• she/they/it

Hi I'm Molly! I love baseball, video games, and I make a number of podcasts you can find in my links!
All of my other socials are @yerfriendmolly as well!


The Amory Score
ineedmayo.com/

Yerfriendmolly
@Yerfriendmolly

Sometimes I just go to the Barry Bonds Baseball Reference page to experience Awe. Like dude. Holy fuck


deafhobbit
@deafhobbit

same, except Aldon Cashmoney Blaseball Compendium


Yerfriendmolly
@Yerfriendmolly

I've been thinking about this rechost since it was made and no offense but I do think its very strange to compare something that actually happened in real life to a baseball sim where everything is random.

My true wish for Blaseball when it started was for it to lead people over to baseball but it really hasn't and it bums me out. Barry Bonds is a human being who did incredible feats. Your guy is a spreadsheet. I dunno. I don't want to be mean but this just ain't it.


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in reply to @Yerfriendmolly's post:

for what it's worth, myself, my partner, and many other people i know did become more interested in baseball because of blaseball. before, i had no interest at all in baseball - now i follow it at a distance, and go to a game or two each year. my partner and i are actually going to a AAA game in a few days for our anniversary.

with that said, i'm still far more interested in blaseball than baseball, because of how it related to my life. baseball is a game played by distant millionaires, for even more distant billionaires. i have never known a single person irl who follows it closely, even though i've lived almost my entire life in msp. it exists almost completely apart from me.

blaseball, on the other hand, is probably my favorite video game of all time. i've been obsessed with it's storytelling, community, fanwork and mechanics since it started, and have meaningfully participated in all of them. i help write and develop characters, plotted strategies other fans of my team, and organized a large community event that ran for nearly 9 months. it helped me stay close with several irl friends during the height of the pandemic, and helped me meet several new online ones as well.

when i look at barry bonds' numbers, i see an impressive performance by someone i will never know or interact with. i understand how impressive they are, but the knowing that doesn't make me feel anything. when i look at aldon cashmoney's, i see a story that i followed live from beginning to end, and that i played a (small) part in authoring. i remember the pain i felt when ve left my team, the mixed feelings of watching vim succeed to an even greater degree on a rival as my team languished, the joy of watching other fans make art and tell stores about a character i'd helped to originate, and the sadness i felt once ve left the game entirely. the fact that bonds is a real flesh and blood person while aldon is "just" a fictional character doesn't change the fact that aldon's story means infinitely more to me than bonds'.

in 2021, at the end of the expansion era, i spent hours coordinating a plan with other fans of my team from around the world to outrace a black hole that was devouring the universe, and cried my eyes out when the season ended and we fell just short. blaseball isn't for everyone, and i wouldn't begrudge anyone for choosing not to follow it, but viewing it as just an inferior substitute for "real" baseball, or as a means to get more people interested in it, is quite reductive.

It's cool that you got something out of Blaseball but it kinda seems like you still fundamentally misunderstand why it's weird for you to reply to a post about a real, physical dude reaching the peak of a sport by essentially saying, "Just like in my browser game."

They are different things. Barry Bonds has his own story, that was created by him and not an RNG machine. Frankly, it doesn't matter to me that I'll never know him personally or interact with him. It's still cool that he was able to reach those heights. And there are hundreds of other athletes who have stories that are just as remarkable, sometimes for wildly different reasons.

I love that Randy Johnson threw a baseball so fast he once accidentally disintegrated a bird.

I'm sure Blaseball is fine, but there are human beings doing rad shit every single day, and the feelings that inspires in me is not something any video game is capable of doing. It's an experience and knowledge worth seeking out, even if it doesn't end up being baseball, specifically.

To put it another way: if someone made a post gushing about how amazing Aretha Franklin was, it'd be pretty weird if I rechosted it by posting the opera scene from Final Fantasy 6 and going, "Celes was pretty incredible, too."

You know?

i'm hung up on the "it's weird to ..." there. to me, that wording implies you see weirdness as objective. things are either weird or not weird, and there is some clear standard that differentiates between the two of them. i guess i just don't think that's how weirdness works? it seems like an inherently subjective thing to me - something that varies from person to person. something that seems weird to one person could be perfectly normal to someone else, and vice versa.

i get that someone could think something i posted was weird, but that could be true of literally any post. that doesn't mean i'm obligated to think it's weird myself, or that my sense of what's weird and what's not is wrong. more broadly, finding meaning in fiction doesn't seem weird to me at all. if anything, it seems like one of the more common human experiences, and i don't think that feeling in any way discounts the radness of real living human beings.

as for your Aretha Franklin v FF6 example, i think that's meaningfully different. FF6 was an authored story - a team of writers decided what was going to happen, which makes it different from a life a person lived. i still think drawing comparisons between the two is fine in certain circumstances, but i'd agree the example you gave would probably be in bad taste. most of blaseball, including just about everything that happens in games, is not authored though. games are simulated play by play, and the results are determined by a mix of pre set stats and random rolls, similar to a ttrpg. no author decided aldon would have the career ve did - it was the result of an improbable series of events, just like a real person's baseball career.

so, when one person says they feel awe at one set of improbable outcomes, it doesn't seem weird to me at all to say i have similar feelings of awe about a different set of improbable outcomes. obviously not everyone would have the same feelings about the same numbers, but i never claimed aldon's numbers were better/more important/etc than bonds'. i was just voicing the literal feeling of empathy i had when i saw this post - "oh yeah, i also feel that way, just about something different."