By Sophie Langton
This story is a part of the Cincinnati’s Storytelling of Journalism project, which represents a collaboration between Northern Kentucky University (NKU) journalism students, the NKU Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Greater Cincinnati Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Students interviewed professional journalist winners and finalists from the Greater Cincinnati SPJ Chapter’s 2023 Excellence in Journalism Awards to create these Nieman Storyboard Annotations-inspired Q&As and story annotations that analyze and celebrate our region’s award-winning works of journalism.
2023 Excellence in Journalism Award: Arts/Entertainment Reporting
Winning Journalist: Laurie Pike, Cincinnati Magazine
Winning Story: The Pinball Wizards Among Us
Laurie Pike knows a good story when she sees one.
In the heart of Cincinnati, she found just that: A hidden world full of flashing lights, resonating dings, and the clatter of balls in motion. This captivating scene prompted Pike to begin her journey into the realm of pinball, a world that not only piqued her journalistic interest but also serves a sentimental remembrance of her past.
As a child, Pike spent hours at a pizza parlor playing pinball with her brother and recalls it as a fond memory. Having knowledge of the game, Pike was inspired to dive deeper into the pinball world. Since playing as a teenager, the game of pinball has changed in unprecedented ways, becoming more complex and strategic.
Pike, a freelance contributor at Cincinnati Magazine, frequently channels her enthusiasm for feature writing into captivating narratives, such as the world of belly-dancing and the allure of cult cinema classics. This time around, she created a detailed feature called The Pinball Wizards Among Us.
Pike’s research for this story was no easy task. Aiding her journey was a graphic novel, unavailable at her local library but loaned to her by a pinball fanatic, that unexpectedly turned into a goldmine of information and education. However, digging up accurate details about such a niche topic like pinball can quickly become tedious and turn into an unpredictable task. Because of this, Pike tends to take full-on plunges into the world of her stories to extract her research, embracing a deeper dive into the intricacies of her subject matter. She is driven by a determination to uncover the most accurate information possible.
“I try to avoid what I call churnalism,” Pike says, “which is a result of people who rely on sources that have been relying on sources, but they haven’t gone back to the motherlode, the original source.”
Searching for an original source, Pike spent many hours at local restaurants and bars where pinball was present. The passion of countless pinball players guided her development of a strong, detailed community depiction. Justin Masterson, the central character of the story, was among the fanatics who dedicated time to learning the game. Through Masterson, Pike found her access point into the world of professional pinball. She observed fathers introducing their children to pinball and spoke with the man who made pinball legal after being outlawed for many years.
NKU students Sophie Langton, Lilly Boden and Sam Wulfekotter interviewed Pike about how she came upon this story, capturing characters on the page and coverage of niche topics.
What was your process on narrowing down the broad topic of pinball and localizing it?
The story was suggested by an acquaintance of mine who had told me about Cincinnati's place as the birthplace of modern pinball, and his efforts to get the 150th anniversary of that innovation noted by local media. When covering a very broad subject, like pinball, it helps to have one person who serves as a guide in your article. It personalizes the story and it gives you what I call a ‘canoe in the river of information.’ Justin Masterson, who had pitched the story, made for a perfect guide for many reasons.
Masterson's character was very unique and fun to read. I was wondering what kind of techniques you used to bring that kind of character to life on paper.
It is a lot of sitting around. I spent a lot of time interviewing. I spent time at his house; I went to different pinball parlors with him. We actually met socially, and he had pitched me on the story. He goes, you know, we should do a story about pinball and I'm like, ‘oh that’s very interesting.’ But I was busy with other stuff and a year went by. A year later, I pitched it and got in touch with him.
What was the greatest challenge you experienced while working on this story?
One is understanding the game. I’ve been playing pinball since I was a teenager. I’m very nostalgic about it, so I have very fond memories of playing pinball. But the game has gotten so much more complex.
The second piece of it was making notes while a pinball game is in process and trying to explain what happened. I opened the scene with two people playing pinball, and pinball happens very quickly!
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| Laurie Pike |
I often cover unique subcultures and it’s a typical story for me. The story was interesting to me because of the sense of nostalgia because it’s been around for so long and a lot of people think Cincinnati and the Midwest are bland, and these stories show that there are a lot of fascinating people in the area. It’s about a subculture that you may have heard about, but you don’t know how big it is, or you don’t know that it’s growing, and you certainly don’t know Cincinnati’s place in it.
