Choose Your Weapon

You just had to take in a ballgame. The sky was blue. The birds were chirping. On a day like today, even you couldn’t resist the siren song of the ballpark. You headed into the city and bought yourself a ticket, but now you’re in trouble. The zombie apocalypse began sometime after the third inning. The epicenter was right nearby, and the undead were drawn to the stadium in droves by the irresistible aroma of thousands of delicious humans. Maybe the churros too. It’s entirely possible that even the undead love the smell of churros. Whatever the reason, they (the zombies, not the churros) are flooding through the concourse and out into the stands. They’re climbing over the façade from every direction. You’re trapped.

You spent years telling anyone who would listen that the world was coming to an end. You told your family to prepare themselves the way you had been preparing yourself. You gave that speech every Thanksgiving, right up until you stopped getting invited to Thanksgiving. You built your bunker. You stocked it with food and batteries and flashlights and Twinkies. For reasons that you can’t quite recall, you’ve even got several cases of diapers down there. Most importantly, you stocked it with weaponry. You procured all kinds of weapons: big ones, small ones, stabby ones, shooty ones, explodey ones, poisony ones. You built a shrine to all the different ways a human being can inflict damage on any and all kinds of matter, and then you left it all behind, just hours before the apocalypse.

Here you are in your seat, and the zombies have got you surrounded. They want your sweet, sweet brains. The good news is that even without your arsenal, you’re ready to fight. You’ve been preparing for this moment your whole life. You reach back under your seat for the novelty helmet you discarded back in the third inning, scrape out as much nacho cheese as you can, and settle it onto your head. It may not be much good against a major league fastball, but as long as you can find some way to keep it in place, it should be strong enough to resist the teeth of the undead.

If you want a fighting chance to make it out of this stadium, though, you’ll need more than a helmet. You need a weapon. You ignore the chaos around you, push your way down the stairs, find the gap in the screen, and step out onto the field. You’re in the on-deck circle, and like all major league on-deck circles, it’s crowded with all manner of hardware. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a shortage of devices designed to improve batting performance. For example, this is a thing that exists:

I’m not going to tell you how it’s supposed to be used. I’m not going to tell you whether the spike extends through the helmet and into the brain of the batter. I just want you to know that somebody invented it, that it has apparently really helped some people improve their hitting, and that you can buy it for $64.95 (helmet not included).

But I digress. You’re in the on-deck circle with a vast array of potential weapons at your feet. Which should you choose? You need to pick the one that will give you the best chance of fighting off the zombies, escaping the stadium, and making it back to your bunker. You need to avoid the ones that would leave you helpless (then limbless, once the zombies have done their thing). Let’s think carefully, and weigh your options.

Rosin Bag

Well, we aren’t off to a great start here. Do not chose the rosin bag unless you want to die. The rosin bag is a bag full of rosin. The rosin bag in the on-deck circle is actually often placed inside a sock that’s knotted at the end, but still, that’s it. It’s just a little bag. If you get the rosin bag wet, it will become tacky. I have been thinking about it for a while now, and I still can’t come up with a way that could be helpful in this particular scenario. You could throw the rosin bag at an approaching zombie. It wouldn’t help in any way, but it is definitely a thing that you could do.

New idea: You could grab the rosin bag, wait until a zombie gets really close, and floof it right in their face, sending up a little puff of dust all around them. Once again, this would not extend your life by any measurable amount of time, but it might look pretty, and it must be at least a little bit nice to know that the last thing you see in this world contains some beauty. Either way, goodbye brain.

My advice? Pick up the rosin bag, give it a good squeeze, and then choose another weapon.

Pine Tar Stick

Yeah, this isn’t going to do much either. It’s a little sticky stuff stick, not much bigger than a roll of quarters. Could you poke a zombie in the eye with it? Maybe. But that wouldn’t stop them from harvesting your delicious brains.

Maybe, just maybe, you could rub a generous amount of pine tar all over the top rail of the dugout, then lure a zombie over and hope they set their hand directly onto the rail, getting it so stuck so fast that when they try to pull away, their whole arm comes off. Zombie flesh is notoriously detachable. Still, it’s hard to see that trick working more than two or three times before the zombies get wise. Plus, zombies aren’t known for letting a little thing like dismemberment slow them down. You can do better.

Pine Tar Applicator

So instead of a little stick, this is a little leather envelope. Inside is a cloth loaded with liquid pine tar. Basically, it’s just a fancy way of applying pine tar with a rag. Why is this ranked ahead of the pine tar stick? Because maybe you could open up the envelope and smush it directly into a zombie’s face. Maybe all that pine tar would cause it to stick, rendering the zombie blind. Maybe when they went to pull it off, they would accidentally pull their whole face with it.

That’s a lot of maybes, and even if they all work out right, you’ve only fought off one zombie. Maybe you’d rather have the stick after all. Either way, a little leather pine tar envelope is not going to get you out of the stadium and back to the safety of your diaper-filled bunker. Let’s keep moving.

Bat Weight Sleeve

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. We’re finally into the weights, and that’s good news. In case of a zombie invasion, blunt force is your best friend. The Pow’r Wrap (on the far left in the picture above) is the classic version of these sorts of sleeves, and it can be found in every on-deck circle in the league. More recent versions, like the Varo ARC and COR (in the middle and on the right), use both weight and wind resistance to slow down your bat. That’s great for creating bat speed, but it’s not so great for bopping zombies over the head. You want the heft; you don’t want to be fighting zombies and the air. Go with the Pow’r Wrap. You can slide your hand halfway into the sleeve and use your extended reach to rain blows down onto a zombie. Or you can slide the sleeve all the way onto your forearm and use it to protect yourself like Batman uses those weird spiky arm things in the Christopher Nolan movies. It’s a step up, but you’ve still got better options.

