Batter Up!

"Strike 1! Strike 2! Strike 3! You're out."

"Beat on the brat, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh yeah!"

— The Ramones

Baseball bats are designed to hit very small, very fast things very hard. They're made out of solid wood or metal, and they're extremely well-balanced. You don't need a permit to buy one, and you can find them anywhere; even a supermarket with a sporting goods section is all but guaranteed to carry baseball bats. Even with no training whatsoever, it's possible for a beginner to pick up a bat and use it to great effectiveness, thanks to humanity's tendency to carry big sticks as weapons through the ages.

All of this makes baseball bats very good weapons, and they're commonly considered as such in Real Life in any country where baseball can be found. Brits, Indians, Aussies, South Africans, Pakistanis, West Indians and New Zealanders could substitute a Cricket bat — artfully described on the Cricket Rules page as "flat on one side, making it ideal for hitting people who owe you money without leaving a bruise. The flatness also gives it edges, for when you do want to leave a bruise".

Also if a normal baseball bat isn't enough, it's common in fiction to just pound nails, spikes, or even glass into it. They're not practical, but they sure do look like they would hurt a lot if they connect. A more rare (and arguably more practical) version is to wrap chains or even barbed wire around it or just cover it with other kinds of junk.

Overlaps with instances of Improbable Weapon User, Weapon Specialization, and Improvised Weapon. Subtrope of I Know Madden Kombat. Bonus points when the phrase is used as a Pre Asskicking Oneliner.

Compare Wooden Katanas Are Even Better. Also compare Carry a Big Stick and Primitive Clubs for big sticks specifically designed as weapons.

Telephone Polearm is a Sub-Trope for very large instances of this.

Not to be confused with the aggressive use of little nocturnal flying mammals, or the use of a pancake mixture as a weapon. Also not to be confused with Home-Run Hitter, although they do occasionally overlap. If this happens to a machine or other piece of equipment, you're looking at a Percussive Shut Down. Swap the bat for a golf club and you're ready for some Golf Clubbing (also compare that). See also Mailbox Baseball.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Tooru of A Channel will brandish a metal baseball bat at any boy who gets too close to her Run-Chan.
• In Baccano!, Isaac and Miria commit a robbery using baseball bats as weapons. They steal money from a major crime family while dressed as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Yeah, they can be like that.
• Batting Female Doctor Saori is a rare case where her batting heals people.
• Magna Swing from Black Clover can form a baseball bat out of his Flame Magic to knock his fireballs at enemies or as a melee weapon.
• Baseball bats are sometimes used as murder/injury weapons in Case Closed. In example, when Takagi is captured by a vengeful Copycat Killer, said killer beats him up with his baseball bat before taking Takagi's handgun, and later the ex-baseball-played-turned-murderer who wants to "silence" Kobayashi-sensei tries to beat her bloody with his trusty bat before Sato, her Identical Stranger Kobayashi's Body Double, incapacitates him. The trope gets lampshaded in the second example, when Kobayashi's soon-to-be boyfriend Shiratori gives the killer a "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  "You have turned a baseball bat into a murder weapon. You have no right to talk about self-defense and dreams at all"
• In A Certain Scientific Railgun episode 24, Ruiko Saten uses a metal baseball bat to destroy the equipment projecting Capacity Down, allowing Mikoto to defeat Therestina Lifeline.
• Sentou Oumi from Charger Girl. He hits Plug and Arresta with his baseball bat in reaction to their sudden appearances before him. Plug doesn't react well to the assaults. Arresta, however, gets an orgasm from the impact of the bat. But only when it's Sentou wielding it.
• A baseball bat is the preferred weapon of Kuroki from Eyeshield 21, even though he's on the football team.
• Used to its full Freudian extent in FLCL. Constantly.
• Nakamura does this in the 6th volume of The Flowers of Evil in order to destroy the door on Kasuga's house and smash his father's kneecap.
• Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. Kaname clobbers Sōsuke with one during the Beach Episode for shooting a melon with a shotgun, spraying her with its juices and daring to say "Bullseye". All while blindfolded.
  Kaname: I'll show you a bullseye! [knocks him across the beach with one blow]
  Ren: That was more...
  Shinji: ...powerful than usual.
• In Gunbuster, the titular mecha wields a massive baseball bat. Considering that said mecha is one of the largest in fiction, you can imagine just how big the bat is.
• Takashi from Highschool of the Dead fights them with a baseball bat until he graduates to a shotgun.
• Both Keiichi and Satoshi use metal baseball bats as (murder) weapons in Higurashi: When They Cry.
  • Also Rena in her backstory, when she beat some boys that tried to rape her.
• In Kill la Kill, Mako wields a spiked bat as part of her Fight Club Goku uniform.
• Mob boss Momochiki Minoi in Mezzo Forte quite appropriately uses a bat to take out his frustrations on the underperforming pitcher of his baseball team.
• In Natsume's Book of Friends, occasional flashbacks show that Takashi's grandmother, Natsume Reiko, used a baseball bat covered in Ofuda as her principal weapon. And considering the number of spirits, demons, and minor gods she defeated and enslaved, she must've been quite the slugger with it...
• One Piece:
  • Mr. 9 and Mr. 4 use bats, a pun of their names; there are nine people up to bat, and the fourth batter is typically the best so that they can score a grand slam.
  • The baseball special had nearly everyone using bats as unique weapons.
• Shonen Bat/Lil' Slugger in Paranoia Agent, named after his signature weapon.
• The first Asura avatar in Popcorn Avatar does a six-armed version of this.
• Reborn! (2004) has a weapon called Yamamoto's Bat that combines this with Katanas Are Just Better: a baseball bat that, when swung at 300 MPH, turns into a sword.
• In the Tokyo Ghoul prequel Jack, Taishi Fura is a delinquent who used to play baseball. He fends off the Big Bad with a baseball bat, and later starts using one with nails embedded in it as a weapon while hunting Ghouls with Arima.
• Kai from Tokyo Tribe 2 uses a baseball bat as his main weapon.
• You're Under Arrest! has the Large Ham crazy baseball-themed vigilante, Strikeman, who calls his archnemesis "Home Run Girl" after her usual way of beating him.
• Botan in YuYu Hakusho uses a metal baseball bat as a weapon in one arc.
  • Kuwabara sometimes used his Reiken like a baseball bat, before he learned what else he could do with it. He was wearing a baseball jersey in the manga when he first manifested it.

Comedy

• George Carlin:
  • He claimed in one stand-up bit that he prayed to Joe Pesci rather than God in part because of this trope.
    ... Instead, I pray to Joe Pesci. Why? Two reasons. First, I think he's a good actor, and that counts for something. Second, Joe Pesci looks like the kind of guy who can get things done. For years I asked God to do something about my nosy neighbor with the barking dog. Joe Pesci straightened that cocksucker out with one visit. Amazing what one can accomplish with a simple wooden baseball bat...
  • He also made a joke in one of his books saying that the bat really is the perfect murder weapon: legal, able to buy one in any sporting store, and hey, it's the national pastime!
  • Evidently he dealt with his daughter's abusive boyfriend by threatening him with a baseball bat (and a terse, frighteningly to-the-point Badass Boast: "I don't play baseball").

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • When a mentally unbalanced Bruce Wayne became the Batman of Zurr-En-Arr (just go with it) he wore a garish purple costume and went around beating criminals up with a baseball bat.
  • In the Elseworlds story Batman Scar Of The Bat, Eliot Ness adopts the Batman identity to take on Al Capone, wielding a baseball bat as his primary weapon.
• Bouncy Ball Man In issue #3, the titular hero, ambushed and without his costume, steals a baseball bat from an elderly neighbor to give himself a fighting chance against his would-be assassin.
• Critter: The sports-themed superheroine Rookie often forms Hard Light baseball bats with which to clobber evildoers.
• DC Comics Bombshells: In the elseworld story, Batwoman/Kate Kane is a professional baseball player in her civilian life, so as a hero, she wields a baseball bat.
• Fables: In Fables: The Wolf Among Us, Bigby uses a cricket bat (labelled "Crowd Control") to smash up the Pudding 'n Pie Club.
• Green Lantern:
  • The Sportsmaster also used a wooden bat. This was bad news for Alan Scott since his version of the Green Lantern Ring is useless against wood.
  • Hal Jordan is fond of making baseball bats with his ring. In fact, quite a few of the Earth GLs do it across several media. This is especially ironic because, as mentioned above, the first Green Lantern's Weaksauce Weakness was not "the color yellow", but rather "wood".
• Hack/Slash: Cassie Hack's main weapon is a baseball bat with "KISS IT" carved into it.
• Harley Quinn: This is often Harley Quinn's weapon of choice in recent years as a more practical substitute for her mallet. It is most notably in DC video games and in Suicide Squad.
• British comics Hotspur and Wizard featured a comic strip/prose story called "The Wolf of Kabul", introduced in 1922. The title character's manservant's weapon of choice was a cricket bat called "Clicky-ba". See the character's entry on this page.
• Jon Sable, Freelance: In issue #10, Sable goes looking for trouble and finds three thugs standing by a Trashcan Bonfire with baseball bats. Jon challenges the biggest one to a fight and picks up one of the bats. He then says "Okay, let's get the rules straight". When another of the thugs responds "There ain't no rules!", Sable invokes the Plank Gag by turning quickly with bat over his shoulder and whacking the big guy in the head. He then follows it up by using the bat to launch a Groin Attack on the second thug.
• Mage: The Hero Discovered: Kevin Matchstick is a reincarnation of King Arthur, and his version of Excalibur is a magical bat. Other items of power are reborn in this way; one hero, with the power of Joseph from the bible, has his trumpet replaced by a kazoo.
• Nightwing: The mentally unbalanced vigilante Nite-Wing (completely different person from Nightwing, but he's only appeared in Nightwing's series) uses a baseball bat and a golf club to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers (or random people he's decided are evildoers). He also does it by beating people to death.
• Preacher: The "Good Ol' Boys" story has Jody participate in a pit fight against a gorilla, killing it using a baseball bat. Once he emerges from the fight to have a word with the fight's organizer, he rams the bat up the organizer's ass.
• The Punisher 2099: Jake Gallows's signature weapon was the Power Bat, a club with an adjustable hardness setting ranging from "rubber" to "titanium"; he never uses the lower settings.
• Spider-Man: In The Spectacular Spider-Man #245, the Shapeshifter Chameleon disguises himself as Peter and try to seduce MJ as part of his plan for revenge. She figures out the ruse fairly quickly and after luring him upstairs, you guessed it, beats him with her baseball bat.
• Sullivan's Sluggers: Since they're a baseball team, Casey and his guys mainly use baseball bats against the monsters trying to eat them.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Casey Jones's signature weapon is a baseball bat, but he does use other sports-related blunt instruments.
• The Walking Dead: Negan wields a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire dubbed "Lucille."

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • Calvin makes fishing fun by having Hobbes hoist him over the water with a fishing rod while he takes aim with a baseball bat.
  • In several early strips, Calvin threatens to use the baseball bat stored in his bedroom to defend himself against the monsters lurking under his bed.
• The Far Side: Parodied in one strip when a pair of incompetent mobsters threaten a man with a wiffle bat.
• "Wulffmorgrnthaler": A baseball bat is the signature weapon of Dolph The Fascist Hippo. He would frequently use it to destroy various objects or beat people up with it. Even one of his most iconic phrases is "Death by Bat." ("Død ved kølle." In its Danish version.)