Are there any other niche topics that you are interested in exploring for future stories?
Yes! I’ve met quite a few non-binary people in the past year. And so, my next story is going to be about non-binary people in Cincinnati. So, I’m really excited about that, because it’s something that I don’t know a lot about. I am also doing a story about a guy who has a printing shop in Cincinnati, meaning he will print very high-end artists, lithographs, etchings, or silkscreens. He has been there for more than 40 years, and he is about to close shop. He has done work for major artists, including Yoko Ono.
By Laurie Pike, Cincinnati Magazine
It’s a muggy summer evening at Arcade Legacy Newport, a cavern of electronic amusements in a shopping center between Supercuts and Crunch Fitness.
Justin Masterson steps up to Tron: Legacy, a pinball machine based on the sequel to the cult 1980s sci-fi movie. It’s got futuristic motorcycles on its sides and a play field pulsating blue, yellow, and orange lights to the electro beat of Daft Punk.
Question: What influenced your decision to open with Masterson’s story rather than featuring the story of Brad and Jesse Baker first?
Answer: Jesse and Brad I knew I was going to write about, they are the Kings of Pinball in Cincinnati. So, I knew they were going to come into the story anyway. But, I wanted to start with someone who just loves pinball and plays pinball for fun. Masterson played a little bit in the olden days and then he came back to it and became completely obsessed. He taught himself how to fix pinball machines, he fixes other people’s pinball machines for free because he loves the game so much. He’s just a perfect fanatic, very well spoken, and very enthusiastic. I wanted to start with a regular person, and not someone who was knee-deep in the industry.
Masterson, 43, is trailing Jesse Baker, also 43, who is Cincinnati’s top-ranked pinball player and the arcade’s owner. Masterson pulls the plunger ever so gently to knock off a skill shot (a specific first target after the ball release for extra points). He shoots the ball up a ramp lit by neon-like fiber optics, and it disappears into a scoop—a hole that locks the ball and then, after releasing it, activates multi-ball, sending steel spheres raining down. Masterson traps and cradles them in the flippers so he can deploy them, one at a time, to execute a strategic sequence of moves. With hip and hand, he nudges an outlane-bound ball into an in-lane. He saves another from the drain with a quick left/ right slap to the sides of the cabinet.
Question: While describing the game of pinball you used words like “flippers”, “outlane-ball”, and “inlane-ball”. Is this pinball lingo? Did you learn it from Masterson or other sources?
Answer: Yes, it’s pinball lingo and I learned it a little bit from both. I reread the story this morning, and I was looking at that paragraph. And I thought, you know, do I need to explain in-lane? I have to go back and forth like I do explain what a skill shot is, but I didn't explain because it would have really clogged the paragraph. Looking back over it. If I were an editor, I might have made a little arrow, saying, I'm not sure what this means. But as for research, I do the usual, I get online. But I also checked out a lot of books. When talking with pinball experts you pick up on the lingo but I also had to search the meaning behind words in the graphic novel.
When he passes 22 million points, the machine knocks—a short, loud sound designed to let everyone in the place know he’s crushing it. Now he’s in multi-ball again! This time he’s flipping furiously, just trying to keep from draining. One more shove of the machine and it tilts: Game over. His score of 41 million trounces Baker’s 36 mil. Masterson steps away, beaming. “When I beat Jesse…” he says, gobsmacked. “Well, that never happens.”
Question: This is a great example of the passion you convey through your characters. What were some stylistic/structural techniques you applied to bring this character to life?
Answer: Structurally I wanted to capture a complete scene, start to finish. I also didn’t want it to be long. So I take you through a game that Masterson wound up winning, which was not expected. He was so stoked! I use exclamations points sparingly, but one was merited to capture the speed and tension of the multi-ball. The machine “knocking” was a great detail, because it makes public in the arcade that this player is racking up points. And finally, the graph telegraphs that Jesse Baker is a force in Cincinnati pinball, and, I hope, that makes the reader want to know more about him.
The sweet smell of success doesn’t linger. Masterson—tall with short salt-and-pepper facial hair, wearing the pinball-player uniform of a baseball cap, T-shirt, and loose, knee-length shorts—goes on to lose the next three games in a row. He places fifth out of 11 in the tournament. “It’s a streaky game, a very mental game,” he says, rounding up his 12-year-old daughter, Bayla, who also competed. “But playing pinball is my happy place.”
