The funniest stat in Blaseball
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.
WhAT
WhAT is the Blaseball version of a sabermetric4 statistic called wins above replacement (WAR). While I am not a baseball expert, the concept behind WAR is simple: it’s a “meta-statistic”5 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 perfor…