It’s May, which means that a new baseball season is upon us. While football is basically a tradition in the fall and hockey and basketball get sports fans through the winter, baseball is perfect for when the days get longer. Baseball is a game of routines, perfect as a soothing backdrop for a summer evening or a great way to waste a summer afternoon. As America’s pastime and one of the world’s most popular sports, baseball is woven seamlessly into pop culture, even in the world of comics.
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So to help baseball fans get ready for the season, here are five great baseball-themed comics:
The X-Men
Although the X-Men are usually busy saving the world from evil mutants or running the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters, the dysfunctional mutant team also enjoys playing baseball during their downtime. While their famous inter-squad games are supposed to be “power-free”, inevitably some mutant breaks the rules, leading to chaos on the baseball diamond. Whether it’s Colossus flexing his metallic metals to smash a ball into orbit, or Rogue flying in the path of an airliner to catch a ball, or Wolverine unsheathing his claws to discourage runners, the X-Men’s baseball games are usually filled with superpowered shenanigans. While many X-Men runs have featured at least one classic baseball game, it’s unlikely the team will return to the baseball diamond anytime soon, as they recently abandoned Earth due to the effects of the spreading Terrigen mists.
Peanuts
While Charlie Brown is more commonly associated with his failures on the football gridiron, the unlucky star of Peanuts is also the pitcher and captain of a neighborhood baseball team. Unfortunately, Charlie Brown isn’t a very good pitcher. Opposing batters will often hit line drives off Charlie Brown with enough force to literally knock the clothes off of him. The rest of his neighborhood team (made up of Peanuts characters like Lucy and Schroeder) doesn’t provide Charlie Brown with much support, which is why they often lose every game in a season. However, the team’s few wins almost always happen when Charlie Brown isn’t playing…which means that the team usually blames them for their failures. Despite the team’s epic losses (they once lost a game 600-0), Charlie Brown opens each season with renewed optimism, hopeful that this year his team will make the championship game.
Cross Game
One of the greatest manga ever written, Cross Game is a slice of life manga by Mitsuru Adachi that uses baseball as both backdrop and catalyst. Cross Game is about two youngsters named Ko and Aoba, linked by both baseball and a shared tragedy. Aoba’s sister (and Ko’s best friend/childhood love) Wakaba passed away in a freak swimming accident, but not before Wakaba shared her dream of Ko reaching the prestigious Tokyo high school baseball tournament. Although he has no strong love of baseball, Ko becomes a pitcher to honor Wakaba and patterns his pitching style after Aoba, who’s a gifted pitcher but unable to play at the high school level as she’s a girl. While Ko and Aoba can’t stand each other, their shared love of Wakaba and her final dream forms an unwavering bond that everyone notices but them. While baseball is a major part of Cross Game, the series is as much about the unexpected ways tragedy and triumph ties people together.
The Great Super-Star Game
DC superheroes don’t have the same baseball tradition as their Marvel counterparts, but one Silver Age series used baseball as the arena for an ultimate battle between good and evil. When married supervillains Sportsmaster and the Huntress get into a fight over whether supervillains can ever win at anything, the two organize a “powerless” exhibition baseball game between nine of DC’s greatest heroes and their villainous counterparts to settle the argument. The Super-Hero team included Superman on the mound and Batman behind the plate, while the villains team had Lex Luthor batting clean up and the Weather Wizard in the outfield. Although Team Hero enjoyed a lead for most of the ballgame, the supervillain team staged a miraculous comeback by cheating and using their powers. However, the villain’s rally fell short when Plastic Man tricked Dr. Polaris into missing first base by transforming his foot, which allowed the superhero to tag Polaris for the final out. It seems that Huntress’s theory about villains always losing was right…mainly because the heroes aren’t afraid to cheat to win!
Triple-A Baseball Heroes
One of Marvel’s lesser known departments is their Custom Solutions department, which teams with various companies and organizations to create special promotional comics. One of Marvel’s more popular promotional comics was “Triple-A Baseball Heroes”, which combined superheroics with the pageantry of minor league baseball. The first issue of “Triple A Baseball Heroes” featured the Thing dressed as a hot dog mascot and the Hulk singing the national anthem, while the second issue (released a year later) showed the Avengers’ attempt to stop the Mole Man from opening up his own underground minor league franchise. Various Triple A teams distributed the “Triple-A Baseball Heroes” for free at baseball games, and one issue even had special variant covers for every minor league team. Unfortunately, Triple-A discontinued the series after two issues, which is a shame because it would be fun to see how heroes like Rocket Raccoon or Ms. Marvel would promote America’s favorite pastime.