Not unlike those multi-balls, more and more Cincinnatians are descending into that happy place all at once—or ricocheting back to it, like Masterson. As a suburbs-raised, middle-aged white man who was exposed to pinball as a kid, he typifies the core enthusiast demographic. “Pinball embodies an element of pure physics that video games don’t have,” says Masterson, who has soured on the latter since they’re pre-programmed and as such can be memorized and become predictable. “You get to be surprised every second of every pinball game. It keeps you fully present.”
Introducing Bayla to pinball back when she was 6 and bringing her to compete alongside him is part of a newer phenomenon that’s lending staying power to the trend. The new generation of fidgety flipper fingers suggests that pinball’s popularity isn’t just a passing hipster fad. Bayla demolishes me in our first game together, explaining that shots need to be strategized. “You could have a ball for 15 minutes and score lower than someone who has it for five if they hit the right things,” she says.
Question: The interview with Baker, Masterson, and Bayla is really interesting and a very natural feeling to start this story. Was this interview something you planned out in advance or was this spontaneous? Did you plan to lead with it?
Answer: I tend to open my articles with actuality, and with a story about pinball, why not drop the reader right into a game of pinball like a ball dropped onto the playing field? However I don’t choose the opening scene before I have done all my research and sit down to write. Neither do I plan out how and where to use interviews before I do them. As with the research, I go out and capture everything I can, then I drag it into my cave and try to spin gold out of it all.!
Now and then something will happen, and I’ll think, “That will make a good lede.” But sometimes I save it for the end of the article, because I like to have a kicker, something succinct to go out with a flourish. As for interviews, I speak with twice the number of people who actually wind up quoted in the story. (I always tell them in advance they may not make it in; sometimes people get disappointed by that.) So I interviewed a bunch of people on that particular day at the arcade. Of course I wanted to interview Bayla, though I didn’t know in advance she would be there. One because she is a rare kid on the scene, and female (of which there are many but not an even number of on the scene.) And also because she trounced me in the game, and gave me that great quote.
The Queen City is no stranger to the growing national predilection for nostalgic, tactile pastimes away from the computer, such as crafting and playing vinyl LPs. More than that, though, Cincinnati appears to be setting the tone for pinball’s 21st century comeback as a more family-oriented hobby while boosting the game’s new prominence as a competitive sport. Pinball has been around for close to a century, but only in the past few years could a Cincinnatian compete for rank in a globally recognized pecking order. To climb that list requires practice and frequent competing, which is bringing business back to arcades.
“Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland are probably in the top 10 of pinball cities in the U.S.,” says Chad Hobbs, who publishes Pin Headz, a monthly zine about the local silver-ball scene. “Seattle is first, and Pittsburgh is up there. But Cincinnati has probably grown the fastest of them.”
The stats back him up: The number of machines available for public play in this area has tripled since 2015. There are well over 200 in the arcades, bars, family amusement centers, and the odd ice cream stand between Florence’s Comics2Games (40 machines) and Pinball Garage in Hamilton (45). Arcade Legacy Newport has a 11,000-square-foot sister arcade, simply called Arcade Legacy, set to open soon in Sharonville. Wondercade opened last year in a former plumbing supply showroom in Westwood, and this past summer Anderson Tap House joined the growing list of craft beer emporiums with a wing of thoughtfully curated pinball machines. This explosion doesn’t include the expanding personal collections of folks like Phoebe and Larry Smith, whose Batavia home brims with more than 60 “pins,” as hobbyists call them.
Question: That stat is insane, “The number of machines available for public play in this area has tripled since 2015”, where do you find these stats? How far did you have to dig to find it?
Answer: I credit the geeky pinball community with keeping very good tabs on how many pinball machines can be found at any given location and home of a person who collects them. There’s a website devoted to it, too. I compared the current number of pins to the number that was mentioned in the Cincinnati Magazine story about the game that ran in 2015.
Like Hobbs, Masterson found his raison d’etre when he rediscovered pinball several years ago. He taught himself to repair machines (refusing to accept pay for his service when helping out an arcade) and broadcasts commentary from pinball tournaments that stream live online. He’s more than your average stan, though—his mission is to raise pinball’s profile on the national and international stage and to give Cincinnati its due. The Queen City, he wants everyone to know, is where modern pinball was born.
