Calling Butch7999! Info needed.

[ooo-ribay]

Below is taken from what I gather is Butch's website. Anything new to add? I picked this up for 100 bucks. Good deal? It is still in shrink wrap but the shrink wrap is a bit odd in that the lid is shrink wrapped separately from the contents, The seller also included a certificate from the HOF. He says the game is "in the HOF." I think it's more likely in the basement of the HOF.

We have in fact seen the game before, but in different packaging (this is new on us, too) -- it's the rare but fairly well-known and much-discussed Willie Mays Baseball, the second version as produced by Preferred Games Inc around 1969. That's the game that quickly followed the initial, possibly test-run/prototype version by Professional Education Products from perhaps a year earlier, possibly earlier in the same year. Both the Preferred Games and Professional Education games were issued in nearly identical boxes -- mostly white with a blue banner at the bottom and a big photo of Willie at the right -- although the games inside are completely different from one another.

What you've brought to our attention and added to the knowledge database is the Preferred Games game, as handled, evidently, by a previously unknown distributor (Pro-Sport Souvenirs) as a mail-order item, shipped in an envelope instead of (and discarding) the box. Very interesting...

The sale price doesn't astonish us. Anything Willie is greatly in demand among collectors -- and for all the discussion and conjecture about the two versions of Willie Mays Baseball, the games, as we said, are rare, and we've seen only three examples, total, actually sell. One previous sale of the Preferred Games version was on eBay about fifteen years ago, reported to us by another member of the Forum, Doug Richardson, who said that one went for about $600. The game was essentially unknown at the time, and was still unknown to us here until Doug posted about it in the spring of 2006


Dave, funny thing, all of us here in the front office have an inkling we've seen that exact same sample of the game somewhere before in some other auction or discussion, but we can't locate that instance at the moment, except for a pic in our own photo files that shows that yellow sheet to which you refer. Anyway, that only slightly closer look at it that we have here confirms that the "player rating" sheet -- the pale yellow one in your pic -- does not belong to Willie Mays Baseball. It is instead a set of player rating instructions that somehow slipped into the Willie box from some edition of Sher-co Baseball.

We'll add -- somewhat contradicting our own listless shrug a couple of posts earlier --that we do have some additional insights into the play mechanics of the Preferred Games version of Willie Mays Baseball. While taking that closer look at our photos and the stray Sher-co instructions in our file of Willie pics, we're reminded that there was, is, a sort of two-games-in-one feature in the Preferred Games version (or in at least one of them). In addition to the select-a-pitch/select-a-swing/roll-two-dice-for-result-on-batting-card system, one, or some, or all examples of the Preferred Games Willie also included separate result cards for individual fictional players, employing a three-dice system for results. And while looking even more closely at those, we notice a 1967 copyright date on one of the cards that we can see. This is quite curious, as we'd guessed that the simplistic ludo-style Professional Education Products version was the earlier game, and Preferred Games' two-dice select-a-pitch/select-a-swing version is obviously from 1968 or later, based on the photo of an Oakland A's player on one of the pitching cards. So our long-held surmise that the Preferred Games version was produced around 1969 is called more seriously into question... we wish we could see a postmark on the envelope of that Pro-Sport Souvenirs mail-in edition...

[Butch7999]

Hi Rob -- wow, we're shocked, shocked... to find that anyone visited our website / forum!
The Golem in his attic in Prague has more visitors than we do. But thanks for your questions!
Funny thing, it was just a few weeks back that we were having a fairly involved conversation with
Hall of Fame Senior Curator Tom Shieber about the variations of Willie Mays Baseball.
The Hall does have an example of the game (almost surely in their fascinating basement, as you surmise),
an edition very similar to yours, but not shrinkwrapped. We agree with you that it seems awfully odd
that the box lid is sealed separately, so our guess there is that the shrinkwrap on your example
is a much more recent thing than the game itself (we've seen a hefty number of vintage boardgames,
many of them predating the advent of shrinkwrap, similarly sealed).

