Ball Park

Ball Park is an electro-mechanical baseball game from January 1968, manufactured by Williams Electronics. Rather than a conventional flipper pinball, it is a 'bat game' - a pitch-and-bat baseball machine in which players swing at balls and watch the results play out, complete with a mechanical 'running man' animation unit in the backbox that brings base runners to life. Williams produced a confirmed 751 units, with 737 for the US and Canadian market and 14 for export.

The playfield features seven hanging targets and a single wide ramp of unpainted metal, giving it a distinct industrial look compared with the more ornate designs often seen on other machines. The two-player format let friends compete head-to-head at the plate, and the game carried a distributor price of $499.50 when new.

With its mechanical backbox animation and modest production run, Ball Park is an appealing find for collectors of baseball-themed coin-op games, a genre with roots stretching back to the 1930s that Williams kept alive well into the electro-mechanical era.