Baseball

The O. D. Jennings and Company Baseball machine of May 1936 comes from a Chicago manufacturer better known for its slot machines, and that heritage shows: this is a payout machine, an electro-mechanical game that dispensed winnings to successful players. Games of this kind occupied the gray area between amusement and gambling that defined much of the mid-1930s coin-op industry.

Baseball gives the player 3 balls per play, fewer than the 5-10 balls typical of contemporary amusement pinballs - a common trait of payout games, where each ball carried the chance of a monetary reward. As a 1936 machine it naturally has no flippers, which would not appear in pinball for another decade; the outcome rested on the launch and the bounce of the ball.

Little else is documented about this machine, including its designer. Nonetheless, Baseball remains an interesting artifact of the payout era, when baseball themes and gambling mechanics regularly shared the same cabinet.