Chesapeake Racetrack and Ballpark

Image of an empty Crabitat, taken on a restful Sunday.

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

The Crabitat is the home stadium of the Baltimore Crabs.

Structure

The Crabitat is formed on, in, and around the carapace of the city's corpse-denizen, The Mother Crab. These three spaces are designated as the stadium, the body, and the stilts.

The Stadium

The Crabs’ stadium was built right underneath the crack in the MotherCrab’s carapace known to have been caused by the killing blow. The gap was stretched farther as the Crabitat settled, making the field more open-air than covered.  Cables run across the length of the gap, capable of pulling the gap closed in case of an emergency.

The stadium is about 36,000 square feet, with the playing field comprising 15,000 square feet on its own. About 8,000 square feet of the field is submerged in at least one foot of water, but never so deep that a six foot tall woman would get her hair wet.

Each grandstand in the stadium is formed from a giant pincer curling inwards, and can be remotely activated to engage intruders or other stadiums in combat. The highest walls of the stadium stand at an impressive 200 feet, and the magnificent mandibles of the Crabitat serve as an entrance, a warning, and a potent weapon.

The Body

A fractal warren that runs beneath the stadium is home to a lively Baltimore neighborhood all on its own. With parts of the enormous fallen carapace naturally segmenting from one to the next, many have been drained to varied degrees to allow for a number of different spaces to form, including shelters, community centers, market spaces, pools, workshops, organizing spaces, dojos, warehouses, hideouts, and so on. Exploration teams have run out of resources before having to turn back, but venturing through a hole in the carapace (an act that requires high grade explosives or a four and a half star batter to achieve) always seems to lead directly back to the Crabitat stadium.

Many Baltimoreans walk down the halls of the dead MotherCrab as a form of meditation, asking her for life advice or assurance that things are going to be okay, and dead as she may be, she answers.

The sides of the fallen carapace are all armor plated in composite alloys of natural carapace and steal (illegal steel), crenellated thanks to the shell's natural spikiness, and ornamented in mosaic patterns of orange and blue shells placed in thanks and remembrance by the city. Although not very populated in the day-to-day, the innards of the Crabitat are ready-set to take in the entire city of Baltimore in case of siege or evacuation or crab battle.

The Stilts

Underneath the shadow of the Crabitat lies a second neighborhood called the Stilts, spilling out into the Oldest Bay in docks, rafts, and other aquatic perches. Nearer to the safety of the Crabitat, this neighborhood-on-the-water is home to some of those closer to the Olde One who seek her company often, those who are more heavily carcinized or who choose to remain in their carcinized form more permanently, those who appreciate the dark, and the most die-hard blaseball fans who want to get the best seats early.

The Stilts are quiet, perpetually hazy like a dawn on the water, and very easy to get lost in, in space and time alike. The neighborhood is very caring and everyone knows each other, but it's easy to get away for a while and find a hole in the wall to read in. If you see your childhood self sitting across the cafe reading a book you've never heard of, do not interact with yourself. Pay for your tea. Leave the building.

Every two years, the Baltimoreans of the Stilts all unmoor their places of residence and spend a day of sailing around the Oldest Bay. At the end, they dock their houses, rafts, and other living spaces in a whole new configuration, so they'll always have new neighbors to get to know.

History

See The Crabaclysm

The avatar of the Mother Crab has a spanning and unknown history, but at some point in the last few centuries, it came to Baltimore. There, it rested in the Oldest Bay, molting, subsisting on the resonant psychic energies of the city, trimming and wiring dreams like a graceful titan through a bonsai forest. The colossal crab upon which the Crabitat would be constructed was discovered in a forgotten Baltimore neighborhood in ██63 when it emerged for its bi-millennial molt.

When the Crab Reckoning began, the Mother Crab entered fully into the world through the Crabaclysm, and like a molt gone wrong, spilled out far too large along the horizon into the thing it has now become. After it was slain, the Crabitat  was constructed in commemoration.

Accessibility to and around the stadium was troublesome for some time, as crab corpses are not actually meant to trudge around inside as one pleases. While issues were resolved on an individual level thanks to a caring and listening community of volunteers, "throw[ing] trained hermit crabs at the problem" turned out to be a solution that was not applicable on a proactive level. It was thanks to Oliver Notarobot's activism during his time on the team that a comprehensive overhaul of the Crabitat's facilities was achieved at a record pace.

While the functionality exists for the Crabitat to be weaponized against intruders or other stadiums, the Crabitat has never been deployed for its offensive capabilities.

Name

The Crabitat is the de facto common law name for the structure. While the Crabaclysm or the Crab Mother both are technically the Crabitat, they are usually referred to the entities that were. Crabs lineup player Tillman Henderson is on record as trying to get the name “Crustadium” to catch on, but he is also on record as conveniently slipping in a puddle of chummy water every time he mentions it to a reporter.