Baseball Diamond: Overview

April 11, 2026 // IOTM Overview

Ah, baseball. The smell of fresh grass, the crack of the bat, the gentle sizzle of hot sun on the back of your neck. The popcorn, the questionably cold beers, the exhausted mascots. The dad who’s way too into their child’s performance, the exhausted umpire, the thump of a well-placed strike in the catcher’s mitt. The incineration of Matteo Prestige, the snackrifice, the Grand Unslam. Wait, that’s Blaseball. You know what, I’m just going to stop while I’m ahead and write about the Baseball Diamond.

General Summary

The Baseball Diamond is an offhand. It’s also a gem that you can set inside an Eternity Codpiece, which means you get to choose if it’s an offhand or an accessory. Cute! The diamond has the following bluetext enchantments:

• Weapon Damage +20
• Collect Players for a Quick Inning
• Play Baseball to improve your diamond for the day

Per the second enchantment, while equipped, the baseball diamond will passively “collect” monsters that can play in a baseball minigame at the end of your encounters. It will not collect:

• Monsters with avatars that are not 100 x 100 pixels
• Monsters with modified names via Monster Modifiers
• Monsters that are uncopiable, or bosses

Otherwise, the baseball’s item description will continue to add monsters until you get to nine monsters collected. Once you’re at nine, any further monster fought with the diamond equipped will get added to the end of the list and the oldest monster will get removed.

Three times a day, you can look at those collected monsters and (as per the 3rd enchantment), play “baseball” with the monstrous collected lineup. For the purposes of this IOTM, you are a pitcher, and the monsters are batters. After selecting [play ball] within the inventory, the nine monsters will come up to the plate, and you will have an array of possible pitches to throw them.

Baseball Diamond: Ramblings of a Madman

It is here that I must make one of my patented small detours. There’s no way to sugar coat this: the game of baseball in the Kingdom of Loathing is completely unlike the rest of the Kingdom. As we all know, KOL prides itself on an inflexible rigid devotion to facts and reality. While the game does not reflect exact situations you may experience in your life, the player can rest assured knowing that nothing in the game is at all fantastical, comical, or in jest. There is a fount of verisimilitude that permeates all player experience.

All this is to say: upon playing through a few days of “KOL Baseball”, I simply do not think a single member of TPTB has ever played baseball. This is (mechanically) how KOL baseball works:

1. You, the pitcher, get to throw nine pitches exactly
2. The opposing team has nine players, and each gets to experience a single pitch
3. You have fifteen possible pitches you can throw; 10 are “normal” pitches, and 5 are “finisher” pitches with special effects
4. The “finisher” pitches count as 1-pitch strikeouts
5. Nearly all of the other pitches result in hits

Look. I’ve seen some shit, alright? I live near the Richmond Flying Squirrels, a double-A minor league baseball team. They’re terrible. They haven’t won a single game in the minor league playoffs since 2014. Even then – I have simply never seen a pitcher like the KOL player-character. In a nine pitch inning, you will virtually always pitch six hits and three 1-pitch strikeouts. You basically are alternating between acting as the world’s meekest pitching machine and the ghost of Greg Maddux, playing an otherworldly game where one pitch can be worth three strikes.

Nobody is like this! Nobody on Earth pitches like this!!! This is it. This is the IOTM that has finally broken my immersion. Literally unplayable.

(More seriously, this is the best minigame TPTB have ever made, and I dearly love it. This IOTM is worth it for the silly minigame alone.)

Baseball Diamond: A Pitching Primer

Returning from our detour, it’s worth starting out by examining what all the pitches do. As noted, you get 9 pitches per inning (i.e., one per collected monster). The pitches are categorized according to their elements; cold, hot, stench, sleaze, and spooky. The “finisher” pitches are in bold.

