Magic Bats: Major League Baseball 1955
Publication date: 1956, Pickman Brothers
Pages: 128, with numerous black and white photographs
Description: Magic Bats: Major League Baseball 1955 purports to be a somewhat superficial look at the 1955 American major league baseball season. It’s written in a style redolent of Madison Avenue, to the point where the book has no apparent author and feels like it was written by committee. Notably, there are numerous oddities in the text, starting with the actual baseball teams:
Columbian League:
- Baltimore Ravens
- Boston Sirens
- Chicago Black Panthers
- Cleveland Bessies
- Detroit Dogmen
- Kansas City Wizards
- New York Knickerbockers
- Washington Snallygasters
National League:
- Brooklyn Assassins
- Chicago Thunderbirds
- Cincinnati Redcaps
- Milwaukee Hodags
- New York Titans
- Pittsburgh Corsairs
- Philadelphia Devils
- St. Louis Momos
Interestingly, the actual baseball players all seem to be ones who were really playing in 1955; also interestingly, this World Series had New York vs. Brooklyn with Brooklyn winning in seven games, although the actual scores are nothing like the Yankees vs. Dodgers scores in the actual 1955 World Series. Also, the Snallygasters apparently fought the Knickerbockers for first place all the way through the season, while the Assassins dominated the National League from the start. The book plays up the various contests in classic breathless sport reporting fashion, but the season was apparently memorable. If it actually happened.
The thing is, you can test items for alternate timeline contamination, temporal anomalies, reality warping, and mass geasing. Magic Bats shows no sign of being a relic of anything like that: it just looks like a slickly produced book trying to cash in on an interesting baseball season. It also kind of feels like a forgery, although that simply might be because all the really interesting esoteric possibilities have already seemingly been eliminated, and it has to be something. Admittedly, it’s kind of a pointless forgery, but maybe it was a joke of some kind?
But if so, it’s a very deadly fake, or joke. That copy of Magic Bats has already shown up in at least four murder scenes, and three more people who have owned the book are currently missing. Generally speaking, when a text that we don’t really savvy racks up its second death, we just go ahead and give it a full-bore esoteric investigation. It saves time later — and usually people.