Welcome to Hlorrible Hlistories. This is a series about less-known weird moments in Blaseball, statistical outliers that didn't get noticed by the community at large. This episode is about the funniest trade that ever happened in Blaseball.
In the Early Expansion era, if you were great at baseball, you probably were gonna switch teams at the end of the season. Wills were introduced in the Season 12, and among them was Plunder and Exchange. Both blessings allowed every team to grab any star player and send back anyone else, regardless of star count. As a consequence, most star players were moving teams a lot. Of the top 5 players by OPS in Season 12, three were wearing a different jersey next season. One of them was Aldon Cashmoney. This is the story of how they were involved in possibly the meanest trade in Blaseball history.
Aldon Cashmoney was, without a doubt, one of the greatest batters ever. After having a yummy reaction in Season 8, and then gaining the Spicy mod in the Season 9 election, Aldon transformed into a top-notch slugger and base-stealer. Aldon Cashmoney was #1 in the ILB in OPS in Season 9, Season 11, and Season 12. And in season 10, they shattered the record for stolen bases, grabbing 132 bags and getting caught only once the entire season. In Season 12, while leading the Hades Tigers to their third championship, Cashmoney had their third 30 HR/30 SB season, the first player in the ILB ever to achieve that, and hit 9 home runs in the postseason, the second consecutive time. After that, in the first season where Plunder was available, Aldon got yoinked by the Tigers' anti-rivals, Hellmouth Sunbeams. The player that got sent in return was Nerd Pacheco.
Nerd Pacheco wasn’t an all-time great like Aldon, but they were a pretty good batter. In Season 11, they batted in 108 runs, were on the batting average leaderboard with 0.335, and drew 54 walks, in addition to having their fourth consecutive season with 25 or more home runs. The problem with Nerd Pacheco? They were shelled. In the top of the 10th inning in a Season 12, Day 56 game against the Tacos, as Nerd walked up to bat to open the inning, the opposing pitcher, Peanut Bong, tasted the Infinite and shelled them before throwing a single pitch at them, only the second player in the Expansion Era to shell an opponent. The Tigers' compensation for losing their best batter was, basically, nothing. As far as trades go, that might be the meanest.
The Tigers struggled without their superstar batter in Season 13, scoring just 418.2 runs - the second lowest in franchise history since Season 1. They were still in post-season contention, but ended up losing to the Wild Wings on Divine Favor. The Sunbeams, with Aldon in company of Dudley Mueller, the other greatest hitter in the league… finished 5th in the division, only above the historically awful Worms.
Nerd Pacheco never played a single game for the Tigers - in next season’s elections, the Philly Pies got them via their own exchange. That same season, Aldon was brought back to Hades for everyone’s best friend Richmond Harrison. Nerd spent another 4.5 seasons in a shell, then got unshelled in Season 18 and played a great season as a pitcher, then got a superallergic reaction in a postseason game that brought their combined star rating from 15.9 stars to 0.6. In that season's election, Nerd got retired to the shadows, likely for the foreseeable future. The same season, Cashmoney was vaulted.
Did the trade really matter at all? Most trades in season 12 didn’t. Of the 8 Exchange/Plunder targets of Season 12, 4 spent only one season with the team that yanked them. But there was one player whose Blaseball career got altered because of this. The player who the Pies sent to Hades in exchange for Nerd was Nicholas Mora, who turned from a lousy pitcher to an okay batter, gained enough fame to get on the idol leaderboard, then played for the Rising Stars in the Semi-Centennial. And that's the story of how a shelling and an unbalanced trade led to a Blaseball player exploding the sun for the second time.
Made by May