Fan Works

• Arc Phantoms: Yuzu wields a baseball bat during the infiltration into Sora's Palace.
• Between the Lines (MrQuestionMark): Mikoto references Saten having used baseball bats to attack people in the A Certain Scientific Railgun series:
  Mikoto: Bats are more Saten-san's field.
• Casey is given an electrified "High Voltage Enhanced Impactor" in Boldores And Boomsticks. The first version was a Flawed Prototype without proper insulation, but she later gains a functional version that uses Gravity Dust to enhance the force of blows.
• This is Cole's weapon of choice in Burning Bridges, Building Confidence. First when she joins Ladybug as a vigilante to help fight an akuma, and later as Vexxin, the new Fox Heroine.
• But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci: Jack Napier, the newly-sane Joker, gets into a fight with "Superman", who is actually Lex Luthor in Clark's body in a sporting-goods store. He wins by spraying him with, what else, kryptonite-laced gas from a rubber flower, and then beating him with a baseball bat he grabbed. The kicker? Once the security footage goes viral, Jack's face is hidden, and since this is a timeline where Bruce Wayne was killed with his parents, the internet quickly dubs him Batman. Jack is not amused.
• The Calvinverse: Multiple:
  • Hobbes arms himself with one of these in one part of the original Calvin and Hobbes: The Movie.
  • Calvin's mom uses one in Calvin and Hobbes III: Double Trouble.
  • In an early episode of Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, an alien uses this against another alien due to Calvin messing up one of their plans.
    • Later, Calvin himself uses one against Electro in his first appearance.
• In Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail, Chloe Cerise has an aluminum softball bat called "Silver Night". While she doesn't use it for fighting — as she's on the Infinity Train at this point — her brother, Parker, uses it as his own weapon and nearly uses it to bash the brains of one of the bullies who harassed his sister.
• In NUMB3RS story Fighting Chaos, Don is on the phone with Charlie when he is hit in the back of the head with a bat before being robbed.
• Stella has an electric version in Flowing Star, this is a weapon she created in her secret hideout, which she can use to knock out her foes.
• Twilight Sparkle goes to town in one time loop on a Changeling invasion with Home Run in Hard Reset (Eakin).
• Oni Ga Shiku Series: After Kiryu fakes his death, one of the things he leaves for Izuku is the baseball bat Majima once beat him up with. Izuku now carries it as his weapon of choice, as Majima taught him how to use it as a weapon, and they're not illegal to carry around.
• A very common element in The Owl House fanfiction. The show's "Beta" concept art showed Luz Noceda wielding a red baseball bat, and the fandom has latched on to this. As a result, it is immensely common to see Luz using a bat as a weapon at some point. Alternate Universe Fic based on this concept art usually takes it a step further and has Luz use the bat as her primary weapon, sometimes combining it with her glyphs to deliver magically charged strikes. Ironically, the bat was used in the show by another character: Luz's mother, Camila, although she never swung it.
  • In HomeLuz, Luz wields a bat, notably using it to take down Adegast.
  • Luz teaches Amity to use the bat in the High School AU There's No One Like You. She uses it in the climax to knock out Odalia when she threatens to kill Luz with a knife.
• Exaggerated in Pro Hero Metal Bat, where Izuku's powers seem outright dependent on a bat. He performs normal physical feats when unarmed, but becomes capable of hitting a ball 2.5 kilometers away when he hits it with his bat.
• In Panem Reborn, the 107th Hunger Games takes place in a large shopping mall. The Careers head to the sporting goods store for weapons, where the District One girl (Sunela) uses a baseball bat to beat the District Fifteen boy (Jacques) to death.
• Risk It All: After learning Reinforcement before heading out to take on Black Mask, Ren arms himself with his old Little League baseball bat for some extra reach, using his powers to prevent it from denting as well as making it hit harder.
• In Salve, Salvage, & Salvation, this winds up being Danielle's weapon of choice in her fight for survival against Victor Zsasz.
• Tales of the Undiscovered Swords: Kasen, Shokudaikiri, and Taikogane each wield one to presumably administer a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Konotegashiwa off-screen.
• In Tealove's Steamy Adventure, Libra Ace's weapon of choice is a baseball bat... with a dozen rubber ducks attached to the hitting end, for some reason.
• A variant in Twinkling in the Dark: Cure Bloom uses a softball bat to beat up a training dummy.
• The Ultimate Evil: Valerie Payne brings several times a baseball bat to missions for this purpose.
• The fan-made Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines chapter, the Angry Marines, have Power Bats as part of their specialist wargear. They're like Power Fists, see, except... bats. (Presumably, they're more fun to beat people way past the point of death with in a blind berserker rage than fists.)

Films — Animation

• In Penguins of Madagascar, Private takes out one of Dave's henchmen with a baseball bat, rescuing the North Wind from the Death Trap.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: When Kingpin's thugs show up looking for Miles at May Parker's house, May firmly requests that the baddies and the various spider heroes take it outside. When a fight breaks out in her living room despite this demand, May hits her Rage Breaking Point and forces Tombstone out with a baseball bat.
  "I said TAKE IT OUTSIDE!"

