duh :smack:
Batman is ALWAYS prepared. He’d simply open the Bat Utility Belt, pull out the Bat Wild Canine Suppression Gas and spray away.
I’m going with a different tactic, one that I know works on smaller animals.
Years ago we used to have a dog that was sometimes ill tempered. It could bite, so we were a little wary around it. I’ve found that if it tried to bite, I’d offer it my fist. As soon as it tried to chomp on it, I’d shove it into her mouth a little. She would then completely forget about biting and try to back my fist out of her mouth. She couldn’t bite it like that and it worked every time.
I don’t have good coordination so I’m not confident I’ll get a good swing on the wolf. I’d hold the bat like a pool cue and wait for it to come closer and try to shove the bat down its throat. I’d not going to be able to bite me if its biting the bat.
Regarding a typical swing of a bat – wouldn’t the wolf see the swing in time to move away? Don’t they have very good reflexes? I think that they would have to, if they have regularly preyed on deer, caribou, elk, bison, or moose – otherwise the wolf would have been skewered or battered to death by antlers, horns, and /or hooves long ago.
How effective is a bat as a thrusting weapon, anyway? If you just waited for a lunge, and kept the bat between you and your canine oppressor, and then thrust hard as the wolf attacked? That should do at least some damage, I would think…
I suspect the wolf would close the gap extremely rapidly and be savagely hanging on to the man’s arm or a leg by the jaws, thus rendering the baseball bat useless. The bat is useful at ranges of 2-4 feet, but not at 1 foot.
A - A broken foreleg, ribs, hip, spine, or neck will ruin a wolf’s day.
B - A wolf can violently shake smaller prey to death. Larger prey can lose it’s balance. A running wolf’s body weight can topple a heavier animal. And wolves generally hunt in packs. Strangulation will take minutes but it’s better than nothing.
C - Bwahahahahahahaha! 
In my experience, it doesn’t take a particularly hard smack on a dog’s nose to almost overwhelm it with pain for a few moments; if you could get a decent swing on the wolf’s nose, I imagine you’d have enough time afterwards to line up a home-run hit.
Day time, of course.
“Night wolf…?”
“Night, Wolf…”
"Hey… "
An average man can easily hit a baseball which is coming at him at considerably faster than 40-45 MPH, which is probably about as fast as a wolf could be approaching, and the wolf’s approach would probably be more straightforward than the baseball (which is dropping as it reaches the plate).
Yes, but there isn’t fear, surprise or panic involved in the baseball scenario. Someone facing a murderous-intent, full-grown wolf may react ineffectively even when armed with the bat.
Agree.
Even if the wolf had a couple buddies, if the man was healthy and able to move, this is still the answer (hint: how many healthy adults have been killed by wolves in the last 200 years?).
If, for some reason, the wolf was crazy enough to take on a healthy, reasonably strong (i.e. not at lightly built as an antelope) animal twice his weight, then I don’t give huge odds for the wolf. Sure the wolf has teeth, but they’re neither razor-sharp or very long. And the man has both a bat and hands. Plus eighty more pounds of muscle and weight.
I mean, sure, it’s possible the wolf could take out a leg with a lucky bite and get into the throat while the man is stunned or something. Not saying the wolf has absolutely zero point zero percent chance.
But, if the man is aware that this is life or death, so is willing to give up a bite to an arm or something, and doesn’t panic, then it’s hard to see what the wolf is going to do once it’s got twice his body weight on top of him, with an opponent that has hands that can choke, gouge eyes, break legs and probably dislocate jaws. Not to mention that, if the man gets tired of that, he could, while still holding the wolf down with one hand and body weight, grab the bat in the middle and pound it like a pestle into various parts of the wolf.
Wolves are not dogs. This cannot be over-emphasized. Grey wolf males average 95 pounds and may weigh 135 or more. Their heads are more massive than dogs, and their teeth are larger relative to body size. Wolf bite force can exceed 1,500 psi while a German shepherd may bite with 750 psi of force. As apex predators, wolves routinely take on prey weighing many times as much as they do. Granted, bringing down a bull moose is a team effort, but nevertheless, each wolf attacks it one on one. Wolves are routinely subjected to defensive strikes from antlers, kicks by hooves, and defensive bites. Painful injuries are a common occurrence, and any wolf that shrinks from such contact isn’t going to be a survivor. Wolves have extremely long canine teeth that produce deep puncture wounds, along with sharp incisors that cut soft tissue quite well, and molars capable of crushing bone. Their bodies are powerful, muscular, and lithe. They bite and hold on only to bring escaping prey to a halt. Alternatively, they bite and slash, bite and slash, producing fearful damage in a very short time. Prey typically succumbs to pain, shock, and blood loss caused by multiple large, deep wounds.
