Field of Dreams
I grew up a Cincinnati Reds fan in a small farming community in Ohio. I have always had a love of baseball, instilled at an early age by example from my Mother. It grew because of the powerhouse Big Red Machine teams of the 70's and early 80's, and then from playing the game in Little League. Way before the movie, and even before the book it was based upon, Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, my friends and I played a lot of pickup games on the baseball diamond my Dad built for us that was truly cut out of a cornfield across the road from our house. Hit it in the corn, automatic home run. 

County Fair
Every summer during the first week of August, the county fairgrounds came alive with farm equipment exhibits, midway games, sno-cone and funnelcake vendors, and the biggest and most exciting attraction of all: the Penny Arcade. The arcade was a canvas tent about the size of a basketball court with a cage in the center inhabited by a shifty-looking character who carried a huge ring of keys. The cage was crowned with a big sign over it that read "CHANGE", ironic because the same games kept coming back year after year.

The Arcade tent had a thick sawdust floor and was packed with all kinds of machines. There were marksmanship games, pennysmashers, a robotic fortuneteller, a passion meter, and rows and rows of pinball machines lining the perimeter. Astreoids, Space Invaders, and Pac Man were still more than a decade away.

We loved the arcade, and my friends and I saved up the other fifty-one weeks of the year shoveling snow and mowing lawns so we could blow it all in a baseball pinball game called the Williams Pinch Hitter. This was the best game in the whole place; the game into which my friends and I plugged our first and last dime of the fair. Frustrated that we couldn't play it whenever we wanted to, the concept of Ballpark Classics was born.

A Game of Our Own
In 1977 at the age of 15, I set out to create my own game using plywood and two-by-fours scrounged from an old wood pile my Dad kept in the basement.

Here I am in a Pony League All-Star photo from the local paper. That's me--bottom row, second from the left--sporting the bell bottom jeans. 

I took a square piece of three-quarter inch plywood and hammered four two-by-four-by-whatever-sized feet to each corner. I then nailed two thinner outfield walls about six inches high to two sides of the game. At the other end of the diamond, I drove a nail through the center of a six-inch stick of hardwood, through a washer, and into the field of play. I cut a wrapping paper tube left over from the holidays down to size, and laid it in the crotch of the outfield walls, sloping down to field level, just behind where second base ought to be.

A few magic markers later, it roughly resembled a baseball field. I took the walls back off and cut three rectangles in both and wrote SINGLE, DOUBLE, and TRIPLE above the missing wood. I re-attached them to the field and, feeling something was missing, I glued the starting lineup plus my favorite pitchers of the 1975 Big Red Machine's baseball cards to the outfield wall.

Marbles were easy to get, so they served us well as baseballs for the new contraption. My friends and I played that game for hours and hours on end. If you timed it right, anticipating the pitch, the batter could spin the bat just at the right time and line a solid double through the fence.

Of course enhancements and additions made the game even more fun. I added a ramp for launching towering home runs into a table tennis net that was cut to look like the screen above Waveland Avenue at Wrigley Field. The net idea came from our limited TV exposure. We only got three channels with baseball in rural West-Central Ohio in those days, our beloved Reds on WLW in Cincinnati, afternoon Cubs games on WOWO out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Game of the Week every Saturday from far off places like Dodger Stadium and Fenway Park.

1989 Edition
I entered adolescence and, The Game, as it came to be known around the neighborhood, fell into dust and disrepair. It wasn't until 20 years later, in 1989, and now living in Southern California, that I decided to revive the concept of that game and build a more sophisticated version for my newborn son. I made several upgrades and enhancements mostly focused upon improving the mechanics of the game.

Pitching Enhancements
From a pitching standpoint, I upgraded the paper wrapping tube to PVC pipe, and glued felt down for the infield and outfield turf. I affixed magnets in the backstop behind home plate to catch steel ball bearings that now replaced the marbles. Originally, the felt was an aesthetic upgrade, but it proved to be a pivotal decision in terms of the skill that could now be used in pitching.

