Sandoval Crossing

Sandoval Crossing
Art by @proximart0
Basic Information
Position	Pitcher
Team	Hellmouth Sunbeams
Status	active
Batting	(3.7)
Pitching	(4.3)
Defense	(4.8)
Running	(4.0)
Modifications	Friend of Crows  OverperformingThis Team or Player will play 20% better than usual.  ScatteredThis Player returned from Elsewhere a bit Scattered.  Superyummy
Items	Hearty Bat ●●
Dates Active	Jul 20, 2020 – present
External Links	Blaseball-Reference Player Changes Player Page
Personal Information
Evolution	Base
Peanut Allergy	Not Allergic
Pregame Ritual	Journaling
Coffee Style	Cream & Sugar
Blood Type	Basic
Fate	19
Biographical Details
Pronouns	Any
Nickname(s)	Crossing Guard
Species	Ostensibly Human
Other Background Information
Player Twitter	@rallypitcher

Sandoval Crossing is a pitcher for the Hellmouth Sunbeams, and has been with the Sunbeams since the Return of Blaseball.

Official League Records

Crossing joined the ILB as a pitcher for the Moab Sunbeams with the Return of Blaseball.

Crossing gained league-wide notoriety during Season 3 for performing a total of 172 strikeouts, the highest of any pitcher in the League that season.

On Season 4, Day 16, Crossing held Moist Talkers 5-star pitcher PolkaDot Patterson in a 4-run-a-side deadlock for 17 innings, until "Patterson blinked first" and Randall Marijuana scored a solo home run in the eighteenth.

During the Season 6 elections the Sunbeams received the Move the Mounds Closer blessing and benefited from the Sharing Signs blessing the Boston Flowers received, which increased Crossing's batting and pitching abilities each from to .

During the Season 7 election, the Hellmouth Sunbeams received the Stickum blessing, which boosted Crossing's defense from  to .

On Season 8, Day 55, Crossing siphoned some of Boston Flowers lineup player Nic Winkler's pitching ability in a game with Blooddrain weather, increasing their own ability to .

During the Season 9 elections the Sunbeams received the Mutually Arising blessing, which increased Crossing's baserunning from to . Crossing also gained the Friend of Crows modification due to the passing of the Forecast: Birds decree.

On Season 10, Day 81, Crossing entered Party Time with the Sunbeams. During the remainder of the Season, Crossing partied once, on day 87, increasing all of their stats a star. During the Season 10 elections the Sunbeams benefited from the Sharing Signs blessing the Unlimited Tacos received, which decreased Crossing's pitching, bringing it back to . The Sunbeams also received the Nut Button blessing, giving Crossing the Superyummy modification.

During Season 11, on Day 26, Crossing threw only the 3rd perfect game in recorded blaseball history. They recorded 7 strikeouts against the Tokyo Lift in a 2-0 double win.

During the Coffee Cup, Crossing played for Cream & Sugar United as a pitcher.

During the Season 13 elections the Sunbeams benefited from all four "Bubble" blessings, which increased Crossing's pitching and defense by 4%.

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

History

Origins and Early Life

In interviews with the pitcher himself, Crossing alleges he fell through a time hole in the year 200X, during his afternoon crossing guard job outside Moab's Grand County Middle School. Crossing claims she emerged "mostly unscathed" at the Dawn of Blaseball, and has been playing ever since. This contradicts verified claims of their near-lifelong residence in the city of Hellmouth alongside their husbands and former teammates, Velasquez Meadows and Rhys Trombone.

At some point before the Return of Blaseball, it can be assumed^{by who?} Crossing struck a deal with the Sun, acting as an envoy and mortal^{[citation needed]} hand for the notoriously aloof cosmic entity.

The Return of Blaseball

Crossing quickly became established as an entertaining, if inconsistent, headline act to the Sunbeams' pitching rotation in the team's early years. His unique pitching style - where he gently tosses the ball in a Sunward direction before violently accelerating it through impact with his crossing-guard sign - is, according to Crossing, owed to a "sport" called "tennis", a (presumably) splort-like ritual he is said to have played when he still resided on the Material Plane.

While Crossing's technique is unorthodox and skirting the edges of blaseball legality, is suspected to be responsible for her enviable pitching performance, which placed her in the League's Top 10 Pitching rankings for over half of the Discipline Era.

