Based Ballers
Based Ballers Report
Inky, field reporter
Peach lasted exactly one out. At a ballpark where the thwomps in the outfield are supposed to swat home runs out of the sky and keep the scoreboard honest, Boo's Dinger Brigade instead treated Bowser Castle like a batting cage with a chandelier, and by the time the first inning was folded up and put away, they had hung eight runs on the board and effectively decided a playoff game before most of the crowd had found their seats. The ledger on Peach is not for the squeamish: one-third of an inning, eight earned runs, six hits, an earned run average that reads 216.00 and looks less like a stat than a typo. Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough spent the rest of the afternoon trying to un-ring that bell, and to their credit they very nearly did. Green Noki came out of the bullpen and threw the best baseball anybody managed all day — 4.1 innings, a single earned run — but a reliever who pitches beautifully after his team already trails 8-0 is a man mopping a floor that is still flooding. Because here is the strange part: this was not a laugher. It was a 51-hit brawl, 26 knocks for Chatter's crew, 25 for Love's, and for long stretches the deficit meant nothing. Luigi's Had Enough answered with a six-spot of their own in the fifth and tacked on four more in the seventh, and the reason they got that close has a name — or several. Wario went 5-for-6 and refused to make outs. Purple Toad — Poad to the regulars in this press box — drove in three. Luigi added four hits. They kept the door open all afternoon. What swung it shut was King Boo, and not in the way he swung a Season 1 semifinal shut with a grand slam. Love handed him the ball in relief and King Boo promptly gave back nine earned runs on fourteen hits across 3.2 innings, a 22.09 ERA that turned a comfortable lead into a white-knuckle ninth. It says something about how lopsided that first inning was that a pitcher can be that combustible and still be standing on the winning side. The bats bailed him out. Hammer Bro, the reigning Season 2 MVP, went 4-for-6 and knocked in five, doing exactly the kind of load-bearing work that earns the title. Blue Magikoopa matched him with four hits of his own. And Daisy took Game MVP honors — three hits, an RBI, and 5.1 serviceable innings on the mound before the bullpen adventure began. Even Toadsworth, muscle relaxers and all, chipped in three hits; the man who owns this league's single-game record of six knows his way around a hit column. So Love's Brigade advance out of round one, 15-12, a game that finished with 27 combined runs and enough hits to bury a scorekeeper. Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough leave 6-4, undone by a single inning they were never allowed to forget. In a park built to smother offense, both dugouts found a way to score twelve and fifteen anyway — which tells you the thwomps had the afternoon off. — Inky the Blooper
King Boo did not so much win a playoff game Sunday as file it in both departments. He drove in three runs, he cleared the fence once, and then — as if bored with only half a box score — he walked to the mound and threw 5.2 innings of shutout relief. When one player is your MVP with a bat and your reason for a lead with an arm, the opposing dugout is not losing a series. It is being audited. The scene was Yoshi Park, a yard this paper stopped calling anything but Dinger Park a while ago, and for a few innings it looked like it might behave. Nothing crossed for three frames. Then the fourth arrived and both sides remembered why they came. Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough pushed across three, the only runs Peach's afternoon would earn her, and for a heartbeat the visitors were level with the moment. Boo's Dinger Brigade answered in the bottom half with four, and that one-run swing was, in retrospect, the whole ballgame written small. The cruelty was in the hit column. Boo's Brigade rapped out twenty-one hits; Luigi's Had Enough managed a perfectly respectable thirteen and had almost nothing to show for them. Peach wore most of it — 7.1 innings, eighteen hits allowed, eight earned runs, and exactly one strikeout to keep her company. That is not a start so much as a hostage situation. Waluigi got two-thirds of an inning of mop duty and surrendered three more hits for his trouble. Behind her, the bats did what they could. Purple Toad — Poad to those of us who file these things — went 2-for-4 with a pair of driven in, and Green Magikoopa and Waluigi each collected a couple of knocks, but thirteen hits and three runs is the arithmetic of a team that kept reaching base and kept getting stranded there. Meanwhile Blue Magikoopa was busy going 5-for-5, which is the kind of night that gets a fellow randomly tested on the walk back to the clubhouse. Hammer Bro, the reigning face of Season 2, chipped in a 4-for-4 of his own. But the story kept circling back to King Boo, who has a habit of authoring these October moments — Brigade fans need only recall his grand slam that closed out a semifinal a season ago. Sunday he traded the walk-off theater for something colder: three RBI, a home run, and 5.2 innings without a single earned run after Daisy's short outing left the game hanging at 3.1. He struck out three. He allowed no ceremony. The standings tell the rest. Boo's Dinger Brigade advance out of round one and keep the season alive; Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough, 6-4 and competent all year, go home despite outhitting nobody's idea of a runaway. Somewhere up the bracket, Zeph's Birdo's Magik Mushrooms — 8-2, run differential the size of a small moon — are watching this and taking notes. But that is a story for another Sunday. This one belonged, in every column the scorekeeper keeps, to a ghost who refused to pick a lane. — Inky the Blooper