“I spent a big chunk of last year making sure that if someone googled ‘birthplace of pinball’ Cincinnati would come up,” says Masterson, who works in marketing. He contacted news organizations last year about the 150th anniversary of pinball’s invention here. He called into a live radio show about the recent Made in Cincinnati exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum Center to inform listeners about pinball, which was overlooked in the show. “This year my goal is a demo reel for ESPN,” he says. “If we can watch cornhole tournaments or darts finals, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have commentary around pinball games.”
Question: How did you choose Masterson as a central character, and what aspects of his personality did you find compelling for this story?
Answer: Masterson was the one who suggested the story (though that never guarantees that person would be in it), and is the most passionate person on the scene who is not actually employed in the game somehow. He had a compelling story about how he got into the game, and he’s very, very articulate and interesting. Access is always a consideration: will this person let me into his home to play his personal machines? Will he make time for the my many interviews, calls, emails and texts? Does he have any hidden agenda I need to be aware of?
He is the core demographic of people in the scene–white, male, over 40–but he is less nostalgic about it, and more involved in repositioning the game for modern times. His passion is expressed in spotlighting the competitions with live commentary, and working to make the game more inclusive and inviting to women and people of color.
Even if modern pinball was born in these parts, the game itself has French origins. Bagatelle, an 18th century variation on billiards, may be forgotten today, but its pins of metal or wood standing sentry around holes or pockets on a tilted, dome-topped play field foretold the hobby that The Who (and Elton John) popularized a half-century ago with Pinball Wizard. Bagatelle migrated from France in the 1700s and spread across America. An 1863 political cartoon depicts Abe Lincoln playing the game, using a pool cue, in a tavern.
In 1871, Montague Redgrave, a British expat living in Cincinnati, secured a patent for “Improvements in Bagatelles.” A spring-loaded plunger built into the right side of a wooden case replaced the cue. Other defining aspects of the game, such as bell sound effects, made it more like modern pinball than anything before it. Other Ohioans in Youngstown modified a handmade tabletop bagatelle into a money-making contraption by adding a coin slot, plus a ball return and a glass top. That 1931 novelty, called Whiffle, was test-marketed in a drugstore where it “took in $2.60 in nickels in a single hour,” writes Alexander Smith, a historian who lives in Atlanta. “Before long, they were booking orders for over 2,000 Whiffle games per month.”
A handful of tinkerers around the country were simultaneously concocting similar contraptions. Several proved popular but could not be produced fast enough to keep up with demand from bars, stores, and train stations. It was the Depression era, and cheap entertainment provided a brief respite from the misery of breadlines and unemployment.
Cincinnati’s place in the history of pinball was all but forgotten by the mid-1930s, when Chicago, already a leading maker of coin-op amusements such as slot machines, eclipsed us as the game’s headquarters. The three biggest pinball manufacturers (Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb) rode wave after wave of the game’s popularity. It was a good run, all the way to the end of the century.
The bells and chimes went silent, though, by the year 2000. Video games had edged pinball machines out of arcade real estate. Home consoles were a literal game-changer, obviating the arcades themselves.
Stern Pinball Inc. arose from the millennial ashes in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, near Chicago, and is the game’s big kahuna today. It’s created more than 100 games, mainly licenses of bands, movies, and TV shows such as Stranger Things and The Mandalorian; an Eminem-themed game is rumored to be coming soon.
Pinball will undoubtedly remain the quirky little sibling to video games. But the post-pandemic desperation for human contact has fueled a return to a new phenomenon: arcade bars like BrewDog in Pendleton and Pins Mechanical Co. in Over-the-Rhine.
Sure, you can buy your own home pinball machine, as a growing number of people do, for several thousand dollars. But for most silver-ball fans, in-person playing with others in a venue where you can meet new acquaintances, grab a beer, and compete for the glory of inputting your name on the backbox display is the preferred method of play. Especially when there are so many sculpture-quality games to choose from. Batman 66 features a rotating bat cave and a TV set under the glass that runs footage from the original TV show. Ghostbusters has a hologram target that blows up a ghost when a ball passes under it. The Guns ‘n Roses pin takes a photo of you while playing and inserts it into one of the band, making it look as if you were hanging out with Axel and Slash. Upstart pinball machine makers, such as Jersey Jack Pinball and Spooky Pinball, compete to outdo each other with such novelties.