The idea that a person, even a strong and mentally prepared person, could hold a wolf down and choke it, break its legs, or dislocate its jaw, is fantasy. Doing so one handed while readying a strike with a bat is ludicrous. Our hands aren’t strong enough to do the wolf any damage. Accepting that the man may “give up a bite to an arm” means accepting that the man will have no further use of that arm, this being the expected result of a single wolf bite. Meanwhile, in that close encounter the wolf can reach us everywhere from face to feet with those jaws and teeth, snapping and slashing multiple places in a second or two. The human would be swiftly incapacitated, and shortly after, quite dead.
Modern wolves have had tens of thousands of years to evolve human avoidance behaviors, since armed humans working in groups learned to use tools to multiply force and defend from wolf predation. Wolves that failed to learn this lesson (in a Darwinian sense) were eliminated from the population. So indeed, a modern wolf is unlikely to see a human as food, or to attack a human aggressively (as opposed to defensively if the wolf feels trapped or confined). That is why the “running away” answer is the most likely result of a human / wolf encounter, baseball bat or not, and the reason there are so few modern wolf kills of humans. But if the OP hypothesizes a wolf undertaking mortal combat with a human, with the results dependent only upon physical characteristics and not on behavior influenced by long time human dominance, then the man has little chance.
I’m not sure this follows.
I’ve seen a lot of video of animals like wolves (including wolves themselves, but more of hyenas and wild dogs - there are more safaris in Africa than in Alaska and Siberia :)) and it doesn’t look like these animals get direct hits too often. For one thing, as you note they generally attack in packs and from multiple directions, and the prey can’t focus on any one at a time and generally flounces around trying to get away. For another, the type of prey they attack are generally not particularly flexible, so they attack mostly from the rear, where the prey can’t reach and probably can’t see too well altogether. A man with a bat is more capable of aiming a well-directed whack at one particular location than a moose or elk is at directing a kick at a wolf attacking from the rear, especially when it’s also being distracted by other attackers as well.
With all that, no doubt some wolves do get incapacitated by a well directed kick. But then I’ve seen lions fatally injured by blows from prey animals that broke their jaws or gored holes in their sides. Happens, but not often enough to impact the survival of the species.
I’m not believing any of your opinions until you bring at least 50 links to back them up.
I’m not suggesting that a given wolf sustains injury, or even just a painful strike, in every encounter. Nor even with frequency. I do maintain that it happens. Given a need to kill prey perhaps every several days, throughout a lifetime, I’d expect something painful to the wolf occurs – what? Once a month? Several times a year? You can pick. Certainly more than rarely, definitely more than never. A successful adult wolf surely avoids injury as much as possible, but shrinking from the possibility seems likely to reduce that wolf’s success rate. To coin a phrase, wolves can’t be wussies. 
I offer this only to suggest that a wolf, if actually committed to the attack, isn’t likely to abandon it because of a hit by a bat. Unless of course the strike causes incapacitating damage.
Wild animals in general, when under stress and/or in pain, even great pain, react differently than you and I. Nothing about wild wolf behavior suggests that there would be any reduction in effort, nor any diminution in effect, due to anything a human could do. Except of course for an extremely fortuitous incapacitating first strike. Short of that, I cannot imagine an outcome that doesn’t go to the wolf.
I would tend to think that the unwillingness of wolves to attack grown men, and the inability to succeed in killing when they do, indicates that a man can hold his own at the very least. Cougars seem to me to be much tougher than wolves, and grown men hold their own in those situations as well.
Holy cow! I work with wild animals professionally every day, but that thread is a revelation. I think I’ll read it in detail tomorrow, at work.
A wild boar, OTOH, will charge you soon as it sees you, from what I’ve heard. Don’t try to run away, you can’t outrun it. Don’t try to scare it, it won’t swerve. Don’t try to fight back, it will ignore that and have its tusks in your guts in seconds. Just make sure to avoid places where there are wild boar. Or carry a rifle.
I’ve noticed that geese tend to charge a lot too, although I’m not sure how much good it does them. I guess maybe bluster can get you up the evolutionary chain as well as teeth and claws?
If the wolf slows before attacking and gives some time to get the bat swinging, the man might stand a chance. If the wolf launches from a point a foot or two out of swing range, I think the man is a goner.
Spike stok - YouTube This is a video of a Dutch Police dog in training. The helper is there to catch the dog - you see him raise the stick, but the dog is on him and knocking him down before he can even start to swing down.
If this was a wolf against a man with a bat, my money would be on the wolf.