1913 Lajoie game card.

[Butch7999]

The National-American Base Ball Game, known in some of its forms as"the Nap Lajoie game," was actually the title
of several different games, produced -- under both identical and varying titles, employing both identical and varying
graphics -- by Parker Brothers starting in 1913.

We just did a whole thing this past spring on the whole family of related cardgames at our own site, if you want to visit there
for the full story. We also corresponded at some length several years ago with former Parker Brothers vice-president and
historian Phil Orbanes (now running Winning Moves Games -- http://www.winning-moves.com/ ), who helped greatly with
our games research. In hands-on checking of actual Parker in-house catalogues and inventories, Orbanes confirmed that
National-American first appeared in 1913 and remained in production through at least 1925. Good luck, by the way, getting
any assistance from Hasbro, who are about as willing to give out information as the CIA.

The card typography was relatively "modern" at the time but is completely consistent with a 1913 date of origin.

Tony Fatseas did repro sets of the 1906 WG2 and WG3 Fan Craze games about ten years ago, "Card Memorabilia Associates"
produced a repro set of the 1913 WG6 Tom Barker Baseball Card Game in 1973, and Larry Fritsch Cards has done a repro
of that set and many others, but we're not aware of any repro editions of "the Lajoie game." That's not to say with absolute
certainty there aren't any out there; we can't prove a negative. But it was a very popular game, produced in large quantities,
for several years (the image of Lajoie was replaced by that of a generic batter in later editions), and the explanations
provided above by other guys here cover, to our satisfaction, most of the reasons that sharp examples are still available
in abundance. Bear in mind as well, the cards were sold as a set, not individually, to be used for game play, not for flipping
or being put in bicycle spokes, so they were inevitably handled less frequently and more gently.