• Throw Some Smoke: Adds +5 to all stats to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Bring the Heat: Adds +5 Hot Damage to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Schenectady Scorcher: You receive all of the monster’s drops (including conditionals and non-pickpocketable drops)
• Deep Freeze: Adds DR: 3 to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Snowball: Adds 2-4 MP Regen to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Ice <Them> Out: Banish the monster until rollover
• Ghost Pitch: Adds 3-5 HP Regen to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Skullball: Until rollover, this monster’s attack and defense will be reduced by 50% at the start of combat
• Non-Euclidean Curveball: The next three fights against this monster are free.
• Garbageball: Gain either a “discarded hot dog” or “most of a beer” (both 4-5 advs, 1 potency)
• Beanball: Until rollover, this monster will receive passive stench damage each round of combat
• Some Cheddar: Until rollover, adds 3 extra copies of the monster to its native zone and disable queue rejection
• Slurveball: Adds +1 sleaze resistance to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Bacon-Wrapped Slider: Adds +5% initiative to the Diamond’s enchantment
• Screwball: Until rollover, increases this monster’s ML by three times your player level

This is a lot of information! Here are a few fundamentals that hopefully make the entire thing easier to parse:

• First, simple mechanics. In order to throw a “finisher” pitch, you have to throw the two other elementally aligned pitches to prime the finisher. There are 15 pitches you can throw, but only 9 pitches per inning. This means that in a normal inning of baseball, you will throw 6 “normal” pitches and 3 finishers, essentially reducing your decision space to “which three elemental finishers are most valuable to me?” (Also, importantly, you can only throw each finisher once per inning. So you can’t just spam Schenectady Scorchers and stock up on tons of items.)
• There are three core themes to what the pitches do. First, 7/15 of them modify the Diamond’s enchantment, mostly with tiny boosts that are almost imperceptible. Second, 6/15 of them modify the monster, with said modifications lasting until you throw the pitch again or rollover hits. Finally, 2/15 of them just straight-up give you stuff – either a tiny useful consumable or a monster’s entire drop table.
• Finally, it’s important to note that the different “themes” of the pitches operate differently when you play baseball multiple times in a day. The enchantment pitches stack, so if you were to throw (say) “Bring the Heat” three times in one day, you’ll have a total of +15 hot damage as an extra enchantment on the Diamond. The item pitches don’t exactly stack, but they’re exclusive, so you can happily use them every time you play baseball. The monster modification enchantments, however, do not stack and are mutually exclusive. So you can’t use this IOTM to banish multiple monsters at a time, or olfact multiple guys, or add ML to multiple monsters.

Baseball Diamond: Usage Suggestions

OK, so. You know the pitches, you know the mechanics. What are the best uses of the IOTM?

Right off the bat (🥁), two of the finishers are significantly more powerful and useful than the others. I refer of course to the Schenectady Scorcher and the Non-Euclidean Curveball. The curveball is awesome; because it makes fights against said monster inherently free, you are (at a minimum) saving 3 turns every time you use it. The scorcher is also awesome! In my head, I essentially think of this as a VHS tape that isn’t burning delay; you can get a monster’s drops twice while only fighting it once. That’s cool! Here are a handful of useful targets for each:

• For the Schenectady Scorcher, you benefit from using it on monsters where you want multiple copies of their drop table while avoiding multiple encounters with the monster. The most straightforward scorcher target is probably a shadow slab; assuming you have Chest Mimic, every extra shadow brick you get from a slab gives you an extra freekill, which saves a turn. Other relatively easy and useful targets include pygmy bowlers, red butlers, baa-relief sheep, skeletons in the Defiled Nook, blackberry bush (if you miss the 3 drops), dairy goat (if you don’t have Mayam), beanbat (if you don’t have Bat Wings), and quiet healer / burly sidekick (if you don’t have BCZ).
• For the Non-Euclidean Curveball, you want to grab monsters you need to kill multiple times. The easiest way to use this is to leverage the power of your Monodent to summon up Some Fish and throw a bunch of free fish into delay. I’m personally a bit more fond of the idea of synergizing this with your purple candles via the Candelabra and the Club ‘Em into Next Week skill from the Legendary Seal-Clubbing Club, allowing you to burn delay -and- complete fights you were going to have to complete anyway. Good targets for that particular usage include dirty ol’ lihcs, modern zombies, and war hippies. Could potentially use it for pygmy witch accountants or desert monsters as well, although the accountants will naturally be within their delay zone and the desert monsters will naturally be exactly where they need to be.

Assuming you are always using a scorcher and a curveball in your 3 daily innings of baseball, that takes up 6 of your 9 pitches per inning, as you’ll be doing three hot pitches and three spooky pitches. To me, the real interesting piece comes with your third finisher. The finishers are by far the most powerful pitches, so I don’t really think there’s much merit in doing an assortment of elemental pitches for your last 3 and missing out on a finisher. The three remaining finishers aren’t quite as good as the other two, but they all have a lot of conditional value depending on what you really need.

