Signs & Signals in Baseball and Mike's Room ⚾️🌈
The greatest significance of baseball in Stranger Things has to do with conformity and homophobia.
Jonathan says in the first season that Lonnie tried to use baseball to fix Will. Ted uses baseball metaphors against Mike in season two to correct his behavior. Mike has a baseball glove in his room.
Mental Math of Signals & Signs in Baseball 🧠
Previously, I thought there wouldn't be any "mental mistakes" in baseball because there's no mental configurations involved (on the field), but I was wrong.
Pitchers and catchers have to interpret signs and signals, and if you get them wrong that'd be considered a "mental mistake."
Pitchers use glove positions to signal the trajectory of their pitch to catchers as a form of secret communication. Beyond gloves, catchers and coaches use hand gestures (similar to a hand gesture in morse code).
Punching in the catcher's mitt signals "wipe-out" or "wipe-off" resetting a hand sign sequence, or act as a decoy if the other team's watching. It can prevent players from stealing bases.
Derek Turnbow punches his glove three times after Steve yells "no mental mistakes!" Is he signaling "wipe-out"?
The record Wipe-Out by The Surfaris plays in Season 4 at the roller rink, a foreshadowing of Mike's bomb that "wiped out" the Upside Down and El. It also recalls how a ton of queer musical artists had their song played leading up to Mike and Will's fight, when the original score In The Closet At Rink-O-Mania plays. In morse cord, Derek signals "O" (and I'll circle back to mania later on in this post).
Behind, Derek the sign reads: "Building character one pitch at a time." Pitching is a term used in marketing and storytelling too.
When Max retells the story of when she was first Vecna'd in S5E4, Mike is there solving equations under a baseball-math analogy poster. The fourth wall breaking poster has the rainbow flag in Hawkins lab behind it. Interestingly enough, in this scene Mike's in pinstripes like a home uniform (or prisoner).
Derek wears a striped rainbow-ish sweater the whole series and in the end becomes a catcher for the Cubs. He says Mike is one of his "best friends." Meanwhile, Will also wears stripes and he's "best friends" with Mike too.
Another sign on the field reads from "cubs to tigers." Is this another "mental mistake," as the Tigers are a basketball team? Or did they hop into an alternate universe that wipes the slate clean?
Regardless, the rainbow-tiger stripes tether is interesting. One is a flag of pride and visibility, the other is a representation of homophobia and camouflage.
History of Baseball Innuendos in Queer Communities 🏳️🌈
Ever hear the phrases "he swings both ways" or "batting for the same team"? In the queer community, using baseball speak is a way to code and decode a person's sexuality. So, for example, the term "switch-hitter" describes bisexuality.
Terms like teams, benching, batting, swinging, etc., can all be indicators of queer relationships depending on context.
As another example, "on the bench" can mean someone is closeted, or indicate hierarchy in poly relationships. When Ted tells Mike he's on the bench, it's another odd parallel to Mike's ongoing queer closet motif.
Baseball in general is used as sexual innuendos for the different stages of intercourse, like "getting to third base" means stimulation below the belt. So it's a safe way for queer people to adopt their own meaning, appearing as though their talking about literal baseball or heterosexual innuendos.
The "pitcher" and "catcher" slang, however, is distinct to the queer community. In queer spaces it describes sexual positions, where the pitcher is a "top" and the catcher is a "bottom." It's separate from heterosexual innuendos who do not use this.
And the secret communication between the pitcher and catcher is a lot how queer people decode/spot their peers. Both use eyes locking, like the "gay gaze" to indicate interest. Or flagging to indicate subtle nuances within communities, examples being: gay hanky color codes, lesbian manicures, asexual rings, and bisexual hand flagging in memes.
Will using the baseball bat—having that be in his inner sanctum, the place that appears in his Sorcerer flashback where he "builds back" his sense of self after his homophobic father leaves him—as a means to destroy Castle Byers, relates the baseball metaphor back to homophobia and hiding. We see both Castle Byers and Mike's closet smashed to smithereens, another loose connection.
So Mike having the baseball glove and Will having the baseball bat gives them a shared connection and recalls their homophobic fathers.
I can't tell what glove Mike has in the end. It's a toss up between a pitcher or a in-fielder glove. I lean towards the latter (I use to have an 80s in-field glove my father gave me when I played that looked like but black). Vintage pitcher gloves were usually more shorter and had a scoop shape.
Stranger-er Connections to a Signal You Can "Feel" 🤨
Putting aside the green goo The Thing connection for a moment, both boys have mouthwash just randomly sat out in their room. A bathroom product in a bedroom.
If Mike's living in a dorm with a communal bathroom, maybe it makes more sense to have in his bedroom. Still, it's odd to keep a hygiene product lying around like that—and it stands out like a sore thumb. Will has no excuse. It's another visual parallel between their bedrooms.
