atma Blueberry is still a significant improvement at bat over Caster. While Blueberry is also a defensive liability, Caster was hardly a star on defense. With 28.7 Outs Above Average Jefferson de la Cruz sitting at Left Field above Blueberry, their bad defense will hopefully be mitigated.

Kansas City Breath Mints: Yeet

With nearly a quarter of the votes, the Mints decisively Yeeted Jesse Tredwell—one of the worst batters in the league—back into the Black Hole. In return, they received  Vernon Glump, who has very high Sight and Thwack but very low Ferocity. This unusual spread means we don’t have much of an idea of how they will perform, but they will surely be better than Jesse. Surely. A small improvement for the Mints, who were once again trying to fix their offense, badly hurt by losing top batter Mindy Kugel. Plus, Jesse was a liability in the infield, and though Glump isn’t much better, they should see much less action in left high field – another silver lining.

Something is Better than Nothing

For those who missed out on the big Blessings, five more teams still managed to win Blessings that should improve the team at least some.

New York Millennials: Ball Hawk

The Mills won one of their secondary picks, Ball Hawk, offering a small improvement to their fielding. Ren Hunter, one of the Mills’ better defenders, is now at midfield with a nice boost to Reach to cover more of the field. While it won’t solve all of the Mills’ woes, it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Boston Flowers: Strong Start

Winning Strong Start was surely not the Flowers’ first pick, but it’s not without some likely benefits. Their most powerful hitters are now back to back at the start of the lineup, rather than scattered between mediocre to bad hitters. This should give the Flowers more chances to pull off rallies and avoid the disappointment of their best hitters left stranded in scoring position. Only time will tell though how much this helps the teams’ offense.

Charleston Shoe Thieves: Telekenesis

With a wimdy vote for Telekinesis, Kit Adamses got a nice boost to control, which should result in fewer balls and walks. It probably won’t be enough to give the Thieves a real edge in the highly competitive Awful Good division, but it may help win a few matchups. A shame it wasn’t a batting boost.

Technically, It Was a Blessing

And then there were the Blessings that, all in all, probably won’t really change much at all. In the hands of other teams or with some better rolls, some of these might have been a nice improvement, but alas. 

Moab Hellmouth Sunbeams: Learn to Defend

Among one of the funnier election results, The Sunbeams wimdied Learn to Defend, rerolling Guozhi Ong’s defensive stats. It seems the training camp Ong went to was, however, mostly a pamphlet that said “don’t.” It certainly won’t help Beams’ defense much, but the Beams already proved they don’t need defense to win a championship.

San Francisco Lovers: Magnetic Fielder

Another defense blessing, another funny result, as the Lovers won Magnetic Fielder, giving Alvie Kesh a rather unnecessary boost to magnet. Kesh fielded only 7% of plays for the Lovers last season and is expected to continue to make no effort to cover any other portion of the field. In the rare cases the ball flies directly to Kesh, however, Kesh will do a great job fielding those plays.

Chicago Firefighters: Dark Matter

After winning the Dark Matter blessing, the Fighters’ active roster looks, well, exactly the same as it did before. All five players went to the team’s Shadows, so it remains to be seen when any of these players might actually see play. Stats-wise, the Fighters got a few players who’d be a step up from others on their active roster, though no true standouts. The Fighters also got the return of an OG, Grit Watson, who has yet to see play in any known era but has many long-time (and lore-minded) fans excited. 

The Strikes

Finally, there were the Strikes. While the Spies had hoped to hedge their bets and encouraged all teams in Awful Evil to go for a Strike in the case that getting hit might increase the Spies’ Strike count, it seemed none of the coordinated voting teams on the official Blaseball fan chat had any real interest in striking other teams. That left these Blessings as generally uncompetitive and not particularly beloved by the teams that won or got hit by them, save for the Spies above.

Tokyo Lift: Rogue Strike (Ohio Worms)

While Lift fans posting on public forums had no plans to go for Rogue Strike, the blessing showed up in the team’s top three early in the season and stayed there, ultimately resulting in the Lift striking the Worms. (On the bright side, it seems at least one Lift fan on a message board was happy about the result.) Mediocre pitcher Johnnyboy Aster of the Ohio Worms was incinerated and replaced by mediocre pitcher Luis Baron. It turns out that even when something happens in Ohio, nothing really happens in Ohio. The Lift now have Strike 1.

Atlantis Georgias: Bard Strike (Houston Spies)

Speaking of the Worms though, former Worms player Scratch Deleuze was hit by the Bard’s Curse, giving hope for Worms’ fans that their beloved Expansion Era star might return briefly to Ohio. Scratch was a poetic target for the Georgias, too, who won the blessing with what was the smallest winning vote count so far this era (less than 200 votes total). Scratch, along with other Worms players, had earned a spot among Georgias’ fans’ (light-hearted) “Enemies List” for repeated painful losses to the Worms in the Expansion Era. The Georgias now have Strike 1.

Core Mechanics: Mage Strike (Dallas Steaks)

Rounding out the Strikes, the Mechs claimed the Mage Strike, alternating Steaks’ Buried player Yams Sokol. As with the Lift, this wasn’t a blessing Mechs’ fans on publicly wanted, given the franchise’s painful history with Alternates. Still, the blessing stayed in their top three on the ballot all week, with support coming from somewhere else. For the Steaks, Sokol might be a marginally better hitter or pitcher now, should they somehow get un-Buried and see play, though their defense took a significant hit. The Mechs now have Strike 1.

Everyone Else

Of course, with only 15 blessings up for grabs and 24 teams competing for them, seven teams had a completely uneventful election, with two more (Steaks and Worms) getting nothing more than the receiving end of another team’s strike. Those seven unaffected teams, for reference, were: 

• Miami Dale
• Baltimore Crabs
• Philly Pies
• Hades Tigers
• Broken Ridge Jazz Hands
• Hawai’i Fridays
• Seattle Garages