Films — Live-Action

• In Adam & Paul, two criminals kidnap the protagonists and order them to stand watch while they smash up a gas station and threaten the employees with baseball bats.
• The Aggression Scale: When Chissolm bursts into Owen's room chasing Lauren, Owen grabs a baseball bat and attacks him.
• A baseball bat is one of the weapons used by the killer in Alice in Murderland. Later, Alice gets hold of the bat and uses it to kill Samantha.
• Alien 40th Anniversary Shorts. In "Night Shift", Rolly gives Springer shit over listening to baseball games, asking "When has baseball ever helped anyone?" Guess what she uses to kill the chestburster at the end...
• Anger of the Dead: Rooker's number two wields a baseball bat. Near the beginning of the movie, he uses it to cave in Ben's head on Rooker's order because he helped Rooker's prisoner escape.
• In Antigang, Serge's squad of Cowboy Cops carries baseball bats in their cars which they employ against criminals in their raids.
• In Army of the Dead, Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) fancies himself using a wooden bat with nails against the zombies in an Imagine Spot.
• Backstreet Dreams: Stevie knocks at Dean's door while he's having a terrible day. He answers the door by smashing out part of it with a bat.
• Back to the Future Part II.
  • A self-telescoping baseball bat is apparently the preferred weapon of Griff Tannen in 2015. He even says the trope name verbatim before attacking Marty with it.
  • Marty comes back to 1985 and sneaks into his own house through an open window — only to discover that reality has changed and somebody else lives there now. Since the room he broke into happens to be a little girl's bedroom, the father quickly appears with a baseball bat. Marty manages to escape unharmed.
• Bad Boys: Julie attacks Marcus with a baseball bat when he shows up at her apartment, refusing to believe he's Mike Lowrey. He eventually snatches it from her and angrily calls her out on it, even asking if she has anything else she can swing at him.
• Wanna-be gangsta Raji Lowenthal uses a red baseball bat in Be Cool to get even with another character who insulted his manner of speech...only after said character was already incapacitated.
• Berkshire County: At Barbara's instructions to arm herself against the intruders, Kylie grabs a baseball bat. She doesn't really get a chance to use it, though.
• In The Big Lebowski, one of the German nihilist criminals uses a cricket bat.
• Big Trouble: The Russian bartenders/arms dealers use an aluminum bat against the two eventual robbers to repel them.
• In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Genghis Khan raids a sporting goods store for weapons and armor. He selects an aluminum baseball bat as his weapon and gives it a few flourishes.
• Billy Club (2013): Billy's weapon of choice is a baseball bat he customized. He hammered a bunch of nails into said bat so they all stick out on one side, and made a little groove in the top into which he inserted a retractable knife blade.
• In Birds of Prey (2020), Harley uses a bat in multiple fight scenes. In the final fight, though she switches over to a giant mallet and it's Black Canary who uses the bat.
• In Black Angel Vol. 1, Zill is beaten up by a gang of Nogi's thugs wearing backwards baseball caps and wielding baseball bats. He subsequently dies from his injuries.
• Black Rat: Initially the Black Rat uses a baseball bat as her primary weapon, killing Takashi with it.
• In the opening of Blitz, Tom Brant uses an Irish hurley to beat three punks trying to break into his car. Then we find out he's a policeman (hurleys are often given as gifts between police officers).
• In Blood Harvest, Jill's stalker gives Scott a Tap on the Head with a baseball bat.
• Blood Pi: Amber kills her father by using a baseball bat to bludgeon him to death.
• The Bloody Man: When The Bloody Man's severed arm attacks Michael, he grabs a baseball bat and tries to flatten it. When the kids arm themselves to face The Bloody Man, Michael once again handles the baseball bat.
• In Bloody Reunion, the killer takes to Dal-Bomg's head with a baseball bat after first chaining him to the wall.
• Boogeyman (2005): Tim uses a baseball bat to smash two objects in his bedroom that gave the Boogeyman its form. Namely, the crow mobile, and the plasma lamp.
• In Brightburn, a woman picks up a bat to defend herself when she's being pursued by Brandon. Problem is, Brandon is an Enfant Terrible Flying Brick.
• Realistically played in The Butterfly Effect when the frat-boy version of Evan gets attacked by Tommy and then loses it. Hitting someone in the head with one doesn't give them a black eye, it's extremely liable to kill them.
• At the start of The Car: Road to Revenge, Cowboy Cop Rainer hands a baseball bat to the girl Tinkerman was abducting and lets her smash him in the head with it.
• The very karmic fate of Joe Pesci's character and his brother in Casino.
• The Catcher: Unsurprisingly for a baseball-themed serial killer, the Catcher uses a baseball bat as his primary weapon.
• City Heat: After Murphy shows Addy the "laundry" containing the missing financial records, two goons shoot holes through his apartment door. He hits them with a baseball bat when they charge into the apartment and then runs.
• In Cold Comes the Night, Amber uses one on the intruder she finds in her house.
• A bat is kept in the store for security in Cornered!, so it's used on the killer, but just once.
• Dawning of the Dead: In one scene, a guy uses a baseball bat to clock a zombie upside the head.
• In Dead End Drive-In, Crabs and one of the prison gang members fight each other with cricket bats.
• In Deep in the Valley, Rod Cannon smacks Carl over the back of the head while swinging a baseball bat around Daphne's room. Rod doesn't notice.
• Devon's Ghost: Legend of the Bloody Boy has a spectral baseball player with half a circular saw embedded in his bat, basically turning it into an axe.
• Sal in Do the Right Thing keeps a baseball bat behind the counter of his pizza joint and uses it to smash Radio Raheem's boombox. Radio doesn't take it well.
• Elves (2017): When the red haired girl starts murdering the members of a support group, one thing she does is hit a guy in the head with a baseball bat.
• In Even Lambs Have Teeth, Katie and Sloan use baseball bats on multiple of their targets; knocking out the Pastor and Sheriff Andrews with them, and beating Jed to death.
• In Escape from New York, Snake gets entered into some Blood Sport and pitted against a huge guy. First they fight with baseball bats, then with baseball bats with huge nails.
• In Falling Down, the first weapon Michael Douglas gets is a sawed-off baseball bat he took from a convenience store clerk. He later uses it on a group of gangbangers who tried to take his briefcase.
• The balaclava-ed figure pursuing the woman in The Teaser of Fear, Inc. is carrying a spiked baseball bat.
• In Flubber, when Wesson and Smith are breaking into Professor Philip Brainard's house to steal the Flubber, Weebo attacks them. Wesson manages to deal the finishing blow on Weebo with Philip's baseball bat.
• A non-fatal (only because the victim gets treatment) example appears in The Grifters. Roy's penny-ante barroom scams result in one bartender giving him a hard whack in the gut with a baseball bat.
• At one point in Hardcore Henry, Akan picks up a baseball bat and notes that roughly 100,000 baseball bats are sold per 50 baseballs sold in Russia (the real numbers are actually skewed even further), before letting loose on Henry with the bat.
• High School High has a female teacher who carries around a baseball bat in the crime-ridden school, and not for sporting purposes. At one point she whacks a student on the head, only for the blow to be absorbed by his afro.
• In Holmes & Watson: Holmes wreaks havoc in 221B Baker Street while trying to swat a mosquito with a cricket bat.
• House Shark: At the film's climax, Ulysses runs into the house and starts beating the shark with a baseball bat.
• In Inglourious Basterds, Sergeant Donny Donowitz, known to Nazis as The Bear Jew, has a notorious reputation for his execution of Nazis with a baseball bat. An even more sociopathic Scout. He even says "batter up".
• In Innocent Blood, the cop uses a bat on the vampire gangster's thug and breaks the bat on him.
• Jack Reacher is attacked from behind by a criminal armed with an aluminum baseball bat, knocking Reacher into a bathtub. The criminal can't swing it properly in the limited space, and ends up doing more damage to the surroundings and his own partner than Reacher.
• John Doe: Vigilante: When John Doe inspires copycat vigilantes, three teenage boys decide to kill the other bouncer but, instead, the bouncer kills all three with a baseball bat. This causes the movement to organise more, and the next scene shows a larger group of people wearing masks and attacking the bouncer with baseball bats.
• Juan of the Dead: What California uses to fight the zombies. He mostly just bashes their heads in, but he also can hit a baseball hard enough to sink it into a zombie's forehead.
• Kick-Ass: Part of the brutal Cold-Blooded Torture Frank D'Amico's men inflict on Kick-Ass and Big Daddy during their attempted public execution involves hitting them repeatedly with baseball bats, including once in the crotch.
• Kindergarten Cop: During the climax, Cullen Crisp's mother has Kimble at gunpoint only for Detective O'Hara to sneak up behind her and hit her with a baseball bat.
• In The Last Detail, a bartender tells the protagonists he's gonna pull out the gun he has under the bar if they don't settle down, and Jack Nicholson says he knows for a fact all the bartender has under there is a baseball bat because he saw him pull it out one night and bash some kid over the head with it.
• In Lovely Molly, a baseball bat is brandished in an early scene when investigating a potential break-in and then makes a re-appearance when the killer uses the same bat to disable one of the residents of the house before killing them.
• In Mean Girls, when Principal Duvall finds out the students are physically attacking one another after the Burn Book's contents were revealed, he grabs his baseball bat before going out and breaking up the commotion.
• In Mercenaries from Hong Kong, the titular mercenary team are confronted by some punks. So they turn back to Sing's vehicle, flips open the boot, and reveals half a dozen aluminum baseball bats they arm themselves with. Cue epic ass-kicking and head-smashing by way of bat.
• In the horror film Mikey the Enfante Terrible title character savagely bashes his first foster father's brains in with a metal baseball bat.
• Mortuary (1983): Chrisie's father is attacked and knocked into the pool to drown by the killer with a baseball bat.
• Billy from Most Likely to Murder (2018) attempts to break down Lowell's door with a bat. Instead the bat breaks in two, injuring Billy's wrist.
• In Nightmare at Noon, Riley hits Charley with a baseball bat to stop him from strangling Ken.
• The Night They Knocked: The murderer dressed as a clown uses a baseball bat as his main weapon.
• Plan B (2021): Doris from the store Lupe and Sunny visit rescues them from two creeps by wielding a baseball bat (she uses it on their truck).
• In Poor Pretty Eddie, Eddie kills Keno's dog and cooks it into a stew. When Keno realizes, he flies at Eddie in a rage, but Eddie knocks him to the ground with a baseball bat and then kicks him.
• In Problem Child, Junior's dad gives him the tip of "holding onto the bat" after two strikes. After hitting the ball, he holds onto the bat while making his way to the bases and uses it to beat up anyone in his way.
• Shane Douglas in Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies uses a bat as his weapon throughout the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Psychos: Larry uses a baseball bat to kill Michael, Sasha's boyfriend.
• In Psych-Out, Elwood uses a bat to attack Jenny's attempted rapists.
• In the Danish crime film Pusher, Frank uses a baseball bat to beat down his sidekick Tonny after some police claim that Tonny ratted him out.
• The henchman only known as "Baseball Bat Man" from The Raid 2: Berandal predictably uses a metal bat to beat his opponents, but also will hit baseballs at them when they're out of reach.
• In Resident Evil: Retribution, the Alice clone kills a zombie by bashing its brains in with a metal baseball bat.
• In the Jackie Chan film Rumble in the Bronx the gangbangers say "batter up!" right before hitting glass bottles at a cornered Keung.
• In the Cold Open to A Score to Settle, Max bashes a bagman from a rival mob to death with a baseball bat: a crime that Frankie takes the fall for. Frankie returns years later with the same bat intending to use it on Max, only to change his mind when he discovers that Max has been in a coma for 15 years.
• In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun uses a cricket bat as a weapon and poses with it on the film's poster.
• The Shining. When Wendy first realises there's something seriously creepy about the hotel, she starts carrying a baseball bat to defend herself. She's reluctant to use it against her Axe-Crazy husband, but finally does so when it's clear he intends to take it off Wendy and use it against her.
  Jack: I'm not gonna hurt ya...I'm just gonna bash your brains in. I'm gonna bash 'em right the fuck in!
• The climax of Signs involves Joaquin Phoenix's character clubbing an alien half to death with a baseball bat, though that isn't what kills it.
  Graham: Swing away Merrill. Merrill... swing away.
• In Silver Bullet, Reverend Lester kills Sheriff Haller while transforming into a werewolf by bashing his skull with a baseball bat he had taken from one of his victims.
• In Slaughter High, Carol bashes Marty with a baseball bat a few times, then drops it and runs away, allowing Marty to pick it up.
• In Snatch., Turkish grabs a bat with a lead core stored behind a counter when Bricktop's men smash up his slot machines. He knocks out two before the rest take it from him and surround him. He's only saved by Tommy using a broken revolver for intimidation.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Casey Jones uses all manner of sport clubs as his weapon of choice. He uses two baseball bats, apparently autographed ones:
  Raphael: (after blocking one of Casey's swings and examining the bat) A Jose Canseco bat? Tell me... you didn't pay money for this.
  • As well as a cricket bat:
    Casey: Alright, new game, round-head. (takes it out, and adapts a batsman's pose) Cricket?
    Raphael: Cricket?! Nobody understands cricket! You gotta know what a crumpet is to understand cricket!
    Casey: I'll teach you. (launches Raph into the air and into a trash can with one solid WHACK!) See? Six runs.
• In Ten Dead Men, Stone's preferred weapon is a baseball. He uses it to wale on Ryan as Ryan is suffering Unwilling Suspension.
• In This is Spın̈al Tap, the band's manager keeps a cricket bat with him and extols its uses during management disputes. A short montage shows him wrecking things with his trusty bat.
• Tiger House: When Mark hears the gang invade the house, he picks up a cricket bat and goes to investigate. More through blind luck than skill, he knocks Shane into a mirror where he gets stabbed by a shard of glass. Callum later uses the bat to bludgeon Lynn's lover to death.
• Among the train passengers in Train to Busan are a high school baseball team. It's only a matter of time before they use their bats as a weapon against the zombies.
• In Trumbo, Frank King scares off a HUAC guy who wants him to fire Trumbo by whipping out a baseball bat and unleashing hell on his own office.
• Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987) famously used a baseball bat to savagely murder one of his subordinates at a dinner meeting. This was Truth in Television, though he actually killed two subordinates.
• in Us, the father of the family brings a baseball bat with him to intimidate some trespassers. It later gets used against him.
• Vampires Suck: Edward does this to Jack, parodying both the baseball scene and the final fight of Twilight. Vampires may be able to jump inhuman distances, but once they're airborne, they're still subject to the laws of projectile physics!
• The Baseball Furies gang in the movie The Warriors is baseball-themed, and all use baseball bats as their weapons. After the Warriors beat them up, several Warriors carry their baseball bats into future rumbles.
• Yakuza Apocalypse: In one scene, Kaeru-kun grabs a baseball bat and starts giving people beatdowns with it.
• Tallahassee uses a baseball bat to kill a few zombies in Zombieland.
• In Zig Zag (2002), ZigZag's father used to beat him up with a baseball bat he called Black Beauty until ZigZag and Singer stole it and tossed it into the river. In the present day, he threatens Singer with a different baseball bat.
• In Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, Clive grabs the baseball bat from under the strip club bar and uses it to fight the zombies.

Jokes

• Russian Humour:
  Last year, the sports shops around Russia had sold three million baseball bats, four baseball gloves, and one baseball.