Their mouthwash bottles look identical, both are green and have the same shape and cap design. And they look identical to the vintage design of the brand Signal, whose tagline was "signal if you feel it" in the 80s.
There's little connection between mouthwash and being queer, but there is a commonly known sexual innuendo.
In Signal's 1984 commercial, it uses sex to sell their product. Audiences know to use it before kissing—and after oral sex, where there's a myth that mouthwash prevents STIs.
The main reason why someone would have mouthwash out in their bedroom are those type of "bedroom activities."
Not only does it appear there was something literally called "signal" in queer-coded scene between Will and Mike, there's a deeper connection to the brand's tagline. A signal that you can feel happens when Will grabs his painted love confession after hearing Mike confess a desire to be a "team" with him—another baseball metaphor.
The mouthwash tied to kissing/oral combined with the position the characters are in, kneeling and sitting on the bed, is another form of advertising their sexuality and sexual attraction.
It's harder for an audience to conceive that as being the signal given in this scene where the characters at the time were minors, but the blocking between them pushes the envelope in terms of suggestion. At the very least, it connects to the (rather innocent) interest in dating and kissing that Will later confirms to have in season five, as he asks Robin about decoding romantic signals.
It's funny how Will never said once he was attracted or in love with Mike, but all audiences received the hints that the object of desire was indeed him. So obviously signals work. There's just varying degrees of semiotics in media that operates on a sliding scale depending on a viewer's knowledge of the reference and how it's used in context.
Mike using the word "team" in the context of both boys' connection to baseball, homophobia, the mouthwash Signal right next to open closet, is him using queer-coded "baseball speak."
Mixed Signals Or Mixed Nuts? 🥜
Next to the glove and mouthwash under Will's painting in Mike's dorm room is a peanut can, which keeps putting pressure on the slider scale of what this sign sequence means.
I don't think I have to explain what "nuts" means in terms of what anatomy it represents, but peanuts are a very common snack sold in baseball stadiums. It's almost synonymous with the sport, tied to a long history, in which oral fixation plays a part. Players and fans chew on peanuts and sunflower seeds to quickly gain energy and release anxiety.
However, there is another parallel to Will, his painting, and his coming out with these can of nuts. For one, while Castle Byers had a baseball bat, it also had a can of nuts too—the mixed variety kind converted into a paint can.
The can was right next to a framed science fair photo of them, where Mike's D&D title, "Mike the King" (the highest form of Paladin), is written on the frame, and where he has his arm over Will inside the picture.
In Will's coming out he mentions Steve Martin, the actor, as something the party shares in common common candy and shared interests we know about. His Holy Grail reference has similar themes to D&D, so okay, sure. Then NASA, we know from his love of drawing rainbow rocket ships. Will loves candy, we can assume from the Halloween episode (Mike and Will's "crazy together" scene).
But "Steve Martin" is odd line of dialogue since there was never an obvious reference to the kids and the actor before. All of us are still trying to wrap our heads around it.
Someone mentioned it's a correlation to Roxanne, Steve's 80s movie adapting the Cyrano trope used in Will's painting confession. It gets meta when the painting shows up in Mike's storyteller scene, placing him in the position of Cyrano, whose veiled letters mimic Mike's stories.
In addition to that, this mixed-nuts paint can funnily ties in to Martin's Mixed Nuts (1994), which depicts a queer romance between a trans women named Chris (Liev Schreiber) and Louie, a writer (played by Adam Sandler, a "writer of t-shirts" and songs).
The world works in funny ways, as years later Liev had a transgender child.
The title is called "mixed nuts" as play on words indicating the film's theme of mental health. It's about a crisis hotline for depressed people, where one of the callers is Chris, who is depressed and wants to leave her judgmental family.
It's a comedic role that Liev and film portray earnestly, like every other character who is dealing with some kind of depression during Christmas. Another theme is defying conventions, where the scene when Liev dances with Steve is a good example.
All of this directly ties into Mike and Will's characters, who agree on going "crazy together," where "nuts" is another term for "crazy," and the can in his room is perhaps a call back to this scene, in addition to the queer romance and double meaning title of Mixed Nuts.
And the can of nuts is by the "invisible woman" box too. With this, I either think of the Cyrano trope using El as an illusion as Mike gives her the powers of invisibility in his epilogue story, or the implicit meta connection of this film to Mike's own gender/sexual identity.
Conclusion
In Stranger Things, the baseball motif is intertwined with themes of homophobia, closeted sexuality, and queer identity; its specific visual use links to broader semiotic signs in Mike’s bedroom, ultimately functioning as a tool to queer-code the characters.
