December pickups

[Butch7999]

Jeez, sorry, Mark! We shoulda kept our mouths shut (or our fingers off the keyboard) -- it's a great piece no matter what.

Mark Cooper will readily admit there are errors in his 1994 volume -- it was a pioneering work with almost no prior sources
or available documentation on which to rely, so there was was a lot of guesstimation involved in putting a date to many pieces.
Over time, much has been corrected and many blanks filled in by collectors and members at our Baseball Games forum,
and a great deal of that new information is thanks to the ferocious research of Hall of Fame Senior Curator Tom Shieber,
who did an incredible amount of digging to get the details right for the Hall's 2008 exhibition of Dr Cooper's collection.
The patent for Wachter's was granted in March 1891, and the earliest advertisements so far found for it appear in October 1890.
The patent for the Nash Base-Ball And Bagatelle was granted in September 1889, but we haven't yet run across
any advertising for it.

That said, there's often a substantial gap between the granting of a patent and the actual production of a game -- sometimes
a couple of years, in a few instances decades. Advertisements are often a more reliable indicator than patent or copyright dates
of when a game was actually on the market. Without more documentation on the Nash game, there's no overwhelming reason
to think Wachter's didn't hit the market first and that you do in fact have a scarce example of the oldest baseball-themed
pinball/bagatelle game made.