Question: This story touches on historical aspects of pinball in Cincinnati. How did you decide on the structure of presenting historical information and current developments?
Answer: Pinball’s history is long and convoluted. There’s a whole Chicago/Las Vegas mafia angle I did not touch on because it would have required explanation, and would have digressed from the focus of the article, which is the current Cincinnati scene. As for structure, the fallback is to present it chronologically. As for current developments, there are a lot of them, but having the Baker brothers as anchors, to humanize the info, was better than reeling off dry facts and figures.
Two developments have raised the game’s profile in Cincinnati in recent years: The growth of Pincinnati, an annual tournament, and attention from the area’s royal family of pinball, the Bakers. Brad Baker owns Pinball Garage, a three-generational arcade bar: Paterfamilias Rick works behind the scenes and in maintenance, Brad owns the place and handles promotions, and his son Bradley is general manager. Brad’s brother Jesse Baker—the aforementioned top player in this area—owns Arcade Legacy, with about 80 pins. “Jesse brought back pinball,” Brad boasts, citing his brother’s string of locations starting in 2009, when pinball was a long-forgotten memory.
The Bakers have done more than provide old-school arcade experiences for a nostalgic older generation and the new guard of enthusiasts. They’ve imbued a wholesomeness into the Cincinnati pinball scene, which may be the key to the game’s survival. Their Christian background is not discussed but can be felt.
Their father worked for Cincinnati Christian School in Fairfield, which Brad and Jesse attended, and their mother was a children’s pastor in Over-the-Rhine, where the family ministered to people in need. Today, people going through a rough patch can get a free meal at Pinball Garage, no questions asked. Brad Baker was named Citizen of the Year in 2021 by the city of Hamilton for his generosity in hosting countless charity events at the Garage. (As anyone in the pinball business will tell you, no one gets rich in it.)
“Part of the exciting thing about arcades was that they felt a little wrong,” says Brad. “As a kid you want a little of that feeling, that edge, but not to the point you did something wrong. You wanted to be an adult. It was an adult’s game back then. It was mostly in seedy bars with a bunch of guys smoking and drinking and talking wrong about women. Pinballs from before the mid-’80s highly objectified women, with lots of cleavage and suggestive voices in callouts. They were never geared toward a kid playing them.”
That part of the business hasn’t disappeared. Older games depicting stereotypes of women and minorities still gobble quarters. Stern came out (in 2015!) with Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons, whose exploitative graphics are embarrassingly out of date. But Baker says the industry in general got the message when the video game biz steered toward G- and PG-rated fare, which guaranteed a wider customer base.
Question: You go into a lot of the history in the previous section of the story, why didn’t you include the uglier side of pinball and the machines in that section too?
Answer: There are only so many spokes you can attach to a wheel. Sometimes you need to break up the history into more than one section. The ugly side of pinball is fascinating to me; I have a penchant for the lurid. But once again, it doesn’t have a lot of bearing on Cincinnati pinball today.
“We want to be family-friendly,” he says. “A lot of pinball bars are geared toward adults, with maybe a family night once or twice a week. We want kids to come and learn pinball alongside mom and dad.”
On a recent Sunday night, the Garage was hopping with retirees, tattooed middle-agers, young couples on dates, a woman in a wheelchair, and a dad coaching his 6-year-old on the Harlem Globetrotters game. There were kids everywhere. A 10-year-old DJ was rocking the adjacent patio, while a waitress weaved through the crowd delivering brisket sliders to families at picnic tables. Mission accomplished.
Pincinnati launched in 2018, and today it’s a multi-day tournament offering more than 100 free-play machines for the ticket-buying public. It has jumped in size each year, with 2020 skipped for obvious reasons. With the recent folding of two of the nation’s biggest pinball juggernauts—the Museum of Pinball in Banning, California, and Pinburgh, an annual confab in Pittsburgh—its rise has come at an auspicious time. “Ohio has three large pinball conventions a year now,” says Erik Wurtenberger, co-owner of Pincinnati with Jerry Westerkamp. “I don’t know if any other state has more than two.”
