Every season keeps a ledger, and Based Ballers Season 2 has begun keeping two of them. There is the one at the top of the standings, where two clubs have yet to lose a game, and there is the one at the bottom, where a single number — a zero in the runs column — has become the most talked-about figure in the league. Both stories are only two weeks old. Both already feel like they mean something. Start at the summit, because that is where the familiar handwriting appears. Birdo's Magik Mushrooms sit 2-0, and it is not the record that impresses so much as the arithmetic beneath it: twenty-two runs scored, one run allowed. Zeph's club opened by hanging ten on the Weed Sox and then walked into Luigi's Had Enough and put up a dozen, winning 12-1. That is not a hot start. That is a demolition schedule. The reigning Season 1 champion, who ran the table at 15-0 a year ago and still owns the all-time marks for biggest blowout and highest-scoring half-inning, has picked up in Season 2 exactly where the record book left him. But Birdo is not alone at the top, and that is the wrinkle that makes this fortnight interesting. Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare is also 2-0, and it got there a different way — not with an avalanche but with a grip on the throat. Ten runs for, three against. Granbel's crew went into Da Plumber Syndicate's building and left with a 6-3 decision, then throttled the Weed Sox 4-0. Where the Mushrooms overwhelm, the Nightmare suffocates. One of these two zeros in the loss column is going to move eventually. Neither has blinked yet. Which brings us to the zero that is causing all the anguish. The Weed Sox are 0-2, and through two full games they have not scored a run. Not one. Twenty-seven outs, then twenty-seven more, and Ylander's club has yet to touch home plate in Season 2. The league's understanding of that ballclub — that its particular pregame habits tend to catch up with it somewhere around the fourth inning — is being tested in real time, and so far the diagnosis holds. Ten-nothing to the Mushrooms, four-nothing to the Nightmare. The Weed Sox are not being blown off the field every night; the 4-0 loss was a tight, quiet thing. They simply cannot find a run, and until they do, the standing invitation of a winnable game means very little. The middle of the board is where the drama actually lives. Da Plumber Syndicate and Boo's Dinger Brigade both sit 1-1, and both got there by way of the same wild afternoon. When Love's Boo's Dinger Brigade traveled to Gareth's Syndicate, the two teams combined for eighteen runs and Da Plumber Syndicate came out ahead 10-8 — the sort of game where the last team holding the bat wins. Love's club had already announced itself in Week 1, running Luigi's Had Enough out of the building 15-4, a fifteen-spot that tells you the Dinger Brigade can score in bunches when the mood strikes. The problem is the runs against: twenty-three scored, but fourteen allowed. Boo's crew can win a slugfest or lose one, and so far it has done exactly one of each. Gareth's Syndicate, meanwhile, is a .500 team still deciding what it is. Thirteen runs for, fourteen against — the balance sheet of a club that beats you one day and gets beaten the next. That 6-3 loss to Granbel showed the ceiling can be pulled down on them; the 10-8 win over Love showed they can pull it down on somebody else. And then there is Luigi's Had Enough, sitting at 0-2 with the bruises to prove it. Chatter's club has scored five runs and surrendered twenty-seven, a run differential that reads less like a standings line and more like a weather report. The 12-1 loss to Birdo and the 15-4 loss to Boo's Dinger Brigade did most of the damage. There is time to right it. There is a lot to right. The individual ledger, though, belongs almost entirely to one player. Fire Bro has authored the most of the season's early record book: two home runs in a game, four strikeouts in a game, and the longest blast in Based Ballers to date — a 94-foot bomb that matches the all-time mark on the books. A boomerang, fire, or hammer bro putting on that kind of power display tends to draw a specific kind of attention around this league, the kind that arrives with a cup and a clipboard. Consider Fire Bro officially watched. The four-strikeout game is the reminder that even the season's biggest bat is human, or at least whatever Fire Bro is. The rest of the leaderboard is a spread of the league's usual suspects: Hammer Bro drove in five in a game, Blue Magikoopa piled up six hits in an afternoon, and on the mound Diddy Kong fanned sixteen — a strikeout number that, in most weeks, would be the headline all by itself. Waluigi sits at the other end of that story, having surrendered nine runs in an outing. Shy Guy in red owns the season's lone stolen base, which tells you what kind of baseball this league plays: they are not running much, they are swinging for the walls. Two weeks in, the shape of it is clear enough to sketch and too early to trust. Two perfect records, two very different ways of building them. A middle tier that could tilt either direction on any given weekend. A Weed Sox club hunting for the run that ends the shutout that has become their whole identity. And a Fire Bro rewriting the record book faster than the testers can print the paperwork. The zeros at the top will not both survive. That is the next chapter, and it writes itself the moment those two clubs cross paths. — Inky the Blooper