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...