Sticky Spray

This is the tacky spray hitters apply to their hands to help them hold onto the bat. The brand you’ll almost always see is Cramer Tuf-Skin Tape Adherent, and it’s a bit of a wild card. If you were being attacked by humans, then by all means, you’d want to grab the tacky spray. Shoot some right into their fragile, little eyes. They’d recoil in agony. “Ahh, my fragile, little eyes!” they’d shout. “It burns!” they’d shout. “My eyes are so sticky now!” You get the picture. They’d tell their friends to steer clear of the weirdo who spraying sticky stuff onto eyeballs. Cramer sells Tuf-Skin with the promise that it will reduce irritation, but it’s still probably not that fun to get a load of it right on your eyeball. But how sensitive are the eyes of the undead? Zombies tend not to be too fussy. They often seem not to mind even when their flesh is pocked with big, jagged holes that let you see their bones and stuff. They’re probably not all that put off by a little sticky stuff to the eyeball. Do you really want to trust your survival on a gamble that zombies would be deterred by a simple irritant? Seems risky.

On the other hand, Tuf-Skin might have a secondary use. There’s a big warning at the bottom of every can. “DANGER. CAUTION. ATTENTION. EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE. CONTAINER MAY EXPLODE IF HEATED.” That seems like it could be useful in a pinch. Have you got a lighter? Then you can turn this can into a flamethrower. Alternatively, are you being attacked by a particularly polite zombie? If so, maybe you can ask them to hold onto the can for a minute, then whip out a magnifying glass and direct concentrated sunlight at it until the whole package combusts, spraying a hail of rotting flesh and sticky stuff all over the diamond.

Oh, also, you could probably bop the zombie on the head with the can a couple times (though this seems like it could also potentially cause an explosion). It may not be your top choice, but the tacky spray gives you the most options. And even if you don’t use it as a weapon, you can give the inside of your nacho helmet a good, long spray to help it stay in place. You’ve got to protect those brains.

Batting Doughnut

The doughnut edges out the sleeve because it’s a little more versatile. And while it’s unlikely to let you blow anybody up, it’s a surer thing than the tacky spray. You can put your fingers inside it and use it like brass knuckles. You can wind up and heave it at an oncoming assailant. You can – well OK, those are pretty much your only two real options with the batting doughnut, but they’re decent options. Obviously, there are some downsides here. In order to punch a zombie, you’d have to let them get within biting range. If you throw the doughnut, you have to have great aim and you have to run over and grab it again before another zombie gets you in their sights. But if you can punch or you can throw, maybe the doughnut gives you a puncher’s chance.

Bratt Bat

At long last, we’re into the bludgeons, and I will now admit that I’ve been sugarcoating it to this point. The batting doughnut is probably not going to save you – not even if it’s the adorable one that actually looks like a doughnut. You’re going to have to swing your way out of this stadium.

The Bratt Bat is your second-best option. It’s a wooden bat handle attached to a long plastic tube filled with heavy sand, and it’s been around since the 1970s, when Richard L. Bratt of Holden, Massachusetts, decided that the world needed a super heavy baseball bat. He also invented a weight that you could put on your tennis racket. The guy just wanted people to swing heavier things. Maybe he knew what was coming.

The Bratt Bat can weigh as much as 100 ounces, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the situation. All that heft will really help when you connect with the oncoming undead, delivering the strongest blow possible and sending zombie heads flying clear over the outfield wall. The downside is that your arms are going to get tired. It takes time to get all that weight moving. The Bratt Bat will help you connect to fend off one slow-moving zombie at a time. But should the zombies come after you with numbers, you won’t be quick enough to take multiple swings with such a big, heavy bat. You’re going to end up as family value meal.

It’s also unclear how well the Bratt Bat will hold up after multiple bludgeonings. The product description calls it virtually indestructible, but it’s not hard to envision there being something of a weak spot where the wood meets the plastic. You know what would be a bad moment to find out that your “virtually indestructible” weapon is capable of breaking in half? This particular moment.

Dirx Warmup Bat

Now this thing could take out some zombies. You’ve probably wondered many times what the deal is with this weird-looking, bat-adjacent piece of steel in the on-deck circle. Is it a torture device? Is it a new kind of jack for changing a tire? Is it some combination of the two? In fact, it’s just a weighted bat for warming up, invented in 1989 by John L. Dirsking and William P. Dirksing, of Cincinnati.

The knob and the handle look normal enough. The thing that makes the Dirx bat look so strange is also the thing that makes it the best weapon of the bunch. The entire silver part in the middle is one long screw. That big silver cylinder is a weight, and it’s threaded onto the screw. You can shift that ballast up and down the length of the bat by rotating it one direction or the other, changing the moment of inertia. Move it up toward the top, and the bat is harder to swing, but it packs more of a punch when you connect. It’s basically a sledgehammer, great for when you’re dealing with a single, slow-moving zombie and you can wind up for a single blow.

Or screw the ballast down toward the bottom and boom, you’ve got yourself a torpedo bat. Because the center of mass is lower, it won’t pack as much of a punch, but it will feel lighter, making it easier to get off multiple quick swings. That’s great for when you’re boxed in by a whole crowd of zombies and need to really hack for your life.

It’s also the sturdiest bat available. There’s no plastic here. The really funny thing about the Dirx bat is that, according to the patent application, the Dirksing family specifically invented it as a safer alternative to bat weights, which can sometimes slip off and injure people. Instead, they invented the ultimate zombie crusher. Grab that Dirx bat. You’re not going to die in here.

FanGraphs would like to emphasize that we do not condone or endorse violence. We encourage readers to attempt to reason with the zombies (preferably from a safe distance) before defending themselves with any of the implements featured in this article. We’ll see you in the survivors’ colony.