• Some Cheddar is nice. Transcendent Olfaction is one of the best skills in the game, and this IOTM essentially lets you get three more casts of olfaction in a day. Super helpful whenever you want to encounter a specific monster many, many times. This is also mildly nice because you get a moderately good filler item for your stomach/liver for your troubles as well. Tiny turnbloat! Yay!
• The Screwball is a neat one for folks who do not have a full shiny set. 3x player level in ML is a decent amount of stats! It is also helpful for doing the rock band flyer sidequest in the Hippy/Frat war, and makes it a bit easier to get a monster strong enough to murder your shrunken head zombies. Also, you get +1 sleaze resistance attached to the diamond in the pre-finisher pitches, which is helpful for the Smut Orc Logging Camp’s Blech House NC. The one big negative (and it’s a doozy!) is that the added ML from screwball doesn’t help on essentially any of the ML tests you have in a run. Doesn’t help with ghuol swarms, doesn’t help with rat kings, doesn’t help with oil cartels.
• Taking a minute to Ice <Them> Out is more useful the less shiny you are. An all-day banish is quite nice, especially on a monster that you want to encounter specifically once (like, for instance, a pygmy janitor) and never again. But we are extremely banish-rich at the moment, so I am skeptical that this will be as useful to runners as Cheddar/Screwball.

One thing I do want to note. Please keep in mind that it would be prudent to only start an inning of baseball when you have your scorcher/curveball targets in the -back- of your 9-monster lineup. This is because you can only throw finisher pitches after the two normal pitches corresponding to the finisher’s element. Same goes for the last finisher; when you’re actually using the diamond, you’ll probably want to just shove the monsters you’re intending to use a finisher on into the last 3-4 monster slots to ensure you have ample time to set up the finishers.

2026 In-Standard Synergies

• Stop me if you’ve heard this before: this IOTM has great synergy with the Monodent of the Sea (2025). You can generate Some Fish freely at any time, which makes it a very easy monster to summon up as soon as you have your targets for your scorcher and your final pitch in your lineup. Because you can generate them so easily, a very simple no-fuss usage of this IOTM is to use your three non-Euclidean curveballs exclusively on Some Fish, then plop nine now-free fish into delay zones. Super easy. (You also can use the deleveler & + ML pitches to make the fish fights (respectively) easier and more beefy.)
• I alluded to this earlier, but the new olfaction source synergizes well with the Heartstone (2026). As discussed in that article, there are a lot of monsters you really want to encounter more of in order to generate more and more Spooky VHS Tapes. The diamond should help quite a lot with that. (It is worth noting there is a tiny bit of anti-synergy as well; if you encounter a spooky VHS tape copy of a monster you still have active non-Euclidean curveball charges on, one of the charges will be eaten by the free VHS tape monster.)
• As noted, the screwball pitch specifically synergizes well with shrunken head (2025), as it makes it easier to turn Some Fish into murderous monsters that damage you enough to clear your active zombie.
• Sources of monster copies and summons (like the Chest Mimic (2024) & the Peridot of Peril (2025)) are useful in concert with the diamond. Because you pitch the monsters in order, being able to control when you encounter one monster versus the other is useful to ensure the lineup is ordered appropriately to correctly use all your finishers. (Also, in the case of the shadow slab, you can’t generate one in-run without the mimic.)

Overall Rating

We’d rate the Baseball Diamond a tier 1 IOTM. This has been a -bonkers- year for IOTM power so far, and the Diamond’s no exception. You can essentially look at it as 12 freebies a day – 9 freekills of a repeat-task monster (or 9 delayburn, whichever is easiest to do), and 3 free item-generation events. Outside of that, you get a tiny bit of turngen, some extra queue manipulation, and maybe a nice shot of stats if you need it. What’s not to like?

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Also, on a small side note: if anyone reading this was a fan of Blaseball (RIV, Rest in Violence), I’ve been playing this lovely Blaseball-esque team manager simulator called MMOLB. It’s very fun! My team’s the Murmansk Deep Earth Macaroni, a reference to the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Come and meet my lil dudes on the field of baseball battle! Massively Multiplayer Online League Baseball, baby!

Article contributed by Captain Scotch