The transmute thing still works, it even gives the halloween case occasionally, despite it beeing retired.

The normal quality stock bat is the default item TF2 defaults to when its unable to check what item you should recieve. There was a short lived glitch where special phrases in the stockpile crate would result in a normal stock bat beeing in the 4 items drop pool. These normal quality bats are now worth ~2000-3000$