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Great American Game, originally made a few years earlier by Evan L Reed Mfg Co just up the road, and slightly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.
Last edited by Butch7999; 02-01-2019 at 01:19 AM.
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