Bored With Cards?

[BobC]

Originally Posted by LincolnVT

Bob C...thanks for your suggestion about checking out the website discussing early baseball games. These do interest me some as they can often be found for a fairly reasonable price. I came accrossed a couple of really nice games (one board game and another metal pinball game) recently and like you have said, the artwork is beautiful. Thinking about picking up one or both of them to display on the wall.

Cheers.

Ethan

Hi Ethan,

Be sure to check out the site. Butch and his two buddies run a great site, and the alphabetic listing of baseball games that they have on there is just incredible. Last year I actually got them to add another game to their list when I pointed out one of those baseball related punchboards from the 30s, 40s & 50s you often see was actually a game, and not just a punchboard to win cigarettes or money off of. This was a Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund punchboard that was baseball themed with baseball graphics. You paid 1 penny for each punch, and got a paper that had three numbers on it like 1-0-2, which stood for the number of runs your team scored over three innings of a game. So you and a friend would each spend 3 cents and punch out 3 papers, and then add up your scores to see who had the most runs for a nine inning game. They knew of the punchboard when i pointed it out, but said they never realized it was an actual game and not just a lottery/gambling type of piece that pretty much all these punchboards were. So they added it to their recognized game list. The punchboard itself was pretty thick and had a hollow, middle space to collect all the coins dropped into it. And I guess when the punchboard had all the holes punched and used up, they simply turned it, and the change collected, into the cancer fund people.

I was surprised I could actually contribute to their site with a game they didn't realize was a game. And this, like a lot of baseball themed/related games isn't always incredibly rare. In fact, there's one of these punchboard games for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund for sale on Ebay right now, though the BIN/OBO price of $250 seems a bit high to me. Seem to remember seeing these usually selling in the $50-$100 range before, but who knows anymore given the pandemic and recent price surges.

And of course they include the other games that you normally see as a card collector, like the Tom Barker, National, Polo Grounds and S&S Game cards. But then you find other games like the metal spinner game called "INSIDE" THE PARK with a 1911 patent date on it. I believe it was based on a re-enactment of the 1913 World Series between the A's and the Giants, and there were actually small coin-like tokens that had the names of the various players on both team involved in the series printed on the tokens. So you had an actual game piece named for Mathewson, another for Bender, and so on. No actual player images on the pieces, but still, how rare and how many of these pieces do you think have survived till today? And you'll likely be surprised when you see how many ballplayers had their names associated with various games over the years as well. Neat little collecting niche that hasn't completely blown-up price-wise, at least not yet. LOL