Brock Forbes/IF-98.606

Rumor / Community Lore
This article contains lore created collaboratively by the Blaseball community. It is just one of many Rumors that we've found in the Interdimensional Rumor Mill. You can find more Rumors about Brock Forbes at their Rumor Registry.

Role on the Baltimore Crabs

The Baltimore Crabs are captained primarily by Kennedy Loser with assistance from Forrest Best, but Brock Forbes is widely considered to be an under-the-table captain alongside them. While they don't tend to take the people-facing responsibilities of the role (addressing media, managing the emotional balance of the team, etc.), they handle a large part of the backstage negotiations, do most of the paperwork, represent the team for the higher-ups of the Internet League, represent the team for Baltimore, deal with the countless undisclosed threats to the Crabs or to Baltimore as a whole, and clean up messes that other Crabs might have caused.

While Kennedy tries to check in on people and include them in a deliberate fashion, and Forrest is widely attuned to the team's general vibes due to it's psychic abilities, Brock contributes to the interpersonal social balance in a far more organic way, just by being chill, being everyone's plug, and having a practically infinite tolerance for shenanigans. They are a sort of everyman to a lot of the rest of the team, connecting a little bit with every player but not forming particularly deep relationships with anyone. Brock is responsible for getting a lot of seemingly incompatible people into the same room together.

The general triumverate of co-captaining is that Kennedy and Forrest are the emotional pillars, here to support the team on a personal level, Kennedy and Brock are representative pillars, handling most of the on-paper team management, and Forrest and Brock are the protective pillars, doing the hands-on work against literal hostile forces that threaten the team.

Early Crabs Pitfalls

Brock has a very difficult time connecting emotionally with people who they don't share much lived experience with. While most the original Crabs had participated alongside the city of Baltimore in the murder of the Crab Mother (all but Nora Perez and Tillman Henderson, who both joined the team afterwards), Brock was only truly close with his wartime compatriots, Combs Duende and Valentine Games. As incinerations and swaps occurred, Brock had an especially difficult experience connecting with their new teammates, and because Combs was captain and Nora assistant captain at the time, they didn't have any responsibility to do so, so they maintained a chill-but-distant professional acquaintanceship with a growing number of now-Crabs. Nobody had a really bad opinion of them, and they would hang out with anyone, played video games or took urban exploration trips, and generally provided a chill space wherever they would be, though much of that time was a bit of a haze for them, literally.

When Nora was incinerated, Valentine and Kennedy shared the assistant captain responsibilities in large part, but needed a bit more help keeping a grounded perspective on the team, and Combs needed to lean on Brock for some support like he could have given them years before, which altogether led to Brock beginning to participate a bit more in the Crabs as a community and a family.

The Team's Anchor

When Valentine was feedbacked and Combs incinerated in short succession, Brock was affected really hard by the feeling of almost total alienation from the team. Things were dark for much of season 4, and a lot of players were reeling from the loss of their steadfast supporters and authority figures. Kennedy in particular, quickly appointed team captain with little preparation, was maladaptively piling up far too many things onto his plate at once in an attempt to keep everything under control. Channeling their rage against the Blaseball gods, Brock took this opportunity to reflect on what the past years have been like since their mother god died, and take audit of what they could be doing to help shield the Crabs from all this.

It was at this time that Brock began to really take on the protector and anchor role for the Crabs, not necessarily opening up or connecting emotionally but at the least ensuring that the support they give is reliable and consistent, resulting in generally improved pitching that got the Crabs their first postseason win and inciting the chant, "Brock's our rock." They found that deepening the connections they have to others for their own sake, even if there is still a distance between them and others, had its own benefits, as they received support in ways that they didn't know they needed, through grounding, presence, and being able to silently share a space with another person and letting that be okay. They learned quickly and finally that while it's hard to connect with someone they have no shared experience with, they can't grow any shared experiences with people if they don't try to connect regardless. There is still a distance, but those relationships are much stronger now, and they fell into their role as co-captain beautifully as a result.