Subantarctic League

The remainder of this article contains lore created collaboratively by the Blaseball community.

The **Subantarctic League**, originally *Subantarctic League of Blaseball* (SLoB), is an association of professional and semi-professional Blaseball teams. It represents one glistening strand of The Underleagues.

Teams participating in the Subantarctic League are mostly based on remote, barren, storm-lashed islands in the south Atlantic and southern Indian oceans. It is among the longest-running Blaseball competitions in the southern hemisphere, and considered one of the more prestigious despite its low attendance, ad-hoc scheduling and distinctive playing culture. The league's main sponsor is Palpit-8, a psychoactive energy drink distilled from kelp and renowned for inducing a state of euphoric despair.

## Style of play

Though each team has a nominal home field, the great distances between islands mean that many regular-season fixtures are played on neutral territory. These games might take place on a conveniently flat iceberg midway between home fields or on the rusting deck of a guano freighter whilst both teams are en route to another venue.

To complicate matters, Blaseballs are expensive and hard to come by in the far south, and the potentially game-ending act of thwacking a ball into the sea is considered the height of self-indulgence. Natural big-hitters find it hard to build a career in the Subantarctic League, which has instead developed a robustly close-quarters style of fielding and base-running. This is well-suited to the ferocious weather conditions and attracts large numbers of carrion-feeding skuas.

When playing aboard a rolling ship or a small ice floe, the cramped infield and lack of formal dugout often leads to a batting side's entire lineup spilling onto the field in hot-blooded defense of their outnumbered teammates. This form of play, known pejoratively as float-brawl or flootball, has become popular in its own right among less sophisticated sectors of society.

## Teams

### Current teams

Current members of the Subantarctic League include:

* Balleny Islands Auroras
* Bouvet Chitons
* Crozet Islands Krill
* Inaccessible Island Merleopards
* Kerguelen Mollymawks
* South Shetland Filter Feeders
* 'Oumuamua Mwah-Mwahs *(non-participating observer status)*

### Former team

The HMS Porlock Ancient Mariners were a team of cursèd sailors denied the merciful embrace of death, doomed forever to traverse the treacherous Southern Ocean aboard their spectral schooner. In ████ they moved to the more lucrative Northwest Passage League as the Cape Sabine Revenants, doomed forever to sail the Nares Strait and Baffin Bay. This team folded after one season.

## Notable players

A majority of current League players identify as:

* research scientists driven to the edge of madness by isolation
* ghosts of shipwrecked whalers driven to madness and cannibalism by isolation
* local fauna hyperevolved by various natural and un-natural phenomena
* merfolk, *or*
* some combination of the above.

The highest-paid Subantarctic League player is sometime Hellmouth Sunbeams prospect Windward Polycule, who represents the Kerguelen Mollymawks in the specialist role of bunt returner.

Other high-profile players include Auroras catcher Guildford Honeybun, an elephant seal noted for his quick flippers, imposing physique and ever-present corncob pipe, and Dr Mimolette Manchego, a field researcher from the University of Bordeaux who completed their PhD on the cheesemaking potential of porpoise milk while playing second base for the Crozet Islands Krill.

Almost every team in the League has claimed Gunther O'Brian as a former player, although this is considered unlikely.