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.

[ooo-ribay]

Thanks, Butch(?)! The seller’s story is that it was his grandfather who produced the game. According to the seller, not one was ever sold to the public.

[perezfan]

Originally Posted by ooo-ribay

Thanks, Butch(?)! The seller’s story is that it was his grandfather who produced the game. According to the seller, not one was ever sold to the public.

Makes sense...

I cannot imagine any toy or game company approving those graphics on the lid. Way too much "white space" with nothing there to catch the eye. Even back in the sixties, these companies relied on attention-getting graphics that would help the item to jump off the shelf.

That one looks like a conceptual piece, prototype, or a very rough first draft. Very cool though, and perhaps one-of-a-kind!

[ooo-ribay]

Originally Posted by perezfan

Makes sense...

I cannot imagine any toy or game company approving those graphics on the lid. Way too much "white space" with nothing there to catch the eye. Even back in the sixties, these companies relied on attention-getting graphics that would help the item to jump off the shelf.

That one looks like a conceptual piece, prototype, or a very rough first draft. Very cool though, and perhaps one-of-a-kind!

Great pic, though! Willie at Wrigley.

[Butch7999]

Just following up with both Rob and Mark...

So, yes, after referring back to our conversation with Tom Shieber, we've confirmed (for now, at least --
games research, especially as it involves scarce or rare games, usually being a glacial process, subject
as always to still later revision) the existence of four varieties of Wiilie Mays Baseball --
the ludo-style game made by Professional Education Products, and three dice-and-cards/charts versions
made by Preferred Games, using very similar graphics.

Whether Professional Education Products and Preferred Games were in fact the same company
operating under different names is speculation. The years in which the games were produced
is for the most part uncertain. Whether they were produced only as prototypes or ever went into
a larger production run is unknown.

Preferred Games' fictional-player card version is separate from the player-photo pitch/hit charts version
(at least six years ago, at the time of our post quoted from our forum, we were under the mistaken
impression that a complete Preferred Games edition included both the cards and charts).
The 1967 copyright on the player cards version tells us... something, but isn't definitive.
No date appears on any of the other versions, although the photos of both Kansas City and Oakland A's
players in the pitch/hit charts version makes that a 1968-or-later game. Peculiarities among the
details in Matty Alou's uniform could potentially nail down a no-earlier-than date, but they don't appear
to conform precisely to the details of any Pirate uni shown in the "Dressed to the Nines" pages that
Mark Okkonen researched for the Hall of Fame's website.

The fourth edition of Wiilie Mays Baseball was the unboxed edition marketed by Pro-Sports Souvenirs.
The components, but for the absent box, appear identical to those in Preferred Games'
pitch/hit charts edition. Its existence would seem to demonstrate at least some limited
commercial distribution. We'd love to be put in touch with whomever it was from whom
Rob bought the game and who claimed to be the grandson of the game's developer.

Mark, you make a valid point, but believe you us, we've seen plenty of games with outright ugly
(not merely bland) graphics, so we're doubtful the vast expanse of white space is indicative
of anything (actually, it might make it kind of stand out among shelves full of loud, busy graphics).
It's odd, too, that while going through at least three completely different designs for the games
themselves over a couple of years or more, the box design seems to have been the one thing
they were happy with... Hey, maybe it was those same art department guys who went on to design
the white-space-obsessed layouts for all things Facebook, Yahoo, and Tapatalk...