Pincinnati relies on the Baker brothers for machines and overall support. The convention is similarly committed to keeping the sport not just family-friendly but welcoming to segments of the population that have been underrepresented in arcades. “New people are getting into it,” says Wurtenberger, who was preparing for the fourth edition of Pincinnati December 2–4 at the Holiday Inn Eastgate. “It’s shifting slowly but steadily. A lot of women are playing. There’s an entire women’s competitive league called Belles and Chimes. And it’s exploded with younger players. It’s easy for multiple ages, genders, and lifestyles to be on the competitive tip.”
Having competed in pinball shows across the country—he’s ranked 12th in his home state of Kentucky—Wurtenberger developed a clear sense of the vibe he wanted at the Cincinnati show. No profane freakouts over losses. Etiquette rules posted on each game. Never scheduling women’s tournament games in conflict with general competitions, in which women are also welcome to play. Pincinnati would also not be part of a larger comic-con type of event that draws furries, cosplayers, and others keen on the sexier side of leisure activities. In short, it would be less about hard partying and more about pinball.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of official competitions in the rise of pinball. And that’s where Jesse Baker comes in. Up until 2015 there were no tournaments here (that we know of) sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association, competitive pinball’s governing body. Phoebe and Larry Smith, the Batavia couple whose game-filled home had been ground zero for Cincinnati pinball leagues, wanted to improve their IFPA ranking, which is recognized internationally, so they secured credentials to run a tournament in their house in 2015. The following year, Baker’s Arcade Legacy: Bar Edition in Northside (now closed) ran the city’s first IFPA-endorsed tournaments in a public establishment. Thirteen people showed up.
Today, Baker says, “We have over 100 unique players locally who come to any given tournament.” That doesn’t include out-of-towners like Carlos Delaserda and John Delzoppo, Columbus and Cleveland players, respectively, who rank in the top 30 players worldwide and who travel here for tournaments. Meanwhile, someone like Justin Masterson, who travels for work, can also now play in any IFPA-approved competition in any city, and his scores will figure into his world ranking. That wasn’t possible before.
It’s been 150 years since modern pinball was invented here, and Cincinnatians are not done tinkering with the game. Masterson and Wurtenberger are fine-tuning the tournament broadcasts with pre-recorded videos such as explainers on the objectives of particular pinball machines. At the University of Cincinnati, a professor teaches two courses in pinball machine design, the nation’s first accredited university courses in a science niche that’s starting to spread to other campuses.
Will pinball storm pop culture again the way it did in the 1950s? Or the ‘70s or the ‘90s? Maybe. Sales of machines are on the upswing, arcades are expanding, and the IFPA will soon reach six figures in its number of ranked players.
At last year’s Pincinnati event, I had to drag my then 9-year-old nephew out of the game hall after two hours of nonstop play; it was his first experience of flipping the ball from pop bumper to drop-target, and he didn’t want it to end. On a recent Saturday evening, I brought him and his sister, now 10 and 6 respectively, to Wondercade. Parents and grandparents drank White Claw and beer. A slightly skeevy guy asked if I wanted to go out and smoke weed, just like in arcades of yore!
Question: I think the skeevy guy asking if you wanted to smoke weed is a good way to add a little comedy to your story. When you were writing this part about drinking and smoking weed did you have doubts about including it in the paper worried about people’s reactions?
Answer: No, for four reasons: 1) It’s weed. 2) It actually happened. 3) I didn’t name the person. 4) It’s hysterical, because that’s what happened to me when I was 15 years old, not 50 years old in the pinball parlor. It was just so typical because there is that slightly sleazy undertone to pinball and I was kind of happy that it hasn’t completely disappeared. But, this interaction was so hysterical and so typical that I couldn’t not put it in.
I wasn’t as successful this time getting the kids to take to the silver ball. My nephew fell in with a group of kids in multi-player video games. His sister took the wheel at a driving simulator, squealing at every fiery collision. Standing next to the foosball tables, I waited to use the Guardians of the Galaxy pinball machine, which features Groot, whose kinetic mouth can gobble a ball or spit out multi-balls.
“Push the button, flip the flipper!” a 30-something dad coached, his hand on top of his son’s tiny paws. The kid, just 3 years old, stood on a stool, his eyes wide as saucers, for his first crack at pinball.
