Fast Ball

Fast Ball, manufactured by the Exhibit Supply Company (ESCO) of Chicago in July 1946, is an example of the flipperless electro-mechanical games produced in the first wave of post-war pinball. Its baseball theme placed it in a long and popular tradition of sports-themed pin games. Distributor advertisements for the game appeared in Billboard by August 1946, and according to the Encyclopedia of Pinball, its original working drawings are dated July 29, 1946.

As a flipperless game, Fast Ball relied on plunger skill and nudging rather than flipper play. The playfield features fourteen passive bumpers, standard equipment on games of this period, along with a single kick-out hole. Players aimed to score by guiding the ball among the bumpers as it made its way down the playfield.

Fast Ball arrived just over a year before Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty introduced flippers to the industry; Exhibit's own first flipper game, Build Up, followed in January 1948. Operators of the period frequently retrofitted flipperless games like Fast Ball with the new flippers, which often ended up in unusual places on the playfield, a quirk of history that makes surviving examples all the more interesting to collectors of the pre-flipper era.