Our quote that you exhumed is from almost six years ago, and we hadn't learned much more
until that recent exchange with Tom clarified some things [ a plug here for Tom's brilliant blog,
Baseball Researcher -- http://baseballresearcher.blogspot.com/ -- while we're at it ].
We'll come back with any pertinent details after we've had a chance to dig back though our e-mails,
but what seemed to become evident was that there are two distinct versions of the Preferred Games
Willie Mays Baseball, besides the completely different (and inferior as a game per se) Professional
Education version. There's the version with the result cards for the fictional players, which you have,
with the 1967 copyright (which doesn't necessarily mean it was in production or marketed that year),
and a separate version without those cards but instead featuring non-player-specific pitch charts
versus non-player-specific hitter charts, with photos of actual players wearing post-1968 uniforms.

We'll be back with any other details we were able to verify in discussion with Tom, but we can say
for sure that a hundred bucks was indeed a terrific bargain for a game that scarce, that much
in demand, and in that nice a condition.

[ooo-ribay]

Thanks, Butch(?)! The seller’s story is that it was his grandfather who produced the game. According to the seller, not one was ever sold to the public.

[perezfan]

Originally Posted by ooo-ribay

Thanks, Butch(?)! The seller’s story is that it was his grandfather who produced the game. According to the seller, not one was ever sold to the public.

Makes sense...

I cannot imagine any toy or game company approving those graphics on the lid. Way too much "white space" with nothing there to catch the eye. Even back in the sixties, these companies relied on attention-getting graphics that would help the item to jump off the shelf.

That one looks like a conceptual piece, prototype, or a very rough first draft. Very cool though, and perhaps one-of-a-kind!

[ooo-ribay]

Originally Posted by perezfan

Makes sense...

I cannot imagine any toy or game company approving those graphics on the lid. Way too much "white space" with nothing there to catch the eye. Even back in the sixties, these companies relied on attention-getting graphics that would help the item to jump off the shelf.

That one looks like a conceptual piece, prototype, or a very rough first draft. Very cool though, and perhaps one-of-a-kind!

Great pic, though! Willie at Wrigley.

[Butch7999]

Just following up with both Rob and Mark...

So, yes, after referring back to our conversation with Tom Shieber, we've confirmed (for now, at least --
games research, especially as it involves scarce or rare games, usually being a glacial process, subject
as always to still later revision) the existence of four varieties of Wiilie Mays Baseball --
the ludo-style game made by Professional Education Products, and three dice-and-cards/charts versions
made by Preferred Games, using very similar graphics.

Whether Professional Education Products and Preferred Games were in fact the same company
operating under different names is speculation. The years in which the games were produced
is for the most part uncertain. Whether they were produced only as prototypes or ever went into
a larger production run is unknown.

Preferred Games' fictional-player card version is separate from the player-photo pitch/hit charts version
(at least six years ago, at the time of our post quoted from our forum, we were under the mistaken
impression that a complete Preferred Games edition included both the cards and charts).
The 1967 copyright on the player cards version tells us... something, but isn't definitive.
No date appears on any of the other versions, although the photos of both Kansas City and Oakland A's
players in the pitch/hit charts version makes that a 1968-or-later game. Peculiarities among the
details in Matty Alou's uniform could potentially nail down a no-earlier-than date, but they don't appear
to conform precisely to the details of any Pirate uni shown in the "Dressed to the Nines" pages that
Mark Okkonen researched for the Hall of Fame's website.

The fourth edition of Wiilie Mays Baseball was the unboxed edition marketed by Pro-Sports Souvenirs.
The components, but for the absent box, appear identical to those in Preferred Games'
pitch/hit charts edition. Its existence would seem to demonstrate at least some limited
commercial distribution. We'd love to be put in touch with whomever it was from whom
Rob bought the game and who claimed to be the grandson of the game's developer.

Mark, you make a valid point, but believe you us, we've seen plenty of games with outright ugly
(not merely bland) graphics, so we're doubtful the vast expanse of white space is indicative
of anything (actually, it might make it kind of stand out among shelves full of loud, busy graphics).
It's odd, too, that while going through at least three completely different designs for the games
themselves over a couple of years or more, the box design seems to have been the one thing
they were happy with... Hey, maybe it was those same art department guys who went on to design
the white-space-obsessed layouts for all things Facebook, Yahoo, and Tapatalk...