Welcome to the Gym, luvs!
Here's my advice,
Question 1: You may need to either:
- Grip a little tighter
- Use a stretching aide such as baby powder or grip-like gloves
- Grip further down the shaft (such as mid shaft)
Question 2: Jelqing stretches the entire penis, including the skin. Of course, for your penis to get bigger your skin must get bigger too.
Just make sure you are gripping tight enough that your jelqing the tissues within the penis, and not just the skin (on the other hand, don't grip so hard that you hurt yourself; finding the happy median comes with time).
Question 3: You have a good handle on what you're talking about here. Both (focusing the jelq on the base and doing the flaccid bend with a focus on the base) might work in helping fix the baseball bat effect. The key is to make sure you don't just focus on the top half, or that will surely worsen the problem.
Hope this helps,
rem