1920's metal board game
 

So I bought the game on the left years ago at an antique store. It's not functional, is missing all the pieces and has several dents in it, but I love the graphic and have had it displayed in my office ever since. The other day I was on eBay and stumbled upon (what I thought was) the same game, but in stunningly good condition, fully functional and included most of the pieces so I bit on the upgrade. I didn't realize until it arrived today that they are slightly different .....maybe different production runs of some sort. The left one has a "Hustler Toy Corp." logo at the top, while the one on the right says "Frantz...Made in the USA". The graphic at the very bottom is different, and the instructions on the back are printed right on the metal on the left one, but on the right they are printed on paper which is stuck to the metal somehow. Anyone familiar with this game and/or company enough to shed some light on the differences?

Frantz Manufacturing (still in business today) produced / produces mainly garage doors and related hardware,
but in the early 1920s began turning out metal toys. In 1923 they got the rights to Play Ball ~ The Rainy Day
Great American Game, originally made a few years earlier by Evan L Reed Mfg Co just up the road, and slightly
altered the graphics to turn out the game in your right-hand photo, The Great American Game ~ Baseball.
The Frantz line of toys and games was sufficiently successful that they created a subsidiary, Hustler Toys, devoted
entirely to toy production. The game in your left-hand pic is an example of that. Even subtler variations in
the game's graphics were made during its production run through most of the 1920s, mostly in a variety of
different colors for the border and the scroll cowling.
It's a great game, a classic in the tiny backwater hobby of game collecting, and the mechanism was later copied
by a few subsequent manufacturers, notably in Principal Baseball Game by Principal Die & Stamping (1949)
and Spin-A-Game Baseball by Hasbro (1960s). Schylling turned out a repro edition of the Frantz/Hustler
original in 2007.

Great information as always Butch.

The Intercollegiate Football game with very similar design and construction was also produced during the era, but only under the Hustler Toy Corporation name I believe.

Thanks, Butch!!

Thanks, Conor and Brent, happy to help -- have to disagree on one point, though, as we have seen
at least one pre-Hustler example of Intercollegiate Foot Ball with the Frantz label.