Riddle me this, Batman! Need Help with an Old Riddle

Cafe Society
1

I inherited a lot of hand-me-down books from cousins. One was an old (circa 1950s. Well, to me it was old) riddle book that had the following joke:

Q: What does a bat do in the winter?

A: it splits if you don’t oil it.

Okay, I get that the joke is that the question seems to be asking about a flying rodent murcielago Batman kind of bat. The reply obviously doesn’t.

the problem is that the reply doesn’t seem to make any sense. Do they mean a baseball bat? as a kid, I had several bats – wooden bats. We never put oil on them. And they never split in the winter, oiled or not. we oiled our gloves, but that was different.

So what the heck does this riddle mean? It’s not like a raven and writing desk kinda thing – I’m sure this actually meant something.

2

You got it right the first time. It was a good procedure to rub a little linseed oil on a baseball bat to keep it from drying out and cracking. However, most kids didn’t bother, and it was probably more of a problem a century ago than now.

3

Unoiled bats split when you hit a baseball terrfically hard. I still own the first baseball bat I ever split – it’s graduated from sporting equipment to home security device.