Another Early Baseball Game
Was Danny MacFadyen's game a baseball sim?
Another Early Baseball Game
As I was looking at issues of Baseball Magazine contemporary with Clifford Van Beek’s National Pastime, I came across this advertisement:
Most people would consider MacFayden’s Stove League Baseball Game to be extremely obscure. However, a few editions of this game have sold from time to time in major auction houses.
An old Heritage Auctions listing gives us an idea of what the game looked like:
It seems that there were different tabs for different on base situations. I’m assuming that “B.C.” stands for “bases clear,” or bases empty.
There is a discussion about this game in this Net54 thread. Note that the value is only estimated at a few hundred dollars — a far cry from the thousands that a rare original copy of National Pastime would be worth.
One thing you can notice in the above picture is the mechanical pointer system usd for indicating balls, strikes, and outs. It seems that this was a variation of the game, since the earlier Heritage Auctions version doesn’t seem to include that.
It’s also interesting to note that play results were contained fully within the booklet, and not listed on the board like in Steele’s game and National Pastime.
This post contains more basic information:
Note that there are no individual player cards to speak of. This seems to me like an early variation of the “dice baseball” games that were so common in the early years of baseball tabletop gaming.
After doing a bit of research, I managed to find some additional photos that come from what appears to be an unopened, unplayed version of this game:
Unfortunately, it seems that nobody has bothered to transcribe the play results. The game is also not listed here.
The game appears to have used three dice of three different colors — one of which seems to have had some custom results:
While I’m not really interested in owning a used copy of this game, I’m pretty interested in seeing what the results booklet looks like. Comment below if you have access to one.
I honestly don’t think that this game compares to National Pastime. However, it is interesting to note all the variants of dice baseball that were available at the time.