
After the epic storyline built during the 2012 baseball season, the league will reboot its universe next year, starting all over again.
With the success seen recently in the comics industry of DC's Nu52 universe reboot in 2011 and the currently ongoing Marvel Now soft relaunch, it was only a matter of time before the concept of a Universe-wide reboot took hold in other industries. The latest entertainment company to announce a reboot is Major League Baseball, which just wrapped up all of it's storylines with the World Series mega-crossover event.
Following the successful Playoffs story which ran through ten teams earlier this month, the World Series ended in a one-sided, four game sweep by the San Francisco Giants over the Detroit Tigers, which itself was reminiscent of Marvel's recent Avengers vs. X-Men event, which saw the Avengers trample all over the X-Men as a franchise. The World Series was the culmination of all of the storylines MLB produced this year, so it makes a perfect stopping point for the company to relaunch and attract new fans.
According to MLB commissioner Bud Selig, the NuMLB will still feature the same teams and players that fans have come to know and love, but the win/loss records of the previous season will be reset, some players might appear on different teams, and some new characters might be added to the team rosters. "Fans can start watching from the first game next year without any prior knowledge of MLB continuity," said Selig, fictionally. "We know that new baseball fans are out there, and we want to create a product that they find exciting and accessible."
Asked about the possibility of an appearance by popular New York Yankees bat girl Stephanie Brown, Selig was less encouraging. "We consider her toxic," he said.
However, fans will be pleased to learn that, with the addition of nineties superstar artist Rob Liefeld as an image consultant to the MLB bullpen, the league is in a position to recapture elements that led to past success. NuMLB players will be encouraged to use more steroids and other performance enhancing drugs than before in an attempt to replicate the physiology of Liefeld's comic book characters. In order to further this goal, all teams will get new uniforms equipped with dozens of extraneous pouches, bats will be replaced with huge, perspective-defying swords, and games will take place in fields full of conveniently foot-obscuring smoke.
It is unknown at this stage what changes will be made to the game for the NuMLB, but popular tabloid website Bleeding Cool has speculated that the company might reintroduce segregation to baseball, in preparation of a Civil War event that will pit players against players in an epic tale of clumsy political analogies and gross mischaracterization. "We look forward to spoiling the ending of next year's World Series a month before it happens," Rich Johnston, the duplicitous proprietor of Bleeding Cool, was rumored to say.
Written or Contributed by Jude Terror
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