New options kept popping up as baseball games moved into the mid-1950’s. Meanwhile, games like Hi-Fly and Champion Baseball replaced the rolled metal balls of most games with large plastic ones that were shot through the air. Each time the player scored, the batter cutout would move forward to show how far they had gotten. It depicted a baseball diamond complete with motorized cutouts for players. For instance, Super World Series became the first baseball game to use backbox animation in 1951. They also began to add new elements around this time to compete with pinball. World War II led to a drastic slowdown in baseball game production, but they returned full force during the early 1950’s. This cost-cutting element made it possible to sell a lot of these machines and helped make Baseball one of the most successful baseball games of this early era. A later game, simply titled Baseball, eliminated figures in favor of lights on the playfield to register the player’s progress. To add to the game’s difficulty, the outfielders would shift back and forth and thus make it tough to score into the targets. This game had tiny metal figures to enact the baseball action. One of the first baseball machines was All-Star Baseball, which was released by Rock-Ola in 1932. These areas were marked to represent everything from ‘Single’ to ‘Home Run.’ Of course, there were also areas for ‘Outs’ and ‘Foul Balls.’ In general, the player would bat the pitched balls for three innings, with an allotment of three outs per inning. The player would use a bat to knock the ball towards a series of pockets or targets at the back of the playfield. They used the ‘pitch and bat’ formula in a fairly standardized way: a pitcher would shoot out a ball at the player from the center of the field. Like pinball games, baseball games were housed in large stand-up cabinets that had backboards to display the score. These baseball games may not be as well-remembered as pinball games, but they were just as popular as pinball games for a long time and continued to be made into the early 1980’s. Sports as diverse as football and golf were used as the basis for these kinds of games, but the most popular sport theme for pitch and bat games was baseball. These games offered an interesting variation on the pinball formula by shooting a ball out at the player from the middle of the field instead of the side, then having them ‘bat’ it into one of a series of targets with some sort of device placed where a pinball game would have its flippers. As pinball became the king of the arcade in the early 1930’s, it developed an offshoot called the ‘pitch and bat’ game.
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