Yes, a heat gun or hairdryer on the paint (repeatedly) to keep it warm while "rolling" will prevent the paint from cracking.
There's a more ghetto method than a baseball bat, and that's to do it with a pair of channel locks. If you really don't care what it looks like or does to the paint (which is my case with the Pumpkin), then you can bend the lip up quite a bit with channel lock pliers.
Very, very ghetto, but it gets the job done as far as clearing the tire. It's not very bit pretty, but for the most part nobody sees it, anyway. With a race car the aesthetic issues aren't as big a deal (to me, anyway) as it might be with a street car.
FWIW, I did it with channel locks on Sam's car as well, but in that case I used a hairdryer and a layer of leather around the pliers and was a LOT more careful about how it looked.
It can be done. There are options. As usual it mostly just depends on how careful you are.