Literature

• In Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, two men attack Gabe for being trans. When John tries to defend Gabe, one of them hits him in the head with a baseball bat. John is in a coma for a week.
• British pulp hero Bill Samson a.k.a "the Wolf of Kabul" had a hulking native sidekick named Chung who wielded a cricket bat he called "clicky-ba" with which he used to kill foes.
• Exterminator by William S. Burroughs contains a sequence in which order has broken down, and people form costumed mobs, including
  The dreaded Baseball Team 5000 burly athletes in baseball uniforms all with special bats erupt into a crowded street . . :
  "BEAT YOUR FILTHY BRAINS OUT . . ."
• Fraternity Of The Stone by David Morrell. The assassin protagonist while a youth knocks out the teeth of a school bully with one, as he regards him as no different from the terrorists that killed his parents. Although the headmaster is sympathetic, he naturally thinks this is overkill and expels him.
• In Gil's All Fright Diner, the ghost Cathy has to fight another ghost. Since they can't touch any physical objects, she has to create a weapon from her own memories and comes up with... a baseball bat.
• The Goosebumps book I Live In Your Basement features protagonist Marco flouting his mother's warnings not to play softball with the other kids by doing it anyway. The first chapter ends with him getting smacked on the side of the head with a baseball bat by an athletic girl named Gwynnie ^notewho is later revealed to be his younger sister and the person who really hit him with the bat was Jeremy . This is what kickstarts the plot.
• This is an occasional weapon in The Hardy Boys through the process of elimination. Thou Shalt Not Kill, so slashing and piercing weapons are out, and since they usually avoid combat they don't carry standard weapons, but a baseball bat can be scavenged to use as an Improvised Weapon for a Tap on the Head.
• Subverted to comedic effect in the Honor Harrington novel Flag in Exile when the main character, unfamiliar with baseball (which has only held out on long-isolated Grayson), confuses baseball bats for clubs, but is actually looking at people gathering for a Sunday afternoon pickup game in the local park. Her chief bodyguard, a Grayson native, finally stops laughing long enough to explain that no, they are not facing an incipient riot. Her next thought is that baseball must be an even more violent game than rugby, and the bodyguard cheerfully explains that the bats are used to hit the ball, not the other players.
• Another instance of baseball bats being used against zombies (although with more effectiveness) occurs in The House Of Daniel by Harry Turtledove.
• This trope appears in works by Haruki Murakami, justified since not only does Japan have the strictest gun laws in the world, but also because baseball and softball are very popular there.
  • In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist Toru Okada breaks several skulls with his baseball bat.
  • In 1Q84, Aomame used a softball bat to smash the objects in the house of her late best friend's abusive husband. In the present, she requests a bat for self-defense in case someone from Sakigake should get too close.
• The Krikkit Robots from Life, the Universe and Everything have a cricket motif (in fact the other way around - cricket is built around a deeply ingrained Genetic Memory of the robots). As well as being melee weapons, their "bats" double up as ray guns and a launching mechanism for bright red incendiary grenades. ^note If you think they sound like a Doctor Who villain, it's because that's for what they were originally intended. Also, the brief summary of the rules of Brockian Ultra-Cricket says that players score by hitting each other with "cricket bats, basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you can get a good swing with."
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy. When one of the Possessed claims to be legendary gangster Al Capone, he grows a blood-stained baseball bat from his hand to prove it. Which he later puts to use beating the non-possessed into submission.
• Rubbernecker: When Patrick was eight, a bully punched him and knocked him off the monkey bars. Patrick followed the bully to the swings and smashed him with a rounders bat just as he was swooping down, causing him to somersault off the swing.
• During the Sword of Schueler riots in the Safehold novels, one group of rioters attacked a family of Charisian expatriates. One of them had been a professional baseball player before emigrating from Charis and had his lucky bat on him during the riots. It didn't go very well for the rioters.
• The killer in John Dickson Carr's Sir Henry Merrivale novel The Skeleton in the Clock used a cricket bat.
• In Super Powereds, when Roy is convinced to take the Weapons course, the professor gives the students a choice of close-combat weapons. They can either pick something from her (impressive) arsenal or bring/make a weapon of their choosing, pending her approval. Roy brings a metal bat he bought at a sporting goods store, pointing out that he lacks the finesse to use anything more sophisticated, and he's somewhat familiar with using blunt instruments from his alternate self Hershel's LARP days. The professor agrees in principle, pointing out that a bat is little more than a cudgel, one of the most ancient weapons, but tell him to return the bat. She's going to have a super-dense version made for him to accommodate his Super-Strength. After Roy gets that weapon, he tests it out against his sparring partner Chad and finds out that it improves his combat performance by a lot.
• In Trainspotting, Sick Boy uses a baseball bat as a weapon. Renton wonders how many baseball bats are purchased in Scotland with the honest intention of playing baseball.
• Baseball bats appear several times as weapons against the zombies in World War Z. One character finds a dropped bat that's been bent useless as a result.

Live-Action TV

• The creepy twins from American Horror Story: Murder House show up with their bats in every single appearance they have. In the pilot, they took them inside the house for protection. When Adeleide warns them about the dangers of the house, they ignore her by replying "we have bats".
• Penny in The Big Bang Theory expressed shock about the burglary at Leonard's apartment, especially due to her working the late shift and thus would have witnessed it if she didn't have it. Leonard tells her not to be scared, before she reveals that she's not scared, and states that she would have "gone 'Nebraska' on their asses." while stroking an aluminum baseball bat. When Sheldon knocks at the apartment door, Leonard then requests for Penny to hand him the bat (implying that he wanted to smack Sheldon with it).
• Boardwalk Empire: In season 2, Nucky directs the black workers in the city to go on strike so as to disrupt Jimmy's bootlegging operation (while Nucky gets a monopoly on the booze trade thanks to a deal with the IRA to bring whiskey into the country). With speakeasies and restaurants too understaffed to serve alcohol, Jimmy's outfit has no way to get customers in Atlantic City. In an attempt to get the black people back to work, they deploy an army of fifty strikebreakers armed with baseball bats and billy clubs to assault and beat up the strikers on the boardwalk. With Eli finding out that his deputy Ray Halloran has been talking to Esther Randolph about the death of Hans Schroeder, he also pays a couple of the strikebreakers to violently beat up Halloran for snitching.
• The opening minutes of The Brittas Empire has Brittas, in an Establishing Character Moment, confiscate a cricket bat that his stepsons (and his neighbour's son) were using and start trying to show them how to use it properly. He gets whacked below the left knee with said cricket bat in response.
• In the Broad City episode "B&B-NYC," Trey brings a baseball bat to Abbi's apartment after she's robbed. He taps things with it as he checks each room for intruders.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In Season 5, Anya wields one as her weapon of choice, though she chokes up on the bat so much that she's holding it by the middle, which wouldn't give her much of a swing. It is a popular weapon among the Badass Normal Scoobies. One version has a wicked hook tied to it.
  • Giles wields a flaming baseball bat when he attacks Angelus in "Passion".
    Angelus: Jeez, what happened to wooden stakes?
  • This was also Angel's solution to stop Faith raping\killing Xander in "Consequences".
  • The demon in "Nightmares" is a lumbering figure with a club for a hand. The club is representative of a baseball bat, and the monster itself is a manifestation of an abusive baseball coach.
  • In the Angel spin-off, Gunn uses a baseball bat whose head has been sharpened into a stake for killing vampires. Ironically the same weapon was used in a MADtv (1995) spoof Buffy the Umpire Slayer.
• The Client of the Week in Burn Notice went after a local gangster with a baseball bat after the thug tried to assault his sister. Fiona not only approved, she suggested a golf club next time; greater force to a smaller surface area.
• In one episode of Cold Case, the victim was a baseball player who, on being harassed one more time by homophobic thugs, finally lost his temper and went after them with a bat. Sadly, it was three-on-one and he ended up being beaten to death with it.
• CSI: NY:
  • In "Tanglewood," the Tanglewood Boys gang kill a wannabe with an autographed baseball bat taken from a sports bar. The fragment of signature on the splinter left in the body provides the CSI investigators with a vital clue.
  • In "Boo,", a guy who tried to fake his death to collect on the insurance by using blowfish poison to make him appear dead was betrayed by his spouse and buried alive. He manages to break out, so the spouse's lover kills him with a cricket bat (but not before he manages to inject both of them with the poison).
• Jon Stewart of The Daily Show apparently fights diabetes with a baseball bat. This is particularly funny for fans of Fake News Rumble, in which a magical bat gives Jon superpowers.
• Deadliest Warrior compared the baseball bat as a weapon to nunchucks in the "Mafia vs Yakuza" episode. The judges determined that nunchucks were faster and flashier, but the baseball bat delivered a heavier and more lethal blow, which shattered a pig's spine in one hit.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Remembrance of the Daleks": The Doctor supercharges an aluminum bat with the Hand of Omega for Ace to use as a weapon. When confronted by an Imperial Dalek at Coal Hill, she whacks the living daylights out of it with the bat; it doesn't die, but its eyestalk is knocked off, leaving it unable to do anything but panic about being blind. Sophie Aldred, who played Ace, considers the fact that she is the only person in the entire series to beat a Dalek to a pulp with a baseball bat very cool, and this led to the creation of the Moment of Awesome page in the first place.
    Ace: WHO YOU CALLIN' SMALL?!
  • "World War Three": Mickey grabs a baseball bat to defend himself and Jackie when a Slitheen breaks into his flat, although he ends up not needing it.
  • "The Stolen Earth": Wilf first arms himself with a cricket bat against any alien invaders. He's switched to a paintball gun by the time he runs into one, though.
  • "The Eleventh Hour": Amy Pond knocks out the Doctor using a cricket bat.
  • "The Power of The Doctor": Ace returns 34 years after "Remembrance of the Daleks" aired and reveals she hasn't lost her touch, whipping out her trusty baseball bat to deal with a team of Daleks planning to blow up a volcano.
• Father Brown:
  • In "The Lepidopterist's Companion", the Victim of the Week dies after being struck over the head with a cricket bat after being mistaken for a burglar. However, he had been poisoned with strychnine before that.
  • In "The Cat of Mastigatus", the Victim of the Week is cracked over the skull by a cricket bat in the boiler room of the school.
• In Golden Boy, the detectives are investigating the death of a politician and are told that the body was shot after death and the actual cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. They then remember that the politician had a valuable autographed baseball bat in his office that seemed to have been cleaned recently.
• In the Heroes episode "Graphic Novel: Normal Lives", Noah beats Marcus with a baseball bat to prevent him from harming anyone else.
• In one episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, Bolander and Munch investigate the murder of a teenager. They discover he had been beaten with a baseball bat as part of a gang initiation ritual, and died when it caused a fatal concussion.
• Parodied in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia when the gang locks a Mexican family in a room filled with stereotypical American culture. Mac casually swings a baseball bat around them, causing them to think he's threatening them.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent: The Victim of the Week in "Love on Ice" is a washed-up ball player who gets whacked over the skull with one of his lucky bats.
• Leverage: In "The Beantown Bailout Job", Eliot beats up three mob enforcers using a baseball bat he had taken off one of the enforcers.
• Lovecraft Country:
  • Leti smashes up the white guys' cars with a bat when they're rigged for blaring their horns at all hours in hopes of driving her and other black residents away. After this, the guys come into the house with their own bats for revenge. They get killed by a ghost before doing anything.
  • This seems to be Leti's go-to weapon. She was also prepared to give Tic a tap or two during his Unstoppable Rage.
  • Atticus later uses a baseball bat to defend a group of black teens from white racists intent on murdering them.
• The Magician: In "The Illusion of the Deadly Conglomerate", two hobos with baseball bats attempt to rough Tony up. He manages to grab the bat off one of them and turn the tables.
• Al Bundy of Married... with Children likes to keep a baseball bat near the door in case of undesirables... such as Jehovah's Witnesses.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil (2015):
    • In "Stick", Foggy uses his softball bat to overpower two thugs that attack Karen.
    • In "Dogs to a Gunfight", Frank Castle, a former father, beats a pawnshop owner to death with a baseball bat after the guy tries to sell him child porn.
  • Luke Cage (2016):
    • In "Moment of Truth", Zip tries to swing a baseball bat at Luke when he interrupts Zip's gang shaking down Genghis Connie's, but the bat breaks on Luke's durable skin.
    • In "Who's Gonna Take the Weight", Luke Cage attacks Cottonmouth's main stashhouse at Crispus Attucks, causing the police to seize all of Cottonmouth's money and Mariah Dillard's name to be dragged through the dirt. When we next see Cottonmouth, he's smashing objects in his bar with a baseball bat, and is still brandishing the bat when Scarfe shows up to deliver Chico's body.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • A cricket bat is used as a murder weapon in "Dead Man's Eleven".
  • Jones gets knocked out with a cricket bat in "Last Man Out", and the killer would have beaten him to death with it had not Barnaby shown up.
• Misfits also has a tendency to stick at least one character (often Kelly) with a baseball bat.
• The Muppet Show: The Swedish Chef bakes a cake that comes to life and yells in mock Japanese. Whatever it was saying, it clearly pissed off the Chef, as he soon brandishes a baseball bat (which he calls a "cakensmoosher"). Splat!
• NCIS: Gibbs uses a bat to pancake a guy on whom Abby had a restraining order. Not pretty.
• The Sixth Ranger of Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger, the Shurikenger, has a baseball motif; the sheath of his sword doubles as a bat. The baseball references were removed for Power Rangers Ninja Storm, presumably because the higher-ups didn't want kids to apply this trope with the Samurai Ranger's toy sword.
• One of Us is Lying: Addy smashes Giselle's car up with a bat when Simon Says commands her to. However, as she was already mad at Giselle Addy leapt to obey.
• Calvin of Power Rangers Ninja Steel used a (presumably aluminum) baseball bat to fight a monster prior to becoming a ranger. The only outcomes were slowing the monster down, enraging it, and bending the bat.
• In the last episode of the first season of Queer as Folk (US), Justin is hit over the head with a baseball bat by his homophobic classmate and is very nearly killed.
• Saturday Night Live had a recurring talk show sketch called "The Joe Pesci Show," in which Pesci (characterized as the kind of bad-tempered psycho he played in films like GoodFellas) regularly blows his top and whacks his guests with a baseball bat stored behind his desk.
• On an episode of Seinfeld one of Kramer's criminal buddies asked if he could borrow a baseball bat.
  Brody: [holds up bat] Can I borrow this?
  Kramer: Sure. Do you need a glove?
  Brody: [smiles] No.
• Silicon Valley: When a blue-collar man threatens to come over to their house and fight Richard, the gang huddles in a corner in fear and Dinesh clutches a cricket bat.
• In Severance (2022), Reghabi kills Graner from behind with a baseball bat.
• In Skins, Effy's therapist beats Freddie to death with a baseball bat.
• In Stranger Things, the first weapon to actually hurt the Demogorgon is a nail-spiked bat, swung by the resident jock.
• In the Supernatural episode "What Is And What Should Never Be" (S02, Ep20), Sam grabs a baseball bat when he hears a noise downstairs and thinks there is an intruder in the house.
• Sweet Home (2020): Ji-su carries a baseball bat to defend herself.
• On Teen Wolf, Stiles attempts to shed his Non-Action Guy status by bringing a baseball bat to face a gang of werewolves. It doesn't work out, since one of the wolves breaks it after getting one hit on him.
• In one episode of Titus Chris grabbed a bat he kept under his couch when he arrived at his home one day and heard an intruder in his kitchen. His girlfriend did not think it was a good idea.
  Erin: What's that for?
  Chris: In case he has a gun.
  Erin: That shoots BASEBALLS?
• Kol Mikaelson from The Vampire Diaries carries an iron baseball bat during the entire episode "Heart of Darkness". He beats up Damon with this bat for about half the episode as well.
• Vera: In "Darkwater", a violent suspect uses a baseball bat to smash up the car of the Victim of the Week's father. He then uses it to threaten the father, telling him that if he is not gone in 24 hours, he is coming back for him.
• Used (probably half-jokingly, but we'll never know) as a threat by none other than the White House Counsel on The West Wing:
  Leo McGarry: You're going to meet him right now. It's going to be fine...
  Ainsley Hayes: It's not going to be fine. He's gonna yell, and scream, I've seen him on TV...
  Leo McGarry: Well, that's TV. He's making a full-throated defense of the President. That's what we do. Believe me, in real life, when the cameras are off...
  [Lionel Tribbey storms into Leo's office, brandishing a cricket bat]
  Lionel Tribbey: LEO! I will KILL people today, Leo! I will kill people with this cricket bat, which was given to me by Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth Windsor, and then I WILL KILL THEM AGAIN WITH MY OWN HANDS!
• The Wire:
  • Bodie and "The Pit" crew beat up some rival drug dealers with bats. It's the weapon of choice when they don't want to bring down police attention.
  • In Season 2, Cheese Wagstaff's crew has a few members carrying bats when they gang up on Ziggy^note aka "Fucknuts" aka "Malaka" Sobotka, although most of the ass-whooping Ziggy gets is from Cheese's fists.
  • In Season 3, some of Bodie's crew are on the receiving end from Marlo's boys. One of them is no older than thirteen.
    Young Corner Boy: I was workin' that bitch.
    Fruit: Yeah shorty, you hard.
• In the first episode of Without a Trace, a rookie agent gets this after going to a suspect's apartment alone, almost getting himself and the Victim of the Week killed. It's he who's hauled off in an ambulance at the end to ensure that he doesn't have a concussion or skull fracture.
• The Young Ones:
  • Vyvyan sometimes used a cricket bat as a weapon, mostly against his fellow housemates.
    Rick: Oh, Vyvyan, what repartee! Sticks and stones may brrreak my bones—
    Vyvyan: That is the first sensible thing you have said all day! *CRACK*
  • Also:
    Rick: What the ruddy heck is going on?!
    Vyvyan: SHUT UP! *SMACK*
    Rick: Hah! Missed both my legs!
• Young Sheldon: "German for Beginners and a Crazy Old Man with a Bat": After the break-in at the gambling room, Dale takes to carrying a baseball bat in case thieves show up. Connie makes fun of the fact that it's a children's bat.
• In Z Nation, one of the signature weapons of the main survivor group is the "Z-Whacker", a reinforced metallic baseball bat with spikes on the front end that puncture a zombie's brain (zombie skulls are pretty fragile in this series, at least most of the time).