Forty-one hits is not a baseball game. It is a rummage sale, and both dugouts kept finding things they wanted. At Mushroom Palace on Sunday, Zeph's Birdo's Magik Mushrooms and Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare emptied their shelves at each other for nine innings, and when the last item was rung up the Mushrooms had come out ahead, 11-9, and punched their ticket to the next round of the Season 2 playoffs. The pitching, mercifully for the concessions vendors, was optional. Zeph's Yellow Magikoopa took the ball and took a beating — 15 hits and nine earned runs over six and a third, an ERA line (12.79) that reads like a phone number you regret giving out. Across the diamond, Granbel got even less cover: Diddy Kong lasted three and a third and surrendered eleven hits before Green Shy Guy came on to allow twelve more. When the starters are combining to give up twenty-six hits, the game stops being a duel and becomes a footrace, and the Mushrooms simply had the longer legs. They set the pace early, two in the first and three in the second to lead 5-3 before Granbel could catch a breath. The Nightmare, to their credit, refused to fold — a run in the third, a run in the fourth, a run in the fifth, a run in the sixth, the kind of steady drip that keeps a scoreboard operator honest and a manager's blood pressure interesting. Boomerang Bro, who has spent this season as the paper's designated cautionary tale, homered and drove in three, and Donkey Kong — an absentee father who at least showed up for this — went 3-for-4 with a home run and two more RBI. For a while it felt like Granbel might just out-hit the math. But the Mushrooms answered every whisper with a shout. Birdo herself was the difference-maker, and earned the game's MVP honors with three hits, three RBI, and three big plays that bailed the yellow-wearing Magikoopa out of trouble he had no business escaping. Red Magikoopa was a perfect 5-for-5 from the top of the order, a metronome in a game with no rhythm. And there was a sound Zeph has been waiting to hear all season: Red Toad, 3-for-4 with three runs batted in. Somewhere in the press box a Toad home run remains on order, but three RBI will do for a playoff afternoon. The seventh was the hinge. Zeph pushed across three more to build the cushion he would need, and it turned out he needed all of it. Granbel's Nightmare loaded up one last rally in the ninth — three runs, the tying man breathing on the doorstep — before the door closed. Credit the quiet arm: Green Toad came out of the bullpen for two and two-thirds of scoreless relief, three hits and no damage, the only pitcher on either side who looked like he'd read the scouting report. And so the top seed marches on. Birdo's Magik Mushrooms finished the regular season 8-2 with a run differential (106-33) that borders on rude, and they carry into the bracket the memory of a manager who won all of Season 1 without losing a single playoff game. Granbel's Nightmare, 5-5 and a fourth seed, went down swinging — eighteen hits is not the profile of a team that quit. It is the profile of a team that ran into a buzzsaw wearing a bow. — Inky the Blooper
Ten Weeks into Based Ballers Season 2, the standings sheet that lands on my perch reads less like a race and more like a receipt. At the top, in ink so bold it barely needs a reporter, sit Birdo's Magik Mushrooms at 8-2, having scored 106 runs and surrendered 33. That is a run differential of plus-73, and it is the sort of number that makes the rest of the league check their bats for holes. Zeph, of course, has done this before. His TJD club went 15-0 through the Season 1 playoffs — still the loudest single line in this paper's history, and the record for the biggest blowout in league annals belongs to him at plus-19. So when the Mushrooms buried Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough 10-0 and did the same arithmetic to Gareth's Syndicate 10-0, nobody in the press box was reaching for the smelling salts. This is what a Zeph team does. It scores early, it scores often, and it hands the scoreboard operator a cramp. And yet — a wrinkle. The one dugout to solve the Mushrooms so far belongs to Love. In Week 10 at Boo's home yard, Boo's Dinger Brigade took Birdo to the wall and won 10-9, the rarest result of the young season: Zeph on the wrong end of a one-run game. It was Love's second one-run heist in the sample; his Brigade also nicked Chatter 6-4 earlier. Boo's sit second at 6-4, a club that scores in bunches (84 runs for) and gives them right back (73 against). Their calling card is the late detonation — anyone who watched them drop six in the ninth at Mario Stadium knows the Brigade would rather win a track meet than a chess match. Bunched right behind them is Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough, also 6-4 but built from the opposite blueprint. Where Boo's outscores its problems, Chatter smothers them. The club has posted a pair of shutouts already — Peach's 7-0 whitewash of Granbel at Bowser's Castle and a 7-0 blanking of the same Jane Goodall's Nightmare in Week 10 — and a 10-0 dismantling of the Weed Sox in between. Fifty-one runs for, fifty-three against; this is a team that wins the games it should and loses the ones it must. Daisy's two-way Sundays remain the most honest work in the league. The middle of the table is a coin flip. Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare sits exactly at .500, 5-5, with a plus-minus so slim (55 for, 56 against) it might as well be a rounding error. Granbel has a signature win already — an 11-5 handling of the Weed Sox and an early 8-6 conquest of the mighty Mushrooms back in the season's first breath, proof the Nightmare can wake up and bite anybody. It can also be flattened, as the two Chatter shutouts attest. Which brings us to the season's quiet disappointment. Gareth is, by long-standing reputation, a god with Piantas — and his Da Plumber Syndicate sits fifth at 4-6, outscored 76-55. The Syndicate has flashes: a 9-8 clawback over Luigi's Had Enough at Donkey Kong Jungle, a 9-6 road win at Boo's. But two blowout losses to Zeph do ugly things to a run differential, and for a manager of Gareth's pedigree, fifth place is a sentence he'll want appealed. And at the bottom, where the smoke never quite clears, are Ylander's Weed Sox. One win, nine losses, 28 runs scored and 88 allowed — the sort of split that suggests the offense forgot its bat and the pitching forgot its glove. The lone bright spot arrived in Week 10, when the Sox climbed out of an early hole to edge the Syndicate 9-8 and finally exhale. It was, for one Sunday at Weed Garden, enough. The other nine Sundays have been long ones. A few individual lines worth framing for the season wall. Diddy Kong has been the most unhittable arm going, fanning 16 in a single game. Blue Magikoopa put up a six-hit afternoon, matching the club-record kind of day the great Toadsworth is known for. Hammer Bro — already anointed the season's MVP in barroom consensus — drove in five in a game to lead the RBI board. And Fire Bro owns a curious trilogy of the record book at once: most home runs in a game (two), the longest bomb of the year (a towering 97 feet), and, in a reminder that this game humbles everyone, the most strikeouts in a single game (four). A man of extremes, that one. — Inky the Blooper
There is a box score somewhere in the league office that makes no sense at first read: nine innings pitched, twelve strikeouts, and twelve hits allowed, all under one name. That name is Daisy, and on Sunday at Yoshi Park she wrote every line of it herself, refusing to hand the ball to anyone as the Boo's Dinger Brigade turned back Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare, 8-4. Call it stubborn, call it heroic, call it both. Daisy struck out a dozen and gave up a dozen, and somewhere in that arithmetic the Brigade found a win. She surrendered four earned runs and looked human in stretches, but she never once looked like she wanted the dugout railing, and Love let her ride it all nine innings. The game hinged on a single frame. Through six the two clubs had traded polite blows — the Nightmare scratching a run in the first, another pair in the fifth, the Brigade answering here and there. Then came the seventh, and the roof came off. Boo's hung a five-spot on Diddy Kong, and the man who did the heaviest lifting was Hammer Bro, who drove in five runs on the afternoon and put one over the wall to make it official. When one hitter accounts for more RBIs than the other team scored all day, you do not need much else in the story. Diddy Kong, who had opened the door, was the one left holding it. His final line — 6.2 innings, eight earned, ten hits — reads like a man trying to bail out a boat with a teacup, and it is a mercy that Green Shy Guy came on to close the last inning and a third without allowing a thing. For Granbel's side, the effort was there: twelve hits, more than the winners managed. Donkey Kong, absentee father though he may be, showed up for this one with a homer and three driven in, and Barry Bones went 3-for-5 out of the green Dry Bones costume. But hits that arrive one at a time, spread thin across nine innings, rarely add up to a rally, and the Nightmare never mounted the one big inning that Boo's did. The standings say the rest. The Brigade climb to 3-1 and settle into second, still chasing the unbeaten Magik Mushrooms at the top of the board. The Nightmare slide back to .500 at 2-2, a run differential that remains dead even and a lineup that keeps collecting hits without quite collecting wins. Twelve up, twelve down the other way, and a five-run seventh that decided it. Daisy will take that trade every time. — Inky the Blooper
Most home runs (game)
2
Fire Bro hit 2 HR
Boo’s Dinger Brigade 8–10 Da Plumber Syndicate
Box score →Most RBI (game)
5
Hammer Bro drove in 5
Luigi’s Had Enough 4–15 Boo’s Dinger Brigade
Box score →Most hits (game)
6
Magikoopa (Blue) collected 6 hits
Boo’s Dinger Brigade 8–10 Da Plumber Syndicate
Box score →Five RBI game
King Boo drove in 5
Boo’s Dinger Brigade · AstroKryztal
Boo’s Dinger Brigade 8–9 Birdo’s Magik Mushrooms
Box score →Five RBI game
Petey drove in 5
Birdo’s Magik Mushrooms · ZephyrXC
Boo’s Dinger Brigade 8–9 Birdo’s Magik Mushrooms
Box score →Five RBI game
Bro(H) drove in 5
Boo’s Dinger Brigade · AstroKryztal
Boo’s Dinger Brigade 15–12 Luigi’s Had Enough
Box score →Walk-off win
Noki(R) won it in walk-off fashion
Da Plumber Syndicate · GAMO1992
Luigi’s Had Enough 8–9 Da Plumber Syndicate
Box score →Shutout
Peach threw a shutout
Luigi’s Had Enough · Chatter
Jane Goodall’s Nightmare 0–7 Luigi’s Had Enough
Box score →Shutout
Peach threw a shutout
Luigi’s Had Enough · Chatter
The Weed Sox 0–10 Luigi’s Had Enough
Box score →Latest results
Coming up
No upcoming games this round — check the full schedule.
Rosters were set manually before the season started.