Flash Baseball

The 1972 Flash Baseball from Midway Manufacturing Company of Chicago is an intriguing electro-mechanical bat game - a pitch-and-bat baseball machine, a close cousin of pinball in which players swing a bat mechanism at pitched balls. Its most distinctive feature is its sound: an 8-track player and cartridge play recorded crowd noises, and the game has no bells at all, trading the traditional EM chimes for the atmosphere of a live ballpark.

The machine is a single-player game with a replay wheel that counts up to a maximum of 19 replays. Its baseball theme and novelty audio make it a characteristic example of Midway's early-1970s output, when the company was experimenting with arcade novelties in the years before its video game fame.

Little is documented about the game's designer or production history, but for enthusiasts of bat games and unusual EM-era audio, Flash Baseball is a fascinating and uncommon find.