The Opening of the Forbidden Book

At the end of the first season of blaseball, the Forbidden Book was opened by popular Decree, incinerating Jaylen Hotdogfingers and summoning a Hellmouth on the outskirts of the Sunbeams' hometown. The entity expanded rapidly across eastern Utah, consuming the city of Moab and extensive tracts of the Moab Desert before its progress was halted by unknown means.

Crossing is sparse on details about what role they played, if any, during this event, but the physical "tells" of their connection to their solar patron became far more pronounced following the Hellmouth's appearance. To this day, Crossing will still, when pressed, share memories of the people and places of "old Moab", though no historical record of such a place exists. Crossing has insisted "it was a real place, it was home, and their memories lie with me now, until my work's done".

Early Discipline Era

Season 2 was believed to be a stressful time in the Crossing-Meadows-Trombone household, according to fragmented interviews with the late Rhys Trombone on his abyssal radio station. When not playing blaseball and coming to terms with the new reality that was incinerations in solar eclipses, Crossing was said to be spending "every waking hour" chronicling the lives and memories of Moab's former residents, in a series of journals which comprised over a hundred volumes by the end of the season. Such was Crossing's dedication to the task, that he would be seen scrawling in the dugout until minutes before he took his place on the pitching mound each inning.

Crossing undertook this recordkeeping alongside their husband, Velasquez Meadows, who would foray into the Hellmouth's depths to locate souls trapped in the entity's jaws and assist in their departure.

It really was a brutal season for those two... they'd play and train for blaseball all day, and spend all night putting lost and stranded souls to rest. All I could do was support them from the sidelines, keep a house for them to stagger home to and pester them until they'd properly eat and rest. We didn't even give ourselves time to think about the worst case scenario, if one of us... well, ended up here. We agreed to save our farewells for the post-season, leave nothing unsaid and quietly hope we'd be doing it again in a year's time, in a town which looked a little less like a disaster zone.

Rhys Trombone, Abyssal Radio

Rhys Trombone was incinerated on Day 2 of Season 3. Velasquez Meadows was incinerated on Day 23, in the same game as the incineration of Breckenridge Jazz Hands pitcher Ogden Mendoza.

Additionally, Crossing broke the League record for most strikeouts this season.

Discipline Era, Continued

Crossing persisted as de facto captain of the Sunbeams through the remainder of the Discipline Era, as the team's primary strategist (with support from Nerd Pacheco) and most senior member of the team. He quickly gained renown for his consistently powerful performance throughout the Era, featuring in the Top Ten pitchers rankings for strike percentage, total strikeouts, strikeouts per nine innings, strikeout-to-walk ratio, walk percentage, and walks per nine innings in Seasons 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Despite Meadows' psychopomp-granted ability to manifest outside the Hall of Flame under moonlight, contact between between the Sun-touched Crossing and his husbands was sporadic - though Meadows had an easier time appearing to batters training in the dead of night, and was able to pass messages in this fashion.

On Season 5, Day 91, while Crossing was pitching, Emmett Internet was incinerated by a rogue umpire. This summoned the entity known as Sutton Bishop to the Immaterial Plane. Crossing adopted the "goose", and the two became roommates until Bishop's incineration in Season 13. Crossing credited this arrangement with eventually gaining a newfound affinity for birdskind. He claims this was thanks to, rather than in spite of, the associated tribulations of having a chaotic gooseform housemate. It was around this time that Hahn Fox also joined the Sunbeams roster, and Crosssing struck up a mutual respect with her as she stepped into a role of firstly co-strategist, and eventually taking charge of batting strategy and practice.

On Season 8, Day 75, Crossing became the second ever pitcher in the ILB to hit 1,000 career strikeouts, after Moist Talkers pitcher PolkaDot Patterson. In an AMA, Crossing described his feelings on the accomplishment as "pretty damn good, considering I don't know how to throw the ball."