I found that the slippery surface inside the pipe, combined with the felt top allowed the pitcher a great deal of influence and creativity with the speed and path of the baseball as it neared the plate. By varying the initial placement of the ball bearing in the pipe, adding a little english to the release, and combining those variables with assorted finger placements and pressures, pitchers were able to throw a wide variety of pitches. 

This became, for me and several friends, the most interesting and enjoyable part of playing the game. We did not share our secrets on how these pitches were thrown, and even when we did, it was no small matter to learn to throw it as consistently as its inventor. We threw strikes (when we needed to, like on a 3-0 count) by just placing the ball in the middle of the pipe and letting go. I threw fastballs of various speeds by squeezing the ball bearing down hard with my thumb in the pipe and my index finger underneath it.

A scoreboard poorly modeled after Wrigley Field's hand-operated masterpiece hid most of your pitching intentions from the batter if you were careful. With practice, letting the ball slide off the side of your finger or thumb made the ball bite into the felt about half way through the infield, resulting in a lovely arc that was impressive to watch, and impossible to hit with the fixed bat that didn't extend beyond the outside edge of the plate. Wicked changeups appeared to be fastballs, but once they caught up with their backspin just inches before the plate, they slowed down to a near stop, and rolled harmlessly right through the heart of the plate.

It was great fun to set up the hitter for a fastball, then freeze them with the changeup, or watch them swing through it completely and then watch its pathetic roll across the plate. The biggest mistake in pitching was made while positioning the ball for the next pitch, and having it accidently slip out of your hands. Because the batter is so tuned into the sound of the ball as it travels down the pipe, they knew a fat pitch was coming. Those pitches were usually the ones that you wished you had back.

Batting Upgrades
The batting mechanism was the biggest upgrade from the original game. The problem to solve here was how do you re-create the flipper of those original pinball machine-like baseball games in a purely mechanical way. The answer proved elusive for a while, but ended up being one of the real innovations of the game, as it resulted in the ability to play the game by yourself. If you had no one to play against, you could both pitch and bat from the pitching side of the game by working the dowel with one hand while pitching with the other.

For a guy who grew up with four sisters and no brothers, this was truly a blessing. Game play was simple with players agreeing on ball and strike calls, for the most part, and utilized small wooden discs as markers for runners to keep track of the on-base situation. A few special rules existed, first and foremost was how an out was recorded. Ferocious swings would often result in the ball bouncing off the outfield wall. An out was recorded if the ball came to a rest in fair territory, no matter where it had been or bounced. To score a home run, the ball could be hit right back up the pitching pipe and over the outfield wall. Two small ramps in the infield also launched home runs over the left-center and right-centerfield walls.

Rules Take Shape
Single, double, and triple targets now featured nets to catch the balls. For the batter, a rule was enforced that stated the batter must ready for the pitch with the bat at its 6 o'clock stop position, parallel to the centerline of the plate. Otherwise, the batter could endlessly foul off pitches. The batter was also not allowed to swing twice at the same ball, if it happened to carom into the batter's box off a wall, it was considered a foul ball. Any pitched ball that was so far inside that it hit the batter's bat without the batter moving the bat, was scored as a ball.

Pitchers could not throw the ball so hard that the ball actually bounced on the playing field or out of the pipe on its way to the plate; this was scored as a ball. This game received a great deal of wear and tear and was played relentlessly by my friends and I at most of our social functions. I thought a lot about how to make the game better as I watched people play over the years. 

In 1993 we moved to the suburbs of Seattle and in early 1999, nine years after completing the second game, my schedule freed up enough to allow me to work on version 3, a detailed but no less playable replica of historic Fenway Park in Boston. I felt that if I could build this park with its varied fence heights and irregular dimensions, yet still deliver the same great playing experience, I could make it successful. 

Several more prototypes and thousands of hours of play time and testing later, today’s games are that much better than the original prototypes in quality and playability.

I am proud to say that we make them here in the US, just outside Seattle and in South Dakota.

Ballpark Classics is a true throwback, a game that plays as great as it looks. We think that it’s only a matter of time and good word-of-mouth until Ballpark Classics takes its rightful place alongside other classics, as the next great family game experience.

I hope you enjoy it!

- Doug