Customer Reviews

Baseball Games: Home Versions of the National Pastime, 1860S-1960s (A Schiffer Book for Collectors)

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is simply a picture book of a bunch of baseball games with some organization and text fill. The games are organized by century (18th & 19th), and by type (player-endorsed, non-endorsed, card, action and coin-operated). There's a bit of baseball history, but what you'll want this for is the attention to historical detail in the games themselves. There are hundreds of games photographed in a reasonable (if not exceptional) amount of detail; most of the text is just a description of what's in the pictures. Many versions of popular games are compared, with information on how to tell the versions apart, which will be invaluable if you're a collector. For some reason there's four pages on Cadaco, but neither APBA nor Strat-O-Matic get a look in, nor do more contemporary games from 3M or Sports Illustrated or Avalon Hill. Don't expect a forty-dollar art book with prose that'll entertain you into the night. The printing quality, photo quality, and text-quality are only so so. I'm still waiting for the book that compares how the different games are designed strategically and how they play. This one's aimed more at collectors.

Baseball Games is a very basic effort: the captions give minimal information, the pictures are just satisfactory, and there's no narrative to put the games in any context. And the price is outlandish !

The only book of its kind as far as I know, but that doesn't make it OK for it to include many games from after the 1960's and at the same time exclude the most popular games from the 1960's like APBA, Strat-O-Matic, Negamco, BLM, and various similar games. I have seen many other baseball games that were not in this book, too. So while it's a definite must-have for anyone who wants a history of baseball table games, its omissions as well as inclusions of games that were produced well after the book's title would imply (Brett Ball, 1981 ?) make it fall short of expectations. Why not produce 2 volumes and make each comprehensive for its time period ? The implication of the text is that there were far too many pinballs and APBA type games and versions to include them, yet many games far beyond the years listed in the title are pictured. So, it's a great picture book, but far from comprehensive.

I bought the book for my husband, and he has found it very interested to read.