During Season 9, Crossing allowed zero walks in games they pitched until Day 71, when Unlimited Tacos player Basilio Mason drew a walk in the 6th inning. While this left them with an enviable walk percentage for the season (matched only by Philly Pies pitcher Elvis Figueroa), they conceded an above-average number of hits and home runs. Crossing explained the unusual trend as the result of a pre-season strategy meeting:

It was Hahn's idea, actually, when we were talking about the elections on the way up to the Shadow Moabbey for the traditional pre-season smoothies. She was excited about this new Base blood the team had gotten, and joked how we could try to make walking the bases our "thing". The five of us in the rotation agreed, thought we'd make a contest out of it to see who could allow the fewest walks. At this point, I'm willing to serve a few dingers just to keep the streak going.

Sandoval Crossing, interviewed by the Hellmouth Inquirer

The Death of Sol

(Main article: Sol's Collapse)

During the Season 10 Postseason, while the Hellmouth Sunbeams were Partying on the Moon, Coach Sol experienced critical fuel levels and collapsed into a Black Hole. This violently disrupted Crossing's connection to the Sun, but by the beginning of Season 11 they claimed they'd "fixed it". Whether this entailed a new deal being struck with Sun 2, a modified arrangement with the Black Hole formerly known as Sol, or some other pact is currently unknown.

The Expansion Era

The Return of Blaseball saw a marked decline in Crossing's former pitching discipline, generally understood to be a consequence of Crossing missing peanuts. This performance drop was not exclusive to Crossing, however - the Sunbeams in general took a far more leisurely approach to "winning" or "playing blaseball well", perhaps due to the Shelling and trade of Nerd Pacheco, who is allegedly "95% of the team's impulse control".

Crossing has since clarified that while he does not miss "that arrogant nut that thought it was ok to scream demands and kidnap our friends", he does miss "the simplicity of a clear, common foe".

Trivia

• Notably, Crossing once hatched a smaller version of themselves from an egg during a game.
• Crossing is reportedly known among fellow players not for their pitching ability, but for their eccentric post-game rituals. Once, fed up after a losing game, they removed their cleats, placed them on top of a stadium garbage bin, and lit the entire thing on fire.
• She is reportedly legally required to sing "Enter Sandman" whenever asked.
• Despite not having a phone or a computer, Crossing has a Twitter @rallypitcher. They allegedly tweet by writing notes, wrapping them around pebbles, and using their sign to pitch them into Twitter's Hellmouth HQ, which is right next to Crossing's apartment.
• Crossing accidentally siphoned some of Flowers batter Nic Winkler's blood in a Season 8 game, and frankly wasn't sure what to do with it. He is keeping it safe in the mean time, until such a time as Winkler can repatriate it.
• Crossing makes a mean chili con carne, among other delectable meal options.
• Crossing and then-Canada Moist Talkers batter Fish Summer jointly hold the record for "longest (and only) rally in a blaseball game", when Crossing forgot what splort he was playing and smacked Summer's flyball out of the air in the batter's direction. Summer responded in kind, resulting in a 29-minute, 643-shot rally and the general vexation of all observing.

Fan Works

• 

  by Discord user Ephesos

• 

  Sandoval Crossing Hellmouth demon gaggle by @hummingmoth

• 

  Art by @proximart0

• 

  Sandoval by @mermeag

• 

  Crossing, friend of crows. (By Discord user manatiger)

• 

  Mini-Blaseballer by @HetreaSky

• 

  Crossing's travel look for the Extended Siesta, by @larkiiiine

• 

  Sandoval Crossing, Friend of Crows and Superyummy. By Ash.

• 

  Sunbeams fashion crimes by @larkiiiine

• 

  Sandy "doing a pog" by @glassgoblin

• 

  Tlopps card by Coblin

• 

  Sandy suggesting you have a peanut to calm down by Ash

• 

  by @glassgoblin

• 

  Crossing with Lars Taylor & Nerd Pacheco at the Vlalentines Day Ren Faire, by @_iznj

• 

  Sandoval Crossing kneeling in despair at the fact that she has not eaten a peanut at this point in the season yet, by Ash

Fanfiction

For more fanfiction see the 'Sandoval Crossing' tag on AO3

• Sandoval's Guide to Blaseball Cities by Livi
• Guarded Crossings by Livi - A history of the Hellmouth Sunbeams through the eyes of Sandoval Crossing.
• the ghosts of sandoval crossing by dasyuridae
• The Pitcher and the Goose by Cee - Sandoval Crossing searches for a missing Sutton Bishop.

Videos

• sun - moon - earth by Olive

Games

• The Edge of Everything by dasyuridae

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