Tearing Up the Pea Patch
Rules of Play
Tearing Up the Pea Patch is a draw-poker-like game played with the true career records of major league ballplayers. It is free, requires no account, and settles its own arguments.
1.00 — Objectives
1.01 The objective of each player is to field the finest nine — a lineup whose combined careers best satisfy the Pennant Rule in force.
2.00 — The Deck
2.01 Every card bears a ballplayer's true career line. Three decks are sanctioned: the Full Roster; the Immortals (Hall of Famers only); the Journeymen (everyone not so enshrined); and five era decks described in 2.02.
Rule 2.01 Comment: Enshrinement is a matter of record, not of merit. The Committee declines to adjudicate Cooperstown's omissions and invites players to do so loudly among themselves.
2.02 Era decks (Dead-Ball, Golden Age, Postwar, Expansion, Modern) sort each player by the midpoint of his career; a midpoint falling on a boundary belongs to the later era. Each card shows the player's initials over his stat fingerprint — a twelve-ray figure drawn from the career itself. No two players in the catalog throw the same figure. No photograph, likeness, or club insignia appears on any card.
3.00 — The Deal and the Draws
3.01 Each hand begins with nine ballplayers, dealt face up. 3.02 Three draws follow, strictly descending: trade as many as three men, then two, then one. 3.03 A player may stand pat at any time, forfeiting all remaining draws.
3.04 The nine held when the drawing ends are the hand. There is no discard, no benching, and no further selection of any kind.
Rule 3.04 Comment: Earlier editions required retaining five cards from a dealt seven, a provision abolished in the 2026 revision after field reports established that nobody could find it. A lineup is nine men. It has always been nine men.
4.00 — Judgment
4.01 Each hand is judged under one Pennant Rule: Slugger (most combined homers), Pure Contact (highest combined average), Table Setter (on-base), Run Producer (RBI), Wheels (steals), Bust Line 2,200 (nearest 2,200 homers without going over; exceed it and score nothing), or Mystery Stat (concealed until judgment; you draw blind and answer for it anyway).
Rule 4.01 Comment: Pure Contact punishes greed. A twelve-thousand-at-bat legend is a great weight upon a batting average, and the Committee has watched many a proud lineup sink beneath one.
4.02 Your nine is graded against every possible nine in the deal — all 5,005 — and the grade is your percentile among them. Committee's Note. Of the 5,005, precisely 657 cannot be reached by any legal sequence of draws; the judges grade against all of them regardless, holding that perfection is not obliged to be attainable. A grade of 100 is a rounded percentile; the judges say perfect nine only when your value equals the best available. 4.03 Your nine careers are then combined into a single composite batting line, and the judges name the historical player it most resembles. This finding is advisory, unappealable, and the entire point.
5.00 — Pennant Matches
5.01 Two players is 9 Outs; three, 18; four, 27. 5.02 Every seat receives the identical deal and draw stream, sealed until all have batted — the duplicate principle, borrowed from bridge and dressed in flannel. Luck is issued equally and is therefore no excuse.
5.03 The inning's winner collects one out from each defeated opponent, and is credited by grade: above 50, a single; above 60, a double; above 70, a triple; above 80, a home run. A winning grade of 50 or below is a walk — outs collected, no at bat charged. Each defeated player goes 0 for 1. 5.04 A tie is a foul ball: dead hand, nothing moves.
5.05 First to the target wins — and every champion, at every table, records exactly nine winning innings. In a Quick Pennant the first to three winning innings takes the flag; Pennant by Post is always the complete game. A complete game. The arithmetic permits no other outcome, which is why the Committee chose it. 5.06 Batting lines are real: averages accrue across each match and your whole career of matches.
6.00 — Pennant by Post
6.01 Matches may be conducted by correspondence, identified by a six-character wire code. Innings stay sealed until every seat has batted. 6.02 Only decisions travel the wire; scores are never transmitted — every device derives the standings by replay.
Rule 6.02 Comment: Under this construction a fabricated score is not forbidden. It is unexpressible, which the Committee regards as the superior prohibition.
7.00 — Challenge Links
7.01 A completed solo game compresses into a code of about seventy characters. A rival who opens it plays your identical deal against your ghost, grade for grade.
8.00 — The Judges
8.01 The Judges are deterministic: the same deal, from the same seed, is identical on every device on earth. The daily deal is one deal, shared by all. 8.02 The Judges keep no accounts, sell no notices, and call no third parties. The game itself is one file; Pennant by Post and the play counter call a first-party Macguffin Co. endpoint.
9.00 — The Standings
9.01 Today’s Box is the book of the Daily. A finished Daily is posted as its code; the book replays it with the game’s own judges and enters the tally under your name. One post a day for each deck. 9.02 The Standings are the season: only your best day counts, so a bad day costs nothing and a second deck can only help. 9.03 Every post carries its deal. A rival may play the same nine from the Box and be graded against you.
Rule 9.01 Comment: The book keeps a name and a code. It has no way to record a score it did not itself compute, which the Committee regards as the only honest kind of ledger.
Historical Note
Red Barber, calling ballgames on the radio when the radio was the ballpark, kept a phrase for a team on a rampage: they were tearin' up the pea patch. This game is named in his honor, and the pea vines on the signage are for him.
A Macguffin Co. Game · Where the Legends Add Up