Music

• Beyoncé's video for "Hold Up" features her cheerfully skipping down a city street in a gorgeous yellow dress... whilst wielding a baseball bat and vandalizing everything in sight.
• The Buckwheat Boyz: "Peanut Butter Jelly Time"
  Peanut butter jelly
  Peanut butter jelly
  Peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat!
• In case anyone who's watched Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was wondering, yes, "I Beat That Bitch With A Bat" is (1) a real song (by Johnny Dangerous, 1992), (2) that catchy, and (3) very clearly about domestic violence. With a baseball bat.
• Eazy-E usually has a gun or two with him in his songs, but his melee weapon of choice is a Louisville Slugger, as depicted in the aptly named "Sorry Louie", where he successfully fends off two would-be attackers with a bat and later kills a kid with it to escape a murder charge.
  "Hold up, wait, the nigga started to load his gat
  I grabbed my bat and ran around the back, yo
  He's at my window, thinkin' I'm playin' Nintendo
  But the stupid nigga don't know I'm behind him, so
  He dropped the gat like a stupid motherfucker
  So I bashed his head in with my Louisville Slugger!"
• Goo Goo Dolls: "Don't Beat My Ass"
  I'll kick your ass with a baseball bat, bitch!
• "Licensed to Kill" by Jag Panzer:
  "A soldier on the streets, somewhere in L.A.
  Preparing this night for the attack
  Swinging chains and switchblade knives
  Feel the nails in my baseball bat!"
• "I Kicked The Shark In The Face" by The Midnight Beast:
  Then I hit the bear in the balls!
• In the music video for the PVRIS song “Fire”, we see bats being used to smash plates, televisions, vases, etc. The bats first appeared in the video for “St. Patrick”, but definitely did more damage the second time around.
• The Ramones' "Beat on the Brat" provides the page quote.
• "My Name Is Mud", Primus;
  "We had our words... a common spat.
  So I kissed him upside the cranium
  With an aluminum baseball bat."
• Infamously in Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats"
  I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive
  Carved my name into his leather seats
  I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights
  I slashed a hole in all four tires
  Maybe next time he'll think before he cheats
• Belarusian singer Lera Yaskevich's video for her song "Mesyats" features her beating a guy with a baseball bat.
• Russian singer Elvira T's video for her song "Drama Queen" features her destroying various objects with a baseball bat.

Myths & Religion

• In Japanese Mythology, this is one defining trait of oni. They are commonly depicted as being huge, freakishly strong, and wielding a huge iron bat called a "kanabo". Such a weapon in the hands of such a creature is seen as a little excessive, given that oni are usually depicted as being strong enough to flatten mountains.
  • This is so iconic that it has led to the Japanese idiom "oni ni kanabo" ("an oni with his iron bat") - roughly, "There Is No Kill Like Overkill".

Pinball

• The shark on the side of the cabinet of Fish Tales holds a bat.

Pro Wrestling

• Maguro Ooma would use a spiked bat during Michinoku Pro Wrestling brawls he got involved in
• Crow Sting in WCW and nWo Sting in New Japan Pro-Wrestling used baseball bats as their weapons of choice.
• Savio Vega's trademark black bat.
• Lex Luger took up a bat as his weapon of choice in WCW
• One of Cactus Jack's signature weapons is a bat wrapped in barbed wire named "barbie".
• Betsy Ruth, being a wrestling baseball player, is not above hitting foes with a bat.
• While best known for carrying a tennis racket, Jim Cornette would carry a bat to fend off those who bothered him in Ring of Honor.
• Christopher Daniels used bat to defeat Rhino at the 2007 TNA Sacrifice.
• In Progress Wrestling The London Riots (James Davis and Rob Lynch) bring a cricket bat to the ring with them for their matches.
• At WWE NXT UK Takeover: Cardiff, Dave Mastiff used a cricket bat in his match against Eddie Dennis.
• Danny Burch and Pete Dunne used cricket bats in their 2020 NXT Takeover: Wargames match.
• This is Sami Callihan's go-to weapon for most part of his career.

Roleplay

• At least one baseball bat is assigned in each season of Survival of the Fittest, whether on its own or with additions such as a nail being embedded into it. Version One's Adam Dodd used one to make his first kill during an Unstoppable Rage on someone who attacked his True Companions, a taste of things to come for him.

Tabletop Games

• In Betrayal at House on the Hill, one of the little boy characters is depicted as being interested in baseball and carrying a bat. Although his main stat isn't Strength, it's Speed.
• A few Dungeons & Dragons Splatbooks have also mentioned that a "worked" club is essentially a wooden baseball bat, and d20 Modern gives them the same combat stats.
• The baseball bat is often cited in 'modern' role-playing games (GURPS, Spycraft, etc). Generally, it's considered a club. Which, you know, it is.
• In the French roleplaying game In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas, the bat is archangel Daniel's weapon of choice. So much that his purge of the rotten eggs in his angelic troops was called the Night of the Long Bats.
• The Bat Mobile in the Card Game Super Munchkin, and the Bat Bat in Munchkin Bites.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game has Ultimate Baseball Kid, who uses a baseball bat with spikes as a weapon.

Theatre

• Fangirls: When the fangirls at the vigil are planning to hunt down Harry's abductor, one of them is wielding a cricket bat.

Toys

• In Teddy Scares, Rita Mortis uses a baseball bat as her main weapon.

