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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