Action Baseball

Action Baseball, manufactured by Williams Electronics in March 1971, is an electromechanical bat game - a pitch-and-bat machine in the long Williams tradition of baseball games rather than a conventional flipper pinball. This two-player game continues a genre that Williams had cultivated for decades, and it holds obvious appeal for fans of baseball-themed coin-op amusements.

The gameplay centers on eight hanging targets, with a center ramp that delivers the ball to a hanging target for a Home Run. The machine's most charming feature is its mechanical backbox animation, in which miniature men run the bases as the player racks up hits - a crowd-pleasing spectacle typical of the best bat games. The replay wheel registers up to 37 credits.

The sound package is unusually interesting: in addition to a single bell, the game houses an 8-track tape player in the backbox, and the schematic even documents an optional buzzer for home runs. These period details, along with the base-running animation, make Action Baseball a distinctive piece of early-1970s Williams engineering and a fun conversation piece in any collection.