Video Games

• Thornies in 8Bit Killer are the most basic mooks whose only method of attack is to walk up to you and bash your head with a barbed bat.
• Aftertime: One of the first weapons you get in the game is a baseball bat. It can down a zombie in five hits.
• In Attack of the Mutant Penguins, Rodney can obtain a baseball bat. He doesn't use it to play baseball.
• Bangai-O uses a giant robot-scale baseball bat to deflect enemy shots and send enemies flying.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City had various enemies using bats as clubs to whack Batman with. In the latter game, Harley Quinn also used a bat to whack Batman unconscious after Joker apparently ambushed him, even yelling "Batter Up!" before doing so.
  • She returns in a pre-order 'exclusive' DLC for Arkham Knight, playable in full with a custom bat she uses. It replaces her normal punches and kicks for brutal takedowns, beatdowns, and finishing moves.
• Bat Boy: the Protagonist, bat boy wields a…well, you get the picture.
• The Game Boy version of Batman: Return of the Joker has a boss named Foul Ball who attacks by spinning a baseball bat around.
• In Blinx 2, one of the weapons that can be obtained is a baseball bat called the Grand Slam. It is a one-use weapon that is guaranteed to take out an opponent. After using it, you have to find a new one, because it breaks in the process. But it can make all the difference. Plus, making a really annoying guard A Twinkle in the Sky is priceless.
• Borderlands 3: Sluggers, who attack with what looks like spiked baseball bats. And their name is a baseball reference.
• In Brain Dead 13, Frankenstein's Monster Jerk Jock Moose wields one giant baseball bat, intending to bash Lance's brains out if you're not quick or careful.
• Makes things easier sometimes in Bully.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead features baseball bats, in both wooden and aluminum varieties. The wooden bat can be crafted into a nail bat, barbed wire bat, or the "Louisville Slaughterer" (a baseball bat with a big spike through the top and covered in flaming rags).
• Since City of Heroes added customizable weapons, a Tanker can take the War Mace powerset but alter it to look like a baseball bat.
  • Invention allows all players to create a limited-use baseball bat power. Presumably after hitting one too many characters who are Made of Iron it just breaks.
• In the Heist multiplayer mode of Conker's Bad Fur Day, all the players have bats as a default weapon. The Xbox remake gives Conker a bat in the story mode when he finds out his frying pan isn't as effective as it was in the original.
• Corridor Z: If the zombies catch your Player Character, you can choose to fight them off with a baseball bat (50 rations for the first time, and an additional 50 for each time after).
• In the visual novel Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Peko Pekoyama uses a baseball bat as a murder weapon in Chapter 2 to kill Mahiru Koizumi.
• A baseball bat (including ones with nails) and a cricket bat are one of the many available weapons in Dead Frontier.
• Dead Rising series:
  • This is the signature weapon of Frank West from the first game, as he will find many bats just lying around the mall.
  • In Dead Rising 2, Chuck can upgrade the stock baseball bat into the Spiked Bat by hammering in some nails, creating a much more effective zombie-slaying weapon.
• Death Road to Canada features baseball bats as melee weapons you can find in infested sporting goods stores, or a playable character with the 'Athlete' perk may start with one. Aluminum bats are just as strong and unbreakable if you can obtain one.
• Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten: You'd be hard-pressed to find any official artwork of Fuka without her trademarked baseball bat, and one of her special attacks is baseball-themed. In-game it's treated the same weapon-wise as an axe.
• Dodgeball Academia: Suneko has a baseball bat, which is fitting for her troublemaker persona, she can use it for her Balltimate move as well.
• Williams and Rowper from Double Dragon often wield baseball bats that can be taken away from them and used by the player.
• The Casey weapon in Enter the Gungeon is a baseball bat that enables its wielder to smack projectile attacks back to sender as its primary function. It can also be used for melee attacks of course, though, given the nature of the Gungeon, getting up close to the enemy is generally not the best idea.
• In the Fallout series:
  • Fallout 2 has the Louisville Slugger baseball bat, which is obtainable from Mrs. Wright in New Reno if you help her sabotage the Wrights' stills and is one of the best melee weapons in the game, second only to the Super Sledge.
  • A baseball bat is the first melee weapon you get in Fallout 3.
  • The "Slugger" is a secret weapon found in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and one of the most powerful in the game.
  • Fallout: New Vegas also has the baseball bat, though its unique VATS attack is called the Grand Slam. Its also one of those early game ineffectual melee weapons you'll want to dump for something better as soon as possible. However, the Gun Runners' Arsenal version can be modded to be more effective, including turning it into a nailbat. With all mods, it hits 6 points harder, swings 20% faster, and lasts 50% longer.
  • Fallout 4 also features baseball bats, or "Swatters" as the weapon vendor Moe Cronin calls them. They can be upgraded to aluminum (increasing damage and decreasing weight) and you can add other nasty upgrades to them, like nails, razor blades, or even buzz-saw blades that have been wrapped in barbed wire. A unique bat from the 2076 World Series is squirreled away in Jamaica Plains, and every so often a whack from it can send a hapless foe flying into the distance, dealing lethal damage if they're unfortunate enough to hit something like a wall. The Nuka-World DLC gives them even more upgrades, eventually allowing you to add jets on them. Fully upgraded, you've got a bat with a lead-filled core, jets, and electrified spikes that cause it to hit harder than even the Super Sledge, previously the series's premier melee weapon. Batter up!
• Fear the Dark Unknown: Chloe can wield a baseball bat covered in barbed wire against monsters.
• Fighting Force Has these as a standard melee weapon which is pretty effective.
• One of Cloud's weapons in Final Fantasy VII is a Nail Bat. As you might expect, it's useless for magic and has no materia slots, but it's got a surprisingly high ATK rating and a Critical Hit bonus.
• In The Godfather: The Game, a baseball bat of the wooden sort is your first melee weapon.
• In Ghoul School, a baseball bat is the weapon Spike begins the game with.
• One of Gene's Roulettes in God Hand is Home Run God, where he forms ki into a bat and sends the enemy flying into the distance.
• The baseball bat was introduced to the Grand Theft Auto series in Grand Theft Auto III, the game where most series tropes were established, and was prominent as the only melee weapon available other than your bare fists. Since III, the choices of melee weapon available to the player have varied from game to game, but the baseball bat, whether wooden or aluminium, has remained a mainstay of every up-and-coming criminal kingpin looking for something cheap and reliable to smash things with.
• Grey: An Alien Dream: One of the weapons Grey can wield in his Dream Land is a spiked baseball bat.
• Guardian Tales:
  • Fittingly for Rie, her Exclusive Weapon Victoria is a bat.
  • When The Little Princess gets a chance to fight, she brandishes a pink baseball bat. It does as little damage as you'd expect.
• In A Hat in Time, the Nyakuza Metro DLC gives you a baseball bat as an alternative to the base game's umbrella.
• Hedgewars: They may not hurt that much, but they send hogs flying far. Fall damage can make up for it, if you don't just go and knock someone into the water.
• Hellgate: London has a usable cricket bat called Shaun's Trusty Sidekick.
• Honkai: Star Rail: The Trailblazer’s weapon when using the Path of Destruction is a baseball bat that was conveniently lying near where they were found on the Herta Space Station.
• Hotline Miami. The bat is a common early-level weapon that's just about as deadly as everything else in the game and seems to be one of the most common weapons Jacket is associated with.
• In Immortal Souls, John wields a bat adorned with glowing ancient enchanted runes as one of his possible attacks.
• Irisu Syndrome! has the titular character wield a rather vicious nailbat. The bat is actually bread.
• Baseball bat is a Lethal Joke Item in Jets'n'Guns. It only works at point-blank range, but deals enormous damage.
• In Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, this is how the Fateless One finishes off gnomes in Reckoning mode.
• Left 4 Dead 2 has both a baseball bat and a cricket bat. In the case of the latter, this is rather odd, considering the setting is the Deep South of the USA.
• MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 features the Baseball Bat and the Spiked Nailbat as early-game melee weapons. They have the benefit of being modestly durable and readily available, and will handily brain most Grunts or Agents in one or two swings.
• MadWorld has the spike bat, a baseball bat with at least a dozen large roofing nails stuck in it.
• In Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven one of the earliest missions requires you to whack some dudes senseless with a baseball bat from behind.
• An available weapon in Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, for some reason broken glass shards have been duct-taped into it. You can clearly hear the "chink" every time you hit somebody with it.
• In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Deadpool's level 3 involves using the hyper combo meter as a baseball bat.
• Max Payne features a baseball bat as an Emergency Weapon, which replaces your initial pipe. In the first game, Max gets it from Frankie "The Bat" Niagara. The violent comic strip character Captain Baseball Bat Boy is also a running theme throughout the first two games. The conversation Max has with him says it all:
  Frankie: Pleased to meet ya. I'm Frankie "the Bat" Niagara.
  Max: Niagara... as in you cry a lot?
  Max's narration: He had a baseball bat and I was tied to a chair. Pissing him off was the smart thing to do.
• The best weapon in Mitadake High is the wooden bat, especially when nails are applied, due to how the game calculates damage and unconsciousness.
• In Monster Party, a baseball bat is the weapon Mark uses.
• Mother: Ninten from EarthBound Beginnings and Ness from EarthBound wield bats as their main weapons, acting as a substitute for the swords that are commonplace in role-playing games. In Mother 3, Lucas' main weapons are instead sticks, but he can obtain a Fake Bat and a Real Bat late into the game.
• Mae Borowski, the player character in Night in the Woods often wields a baseball bat. In the game, we never actually see her using it to play baseball or beat up anyone. She only ever uses it for petty vandalism. It's revealed that she did mercilessly beat up another kid with her bat during her high school baseball game due to a mental breakdown but we never actually see this event in the game.
• Ninja Baseball Bat Man. It's right there in the title! Some of the enemies you fight are even sentient baseball bats who wield a baseball bat for a weapon.
• In Ninja Combat, one of the weapon pickups is a studded metal baseball bat.
• Bad Girl from No More Heroes; most of the other assassins in the game use ridiculously complex gadgets and weapons (Speed Buster attacks you with a Wave-Motion Gun disguised as a shopping cart). Bad Girl is able to rise above all but one of them with nothing but a wooden bat and a serious case of the deep-down crazies. And projectile gimps. She even says the Trope name during her downward swing, and if you hurt her enough, she sets in on fire. Her father Bad Man, as shown in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, also uses a diamond-cored bat that can clash with a beam katana and briefly stun a rampaging Humanoid Abomination and was a baseball player before becoming an assassin.
• One of the weapons in Odium. About as much power as a crowbar, and weaker than an axe.
• Seeing as how the protagonist's name is literally "The Batter," it's not surprising that this how many physical attacks are delivered in OFF, using a variety of different bats, such as the "Harold bat", the "Katsuhiro bat", and more.
• In OMORI, Aubrey's Ultimate Weapon is a baseball bat. Aubrey also wields one in Faraway, with it being a nailbat for intimidation.
• One Dog Story: The first weapon you can get is a baseball bat, which is acquired by retrieving the janitor's bucket.
• PangYa has a club set that is actually a set of bats, including wooden bats, metal bats, and a cricket bat for a putter.
• Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Mario can use Baseball Bat and Toy Bat stickers to knock enemies out of the stage. This is also the Tower Power Pokey's main weakness, to the point where the battle against it begins with "PLAY BALL!" instead of "FIGHT!"
• Persona:
  • In Persona 3, the Joke Weapon of the 2-handed sword class is a Nail Bat. Junpei, the party's BFS wielder, attacks with all weapons of this class as though they were baseball bats, complete with yelling "Home Run!" when he scores a Critical Hit. And he's particularly ecstatic if you do equip him with the bat.
    • Taken to its logical conclusion when Junpei becomes playable in Persona 4: Arena, which takes place 2 years after Persona 3. Junpei is now a baseball coach, and he exclusively uses bats as his main weapon. His fighting style actually revolves around scoring hits with said bat and getting "runs" while trying not to whiff attacks and getting "strikes", essentially causing this trope to overlap with I Know Madden Kombat.
  • Persona 4 lets the protagonist equip one as well. It only hits 30% of the time (though when you think about it, that's a pretty good batting average), but has a much higher-than-normal rate of critical hits.
  • Persona 5: One of Ryuji's blunt melee weapons he can use to beat enemies to the pulp is a baseball bat covered in nails, in keeping with his Delinquent looks.
• The baseball bat is one of the better choices in Project Zomboid, where most of the weapons (except firearms) are household items. If you want your bat even deadlier (but slightly less durable), find a hammer and some nails.
• Some Goons in Rage 2 use baseball bats to hit grenades at you. If you get into close range, they also use their bats as melee weapons.
• Raging Justice have bats as recurring weapons you can use to smash enemies' faces in. Defeat enough enemies with the bat and the game will announce onscreen, "Homerun!"
• Raw Footage: Your sole melee weapon in the game is a baseball bat.
• RemiLore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore: One of the unlockable weapons in the game is Old Clunky, which is a baseball bat with a couple nails in it.
• The magical Excalibat from Rise of the Triad. This enchanted baseball bat can knock the enemies flying, sometimes gibbing them in the process, and if you hold down the fire button for a while, it unleashes a wave of deadly baseballs.
• Shoma in Rival Schools. He's a baseball player so this is a given, but the bat he carries around is longer than he is tall.
• Baseball bats are one weapon in River City Ransom, which tends to use improvised weapons such as this and chains, in addition to more traditional weapons like brass knuckles.
• The storm bat in S4 League.
• Scribblenauts: Maxwell and NPCs can use baseball bats as weapons if necessary.
• Slash'EM features the Bat from Hell, an artifact baseball bat.
• StarTropics: Mike Jones is a star pitcher from Seattle, so he's more than familiar with a baseball bat which, in the game, is a really strong, short-ranged attack.
• Street Fighter EX's Cracker Jack is as good with a baseball bat as he is with his fists.
• Appear quite frequently in Streets of Rage and its sequels. Some of the basic mooks wield them, although you can pick them up to return the favour!
• Used in the sequel to The Suffering, but subverted in that it's exactly as useless as you'd think compared to an M-60. (As one walkthrough remarked, "Put down the crack pipe.")
• The Home-run bat in Super Smash Bros., which can become a One-Hit KO item when charged up. Ness also uses his baseball bat as his forward Smash. This move can also reflect projectiles as well.
• A baseball bat is Kratos/Zelos' Joke Weapon in Tales of Symphonia.
• Frank West carries a bat into Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, both as a special move and a super move. The trope name is even one of his sound bites. Bats have sort of become an Iconic Item for Frank. In Dead Rising 2: Case West, an AI-controlled Frank has an infinite supply of bats as weapons.
• The Scout from Team Fortress 2 wields one and has a Baseball motif. His appearance, taunts, and achievements all reference it.
  • A bit of a subversion, however, since most of Scout's bats deal 35 damage per hit, unlike every non-Spy's melee weapons that deal 65. That means Scout gets less damage per hit than a golf club, a wooden protest sign, and mittens. To compensate, Scout's melee speed is faster than everyone else.
  • Scout also has a wooden bat called the Sandman that has a taunt kill where Scout points to the sky, winds up, and makes a mighty swing. If he connects, he can even send the Heavy Weapons Guy flying.
• ThanksKilling Day: The kid in the prologue level can get a baseball bat. It can be used as a weapon against the turkeys, but doesn't really help him much against the killer pilgrim.
• Useful for conserving ammo while zombie hunting in TimeSplitters Future Perfect.
• Undying: Anling can battle zombies with a baseball bat. It's also a weapon she can make via Item Crafting.
• Baseball Bats are a pretty common weapon in Urban Reign and can even be used to launch an unlucky target like you're going for a home run.
• The bat is the second weakest melee weapon in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Lots of thugs in Santa Monica and downtown LA use them. It can be used for stealth-kills which involves your character taking a massive swing and smacking them one, somehow completely silently.
• Bats are the weapon of choice of Javier Garcia from The Walking Dead (Telltale) Season 3, who can wield them with skill since he was once a professional baseball player before his gambling addiction got him kicked out of the major leagues.
• Bats are an uncommon weapon in The Warriors and like in the movie, bats are always carried by the Baseball Furies gang. Their gang leader wields three bats tied together and it HURTS. Too bad you can't get that weapon anywhere else.
• In Warriors Orochi 3, the Bat is one of the Lethal Joke Items that can be used by sword-users.
• Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening: Alicia uses bats to attack monsters, with skills like "Bash" and "Bat Barrage", with the former being described as "Smash one target with Alicia's bat."
• The crazed janitor of White Day: A Labyrinth Named School carries a bat and will beat his victims to death with it. If you see him, RUN!
• World of Horror has two baseball bat weapons, the Wooden Bat you can find in a school locker during "Spine-Chilling Story of School Scissors", and the Baseball Bat that drops after beating the Apartment Stalker. Getting both in one playthrough unlocks a new playable character, Yumiko.
• One of the weapons in the arsenal of Worms. Great way to smack someone into the ocean, complete with corny sound effects (usually the very stereotypical Charge) and caption.
• Goro Majima, the Psycho for Hire rival to Kazuma Kiryu from the first Yakuza game, in a Joker-like moment (Majima is voiced in the English version by Mark Hamill), takes a baseball bat to one of his underlings before Kazuma's first battle with him for not laughing after Majima gets hit in the side of the head with a baseball at the batting cage. In the prequel Yakuza 0, Majima as a playable character has a "Slugger" style that focuses on using a baseball bat to dispatch enemies. In Kiwami, the remake of the first game, Majima will eventually show up as "Officer Majima" and try to bludgeon Kiryu with his "Slugger style" as a part of his "Majima Everywhere" system.
  Majima: This is the part where you're SUPPOSED TO LAUGH! [WHACK!]
  • Subverted by Tatsuo Shinada in the fifth game. Despite specializing in club weapons as well as being a former baseball player he refuses to use actual baseball bats as weapons due to his respect for the sport. If he gets his hands on one in a fight, he takes a moment to gaze at it longingly before putting it down on the ground. He is however able to use his baseball experience/training to deliver some pretty powerful swings with other weapons.
    Shinada: Baseball bats aren't made to hurt people ...
  • In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ichiban's weapon of choice is a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire that he uses as his idea of a fantasy sword for his "Hero" class. He first finds his "Hero's Bat" stuck on the ground and after pulling it out his imagination and delusions of grandeur run wild. Said bat can be upgraded from a shoddy bat wrapped in barbed wire to a golden electric bat with pronged blades sticking out of it.
• Yandere Simulator:
  • Yandere-chan can use a baseball bat as a blunt weapon to kill a student, or more subtly to break a student's neck. However, other students will be suspicious of her if she's seen carrying one in school unless she's a member of the Sports Club.
  • A baseball bat is also the weapon of choice for delinquent Umeji Kizuguchi.
  • When discussing a possible future elimination method-the ability to drive your rival to murder-YandereDev posted a video in which Yandere-chan coaxes Kokona into beating Musume up after telling Kokona Musume's father holds her father's debt. After Musume taunts Kokona one too many times, Kokona snaps and beats her up with a baseball bat so much it kills her (and it's implied there's not much of Musume's head left). Kokona is arrested for murder, and despite her insistence that Yandere-chan was involved, the police refuse to arrest her because she has a solid alibi.
• Zombie Playground: One of the weapons you can outfit your kid with is a baseball bat.
• ZombiU gives you a cricket bat as your default melee weapon.

