The end of Blaseball continues to leave a large squid-shaped hole in what I’m going to, for the sake of argument, call our hearts, but there are alternatives out there. One such alternative is Inty Sports, and the IBL: the Intellivision Baseball League.
Forget about hacking Tecmo Bowl or the like to include modern stats, this goes all the way back to arguably the first complete home console baseball simulation, back on the first console that made decent sports adaptations a reality.
Since 2014, each year, over the course of around three-and-a-half months, a league of ten teams with names based on Intellivision properties battle it out for the title of IBL Champions. I don’t know if human players back the teams or if they’re all computer-played, but it seems probable that it’s the latter. Intellivision’s Baseball (originally marketed with the Major League Baseball license) is a decent adaptation, although there are some rule changes as described on its Wikipedia page: no fly balls are simulated, home runs are declared based on “how and where” the ball is hit, and if a run is scored before the third out on a play, it counts.
Intellivision Baseball is from an era before consoles tracked stats, named players, or even offered selectable teams, so any strengths and weaknesses on a given team are merely the result of statistical variance. If you can allow yourself to forget about that detail, though, you might allow yourself to be amused, for a period of time ranging from minutes to multiple years.
Each game progresses rapidly, and is over in a brisk 9 to 11 minutes, which is much better than real-life baseball. Inty Sports has a website with the records of past seasons, and a page of greatest moments. Their 2024 season wrapped up just a few weeks ago, and can be viewed on their Youtube channel. Here is the final game of the 2024 season, Spartans vs Bombers (11 minutes):
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