Tag Archives: Bizarre Baseball Culture

Bizarre Baseball Culture: Crummy Teams, Fanatics, and Pokémon in “The Double Trouble Header”

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In Bizarre Baseball Culture, I take a look at some of the more unusual places where baseball has reared it’s head in pop culture and fiction.

In a first for Bizarre Baseball Culture, we’re going international to look at one of the more strange appearances of baseball in Japanese culture. To be more exact, we’re looking at an old episode of the Pokémon anime, entitled “The Double Trouble Header”.

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Okay, are you done laughing/rolling your eyes? Good. Now go below the jump for this installment, which has been weeks in the making:

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Bizarre Baseball Culture: The Little Wise Guys and the Absent-Minded Natural

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In Bizarre Baseball Culture, I take a look at some of the more unusual places where baseball has reared it’s head in pop culture and fiction.

There is nothing new under the sun. That is one way to sum up the tale of “The Trick Baseball Bat” by Charles Biro (story) and Norman Maurer (art). It stars the comic sidekicks of a superhero named Daredevil (who’s name was later taken up by a Marvel character), it involves a magic bat (you know, like The Natural, only in this case it’s actually magic) and said magic bat is made out of a special type of wood that is incredibly bouncy (like Flubber in The Absent-Minded Professor). Oh, and that wood? It got it’s amazing powers from being nuked.

And the thing is, this story was from 1951. That was a year before Malamud’s The Natural hit bookshelves, a decade before The Absent-Minded Professor was in theaters and at the start of the 1950s, where every B-Movie ended up having some sort of monster mutated by atomic radiation, although to the best of my knowledge none of them were bouncing wood. It is a stretch to say that this story (in the public domain, originally printed in Daredevil Comics #77, found here) is the inspiration for those works (it has a significantly different ending), but it is a interesting coincidence. Too interesting to have been ignored up until now.

(more after jump)

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Bizarre Baseball Culture Theater: The Time Mark Wahlberg Shot Derek Jeter

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From the 2010 comedy The Other Guys:

Mini-Bizarre Baseball Culture- Tony Stark: Baseball Fan

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In Bizarre Baseball Culture, I take a look at some of the more unusual places where baseball has reared it’s head in pop culture and fiction. This is a smaller installment of that.

In the trade paperback entitled The Five Nightmares (by Matt Fraction), Tony Stark AKA Iron Man has traveled to the Congo to investigate a genocidal supervillain organization that may have replicated his technology.

He also is tracking a few other things. Y’know, R&D meetings, messed up satellites….

… and Josh Beckett throwing a no-hitter.

Iron Man = Baseball Fan.

(The use of this low-quality photo of a very small portion of a larger storyline qualifies as Fair Use under US copyright law.)

Want more Bizarre Baseball Culture? Check out after the jump.

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Bizarre Baseball Culture: Doll Man fights the Baseball Bandits

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It’s time for another installment of Bizarre Baseball Culture, where we look at some of the weirdest uses of the National Pastime in the history of pop culture (no matter how low or high-brow). This time, continuing the series of unusual old comic book adventures that featured baseball, we have the story of Doll Man and the “Baseball Bandits.”

Read more after the jump.

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Bizarre Baseball Culture: Amazing Mystery Funnies #22 has exploding baseballs

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There is a story that, during one of their several hundred attempts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro during the 1960s, the CIA considered sending him baseballs that would, after a time, explode in his face.

With that in mind, perhaps the story featuring the “Fantom of the Fair” in Amazing Mystery Funnies #22 has more truth to it than it appears.

(more after the jump)

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Bizarre Baseball Culture: Captain Marvel teaches baseball… to Martians

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Baseball has an unusual relationship with the rest of popular culture. There are more baseball movies than basically any other kind of sports movie (with the exception of boxing, which is very easy to stage), Charlie Brown’s ineptness on the mound lasted fifty years, and almost every TV series ends up having at least one casual mention of the game at point or another.

But with this, sometimes popular culture about baseball can get, well… weird. Bizarre!

This is part of a series about those times. Sometimes it’ll be short stories (like that old tale about 2044 baseball), other times comic books, occasionally a movie clip or advertisement. No matter what, it’ll be weird, it probably won’t be very good, and I’ll give it far more attention than it really deserves.

So, for the first edition of BIZARRE BASEBALL CULTURE (I’ll consider the 2044 baseball story as something of a prologue), I bring to you this:

Captain Marvel. Playing baseball. On the planet Mars. In a story that is about how Captain Marvel taught the Martians baseball. Fittingly, this has been set to go up on a Saturday morning. More underneath the jump.

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