Web Animation

• Epithet Erased: Giovanni might not be much of a supervillain, but he's quite a good baseball player and has the trophies on his shelf to prove it. His weapon, the "Soulslugger Doom Bat", is a mundane baseball bat, to which he's taped a knife; when Molly questions why he didn't stick it through the bat as is customary, he says that he's "evil on a budget". His ability to deal a massive Critical Hit with every 13th attack makes his bat legitimately dangerous, and indeed it's his swing with the Soulslugger Doom Bat that eventually takes down Mera.
• MrSpherical:
  • In "America vs Tree", North Korean forces use the baseball bats to beat the South Korean forces down.
  • In "Greece vs Greece", America and Greece use the baseball bat to beat the Greek Communists down.
  • In the end of "Ukraine’s SNEAKY counterattack", a Ukraine soldier uses a baseball bat to attack a Russian ball.
• In RWBY, Junior's weapon of choice is a huge baseball bat that can transform into a rocket launcher, perfect for those Macross Missile Massacre moments! Still got nothin' on Yang, though.

Webcomics

• New York Mets fans Monday and Dale from Dead Winter have a liking for baseball bats. With the latter being his weapon of choice and the two bonding because of their similar interests.
• In AntiBunny, Nailbat lives up to his name by effectively wielding his namesake spiked bats against crime, robots, and supernatural beings. He later upgrades to two bats and also demonstrates that he uses them as effective climbing tools as well.
• '32 Kick-Up Calloway has a "Lucky Bat".
• In Better Days, Fisk stops his mother's rape by braining her attacker with a bat.
• For lack of better options, Marina from Crystal Heroes finds a baseball bat to use as a weapon for her Dungeon Crawling.
• Jon Stewart uses a magic lightning bat in Fake News Rumble.
• Baek Seung-Chul of The God of High School uses an aluminum bat with remarkable effectiveness in the eponymous tournament. He upgrades to one made of Barbadium as part of his contract with the Ox King.
• Steve from Life and Death uses a cricket bat as his favored weapon.
• This was how Jared somehow managed to get a Gyarados in Manly Guys Doing Manly Things without knowing a thing about Pokemon mechanics: he used his Magikarp to bludgeon Pokemon until it evolved.
  • And he hasn't lost his touch: this was also how he stopped the animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy's from killing him. Too bad Fazbear Entertainment didn't see eye to eye on that.
    "Anyway they said that was destruction of company property and fired me."
• Medic Pics: The author (and his artist self) uses this on two occasions to dispose of things they don't like - AI, and people who don't like the flashcard software, Anki.
• In Men in Hats, when Aram is pretending to be a baseball star, he carries around "Mr. Breakface" in case people question his pretense. An earlier strip has Aram hitting Beriah in the face with a baseball bat, which breaks in half.
• In One-Punch Man, the superhero Metal Bat, true to his name, is always armed with a baseball bat made out of very sturdy metal, and can even battle giant monsters with it. After getting tired of his bats constantly bending or breaking from high impacts, he eventually acquires one that is seemingly Made of Indestructium.
• Paranatural: Main character Maxwell Puckett's "tool" is a bat, which he uses to fight supernatural creatures.
• Rebirth: Li during the mall trip. She bashes in an undead's head with a bat and spends the rest of the trip carrying around the bloodstained weapon. Everyone is rightfully intimidated.
• Sidekick Girl, from the comic of the same name, uses a baseball bat as her primary weapon.
• Sleepless Domain: The baseball and delinquent-themed Outrageous Lime's weapon of choice as a Magical Girl is her green baseball bat, which she uses in combat both as a blunt weapon and in conjunction with her power to hit Energy Balls at enemies from a distance. According to Word of God, she doesn't actually know anything about baseball as a sport — she just likes to hit things.
• The Sword Interval: Fall Barros uses an autographed baseball bat from the 1923 World Series to kill a dragon. This is possible because in the world of the comic, dragons can only be hurt or killed by "legendary weapons", and since the bat is famous (it belonged to famous player Berry Riese, basically that world's equivalent of Babe Ruth), it qualifies. Afterwards, Fall keeps the bat.
• Baek Seungchul in The God of High School is a Badass Bookworm martial artist whose weapon of choice is a metal baseball bat.

