In an oft-quoted Simpsons line, Adam West wondered why “Batman doesn’t dance anymore”—a nod to the way his wacky Batman show had been replaced by modern Batman stories that were all about darkness and misery. A group of Chicago-based Batman fans seem to have had a similar thought recently, but instead of bringing dancing back to the Dark Knight, they’ve decided to see how he’d fare on a baseball diamond with a nine-episode radio play called Batman At Bat.
Created by Chris Geiger, Sean Rose, and Stephen Winchell, the un-licensed, fan-made project was originally conceived as a way to tell a story with an old-fashioned radio broadcast of a baseball game, with the writers adding Batman when they decided it’d be an easy way to established a team of good guys and a team of bad guys. The basic setup is that Batman has agreed to let all of his worst enemies go free if they can beat him and his team in a regular game of baseball, and it was explicitly created as a callback to—as a press release explains—”Batman stories that don’t require parental guidance.”
It’s a fun concept, and the show itself is available on Apple Podcasts, but the coolest part of the project is the collection of baseball cards on the Batman At Bat website that detail the stats of every player (from Catwoman and Harvey Dent to the Joker and Gentleman Ghost). There’s also some neat art with homages to various Batman eras, specifically the beloved ‘90s cartoon and the Michael Keaton movie.