Calling Butch7999! Info needed.

[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.