Web Original

• Fantasy Powers League: Used by two separate characters as a primary weapon, and despite the phallic intonation, both are female. Used first by Penelope Whatshername as an instrument of revenge against a clan of sadistic brothers who brutally abused her, and second by Zombiegirl who first used it as a weapon against zombies, but now backs it up with undead strength as a zombie herself.
• The SCP Foundation universe has SCP-2398, a baseball bat that makes whatever organic thing it hits violently explode on impact. The testing log for the bat is pure Black Comedy:
  During setup of the swinging robotic arm rig, the arm swings prematurely, striking Dr. Towns in the arm and causing him to violently explode. The swinging robotic arm rig is destroyed. The resulting explosion causes SCP-2398 to arc across the test chamber and strike the test pig, which also violently explodes. That explosion causes SCP-2398 to then strike two D-Class personnel used as operators in earlier tests, who also violently explode. The test chamber is destroyed as a result of the four explosions. SCP-2398 is unaffected, and later placed back into containment.
• At Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, Lancer is a PK "superboy" type with a psychokinetic force field that gives him his strength and Nigh-Invulnerability. But he's found out he can extend his forcefield to any short object (less than a meter) that he's holding. He's turned his baseball bat into a (nearly) indestructible offensive weapon. Since his field is sharp where it is psychologically appropriate the paper swords are more impressive.

Web Videos

• A deranged hillbilly used one to knock the The Angry Video Game Nerd unconscious. Since he already had it with him when the Nerd showed up unexpectedly, it may very well have been his weapon of choice.
  Batter up, bitch boy.
• Everyman HYBRID: Evan finds a baseball bat lying around in "Ashen Waste". Then the Slender Man shows up and Evan tries to attack him with it.
• In the KateModern episode "Batwoman" Lauren chases off two Hymn of Oners with a cricket bat.
• Yanki J's method of fighting during the second invasion of Molossia in Kickassia.
• The League of S.T.E.A.M.'s zombie hunter, Katherine Blackmoore, uses a cricket bat as her signature weapon (perhaps a shout-out to Shaun of the Dead).
• Related to the above example, this is how Todd in the Shadows and Paw Dugan get rid of The Voice of The Ancients in Suburban Knights.
• A Running Gag for TV Trash is host Rowdy C. threatening the creator of a work he despises by brandishing a baseball bat.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In the episode "Cops and Roger", Roger intimidates people making a deal at the docks to let him take a cut of the money by beating them up with a baseball bat. Stan sees everything due to being on a stakeout there.
• In the Animaniacs episode "Draculee, Dracula" Wakko hits Dracula over the head with a baseball bat, the censors didn't want children to imitate this scene so the animators put a smiley face and bat wings on it.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode, "Christmas with the Joker", Batman uses a baseball bat to swat away several RC airplanes attacking him.
  • Robin lampshades it, quipping, "They don't call you BATman for nothing!"
• In the Beavis and Butt-Head pilot episode "Frog Baseball", Butt-Head bashes Beavis over the head with a bat, knocking out most of his teeth, and later beats a frog to death with it.
  • "Die Fly, Die" had Butt-Head smashing a baseball bat over Beavis's back while trying to kill a fly.
• Used a couple times in Celebrity Deathmatch, like by Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire against each other. In an earlier episode, a kid from the crowd hands Michael Jordan a bat to use against Dennis Rodman, and it goes as well as his real-life term as a baseball player.
• In Danny Phantom one of the Fenton ghost hunting weapons is one called the Fenton Anti-creep stick. It's a bat. With the word "Fenton" on it.
• In the Family Guy episode "Road to the North Pole", Brian and Stewie are Subbing for Santa when they make too much noise and are mistaken for robbers by the father of the house. When he tries to call the police, Stewie viciously beats him to death with a baseball bat and then uses it to knock out his wife and daughter.
• Norm Abram does this in the final episode of Freakazoid! Freakazoid was the bat.
• In Gravity Falls, Grunkle Stan used a baseball bat to fight off a horde of zombies. When one of them breaks it, Stan merely switches to Good Old Fisticuffs.
• Harley Quinn (2019): As part of her transition from classic Harley Quinn to the more modern portrayal, Harley ends up trading her iconic hammer for a bat in the first episode. It's devastating against ordinary humans, but having it shatter against enemies with Super-Toughness is her equivalent of The Worf Barrage.
• On an episode of Jem, boyfriend Rio actually says this just before dispatching of the thugs who have attacked Jerrica.
• Stumpy, Mr. Cat and Pretty from Kaeloo frequently use baseball bats to beat up people who annoy them.
• Looney Tunes: In "Transylvania 6-5000", while trying to avoid being hit by Bugs Bunny again, Count Bloodcount puts on a pair of glasses and says "You wouldn't hit a bat with glasses would you?" in response Bugs turns himself into a baseball bat and hits him.
• In The Owl House, during Season 3, Camila brings a baseball bat into the Demon Realm. It comes in handy when she throws it at Kikimora, although she never ends up full-on swinging it at someone.
• Considering the cartoon ProStars has Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Bo Jackson fighting crime, it was inevitable that they'd go into battle throwing basketballs, swinging a hockey stick, and bashing heads in attacks out of the air with a baseball bat. Sometimes they also used the bats to shoot baseballs at inanimate objects.
• Rick and Morty: One of the gadgets that Rick made for Beth when she was younger was an indestructible baseball bat; for what purpose is left to the viewer's imagination.
• In Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a baseball bat is April O'Neil's weapon of choice.
• Used in the Robot Chicken sketch "Top 100 Finale Episodes Ever", in a scene based on The Incredible Hulk (1977).
  Narrator: The Incredible Hulk was a ratings behemoth, but eventually, David Banner walked off into the sunset for the final time. (a truck drives by and a passenger whacks Banner with a bat, killing him) On a related note, Bill Bixby walked off into the sunset for the final time on November 21, 1993. His bat was cancer.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Homer Goes to College" spoofs the scene from The Untouchables (1987), when Mr. Burns tries to whack a Springfield University board member, but Burns is so weak that the board member barely notices he's being attacked, and it utterly exhausts Burns.
  • In "The Joy of Sect", Reverend Lovejoy tries to subdue Homer by smacking him with a baseball bat, but as he's failing, Willie steps in and tries to smack Homer himself.
  • Show Within a Show example; In "Itchy and Scratchy and Marge", Marge protests against The Itchy & Scratchy Show for being a bad influence on children when she catches Maggie copying Itchy's violent antics and injuring Homer as a result. In response to this, the writers of Itchy and Scratchy write an episode where Itchy and Scratchy hit each other with baseball bats, only for a blue-haired squirrel to tell them to stop. Itchy and Scratchy then take a pause from their feud so Itchy can behead the squirrel with his baseball bat, shaking hands afterwards. While Homer finds the cartoon funny (even to the point where he calls the squirrel dumb), Marge does not.
• Steven Universe:
  • In "Political Power", Onion was prepared to beat up Mayor Dewey with a metal baseball bat.
  • "Video Chat" has Lapis grab a bat to smash a tablet to "free" Steven when she assumes he's trapped in it.
• Yogi Bear: At the end of "A Bear Pair", Ranger Smith chases Yogi with a bat after he causes an international crisis during a trip to Paris.
  Yogi: Ah, just a minute, Mr. Ranger! Uh, can't we talk this over?
  Ranger: Sure, Yogi — over your dead body!
• In the South Park episode "Toilet Paper", Cartman attempts to kill Kyle by taking him out to the lake on a boat and whacking him with a bat. However, since he could only afford a wiffle bat all he does is mildly annoy him.

Real Life

• The trope is Older Than Print, as 16th-century soldier Diego García de Paredes famously got into a brawl against a squad of Papal Guards in Rome while solely armed with a rod from a medieval sport called tirar a la barra (it's unclear what did it exactly entail, but it involved using a heavy iron rod). It served him well, as he and the other six people he was playing with killed five guards and hospitalized ten.
• While scuffles in baseball are quite common, the bats are almost always left out of it. Jose Offerman's attack on a pitcher with a baseball bat drew headlines.
• San Francisco Giants legend Juan Marichal was a 10-time All-Star, a Hall of Fame inductee, and the winning hurler in "The Greatest Game Ever Pitched" ^note (a 16-inning mutual complete-game duel with Warren Spahn that Marichal won 1-0), but "The Dominican Dandy" will always be remembered for this performance after being grazed by Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro's throw back to the mound (Marichal is #27).
• In Russia (where baseball notably failed to get any semblance of popularity), bats outsell all other baseball paraphernalia combined by orders of magnitude. In the '90s, it was considered a common "car accessory" on par with a crowbar or a tire wrench. It's always a baseball bat and never a hockey stick because hockey is a genuinely popular sport in Russia.
• Same for Poland, to the point that "replicas of baseball bats" are considered a weapon under the Firearms and Ammunition Act. No other ordinary tool, including knives of any kind, are weapons and are completely unregulated. There were billboards displaying a baseball bat with the slogan, "Służy do grania, nie do zabijania" ("This is for playing with, not for killing with").
• During the riots in London and other cities in the UK in the summer of 2011, it was noted that baseball bats suddenly shot up to the top of Amazon UK's list of top-selling sports equipment, mostly due to people wanting to defend their homes from rioters. Many of the reviews posted during that time focused on the bats' usefulness for whacking looters over the head, often with an aside along the lines of "And you can use it to play ball, too."
• It has been reported that China, a country with an almost nonexistent baseball culture, has observed a slew of people seeking bats for self-defense.
• Though the sport is not very popular in the Philippines, the baseball bat is quite a popular weapon for street roughs, especially those without access to knives or guns.
• Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Cold Steel's Brooklyn Smasher and Brooklyn Crusher. A virtually indestructible baseball bat.
• One ACE Hardware store in the Philippines promoted baseball bats as self-defense tools rather than for sport.
• The Samurai actually got in on the action with this trope for a lot longer, as the aforementioned kanabo (sometimes also known as "tetsubo") is an actual weapon that is often described as a big, wooden (sometimes solid metal) bat, that they used as a pretty nasty anti-armor weapon. Even worse is that sometimes the kanabo can have spikes stuck into the business end.
  • Similarly, the Aztecs made extensive use of the macuahuitl, a kind of flattened club that resembled a cricket bat, but lined with obsidian blades.
• Mafioso Tony Accardo was nicknamed "Joe Batters" by Al Capone for using a baseball bat to bludgeon several mobsters who betrayed the Chicago Outfit. Capone was alleged to have said, "Boy, this kid's a real Joe Batters," though Accardo considered the nickname to be insulting.
• Al Capone's murder of a henchman with a baseball bat in The Untouchables did happen, but the real incident was much bloodier and gruesome than what the movie shows. Three henchmen, John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, and Joseph Giunta, plotted to assassinate Capone and seize his criminal empire. Capone found out via a loyal intermediary. He threw a gala dinner in their honor in Hammond, Indiana. After they were engorged with food and sated with wine, Capone's henchmen jumped them on a prearranged signal and tied them to their chairs. Capone produced the baseball bat and beat the three almost to death; they were each then shot in the head execution-style to finish them off. Their bodies were then left on a deserted stretch of road outside of town.

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WHACK!

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