Description: Scientific Batting Practice, 1 player, manikin players, ramp style baseball game. This game post-dates the 1940 Keeney Texas Leaguer. Newer versions of this game were also released as 1965 Irving Kaye Batting Practice, 1958 Keeney League Leader.

The game automatically pitches 15 balls for five cents. The manual thrust bat is used to hit the ball into one of the scoring decks. Therre are four decks. From lower to upper, the player gets a single, double, triple, and the upper deck is a home run. The backglass shows player position. And backbox lighting scores the runs. The playfield men were originally all painted in full uniform. They players serve no purpose but since they are uniform painted, give a very strong aesthetic to the game. There is also a light on the backglass when the player has three pitches left to bat. That is, the light comes on after the 12th pitch.

This is similar to most of the other rolling ball style baseball games. Except this game tracks player position on the baseball diamond. Most of the other ramp style baseball games just give 1/2/3 runs for each ramp hit, and do not show base position (except for the 1958 Keeney League Leader which scores like this Scientific Batting Practice, but more advanced.) Unfortunately though the ramp designations of double and triple are a bit misleading. For example, if you have a player on third base, and you hit a "double", it will score the third base player, but only put a new player on first base. Perhaps better nomenclature would be "advance two bases" instead of "double". Ha! Because there can only be one player on base at a time.

The problem with the base position being unlike actual baseball is a simple mechanics issue. It was a decision made by the game designers to keep the game as simple as possible. It works like this... When the ball is hit to a scoring ramp, the scoring ball then rolls down a vertical ramp in the back of the game. This ramp has four socre increment switches, which are all in parallel. Each switch pulses the score stepper unit once. Therefore if the player hits a ball into the double deck, the score stepper gets pulsed twice (ball rolls over two score increment switches.) If there was a player on third base and a "double" was hit, the score stepper will increment two times, showing a run and now a player on first base! So again, it's not really a "double" as in the rules of baseball. It's just advancing the runner two positions. And note that only *one* player can ever be on base (again not like actual baseball.) If you really want a ramp game that scores baseball correctly, the only ramp game (of the four EM ramp games) is the 1958 Keeney League Leader.

The 1941 Scientific Batting Practice was a staple of the coin-op arcades through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and even as late as the 1970s. The game was incredibly popular and easy to maintain.

If you have this game for sale please contact me at cfh@provide.net