Jimmy Dalton died in 1988. Jack Manning, his nephew, does not want the game that his uncle invented to die as well.

When Manning was eight years old, Dalton taught Manning a baseball game played with a deck of cards. Now, some 48 years later, Manning has re-tooled the game, developed a prototype, had it copyrighted and is now selling the game, called JIMMYjack Baseball, in local stores and on the Internet.

“One day I started thinking, ‘This game will die and that shouldn’t happen,’” said Manning, who lives in Naperville and works as a real estate appraiser. “I did not know if any of my cousins knew the game or anything, so in June of 2003, I started thinking how the cards might look in a real game.”

Originally, the way Manning’s uncle had developed the game, 44 cards of a regular playing card deck of 52 cards were used in the baseball card game. Two people, or one person playing alone, would shuffle a deck of cards and flip over one card at a time. Each card corresponded to outs, hits, errors and home runs. For example, the king of hearts was a triple; the seven of diamonds, an error.

“It played fast,” Manning said of his uncle’s invention. “It played real.”

Manning’s expanded version of the game mixes in more components.

“I added cards that my uncle’s game did not have,” he said. “I incorporated many more elements, but I still maintained what he created. My uncle’s game had no dice. In this game you roll the dice to steal a base.”

With no graphics background except helping with his kids’ art projects in school, Manning designed every aspect of the game. He eventually accumulated four spiral-ring notebooks full of notes in which he developed card colors, designs and other ideas.

Manning’s next step was to find a copyright lawyer. He referred to a telephone book.

“I went to the guy who offered the first consultation free of charge,” said Manning of Charles Meroni, a lawyer in Barrington. “When I met with him I found out that he was a baseball fan. So that felt good.”

Early names considered for the new game were “Box Score Baseball,” “On Deck Baseball” and “Real Deal Baseball.”

“We checked names that were already taken and ‘Real Deal’ was a name that was not available,” Manning said. “Then I was reading up on baseball and found that an old-time term for a home run was ‘jimmy jack.”

Since Jack’s uncle was named Jimmy, JIMMYjack Baseball seemed to fit.

Manning copyrighted the name and then Meroni referred him to Game Builders USA, a board game development company, in Gurnee. Meroni knew that Dan Becker, who runs the company with his wife, Kim, loved Beckett Baseball, a trading card magazine.

“So he thought Dan would be interested in my game,” Manning said. “As I went along in this process I realized how many people really love baseball.”

From his first big push to design the new game in June 2005, Manning spent about 2 1/2 years, on and off, refining aspects of the game and adding new elements.

Manning worked with Game Builders USA for about a year with only minor alterations being made to his concept. As part of the its development packages, Game Builders USA offers to do a game test.

“But I elected not to do that because I had played the game all my life,” Manning said. “I had played a 162-game schedule with the cards. All the numbers fell within the major league baseball totals for the year.”

Confident that his own product testing was sufficient, Manning had 1,000 games made, “mainly because my funds were limited,” he said.

Manning used personal money to finance the project. He received the finished product in January of this year. He then made personal visits to local stores to see if they would stock the new game.

Retailing for $20, JIMMYjack Baseball is available at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Mark & Alex’s Toy Box in Oswego and in various Gamer’s Paradise locations in the Chicago area.

“The game has been well received,” said Manning of sales, although he would not relate specific numbers. “I want to accelerate it, but slowly. I am contacting major retailers and I am trying to get the game in the stores for the holidays.”

Manning believes that JIMMYjack Baseball will appeal to a wide audience.

“If you love baseball, you will love this game,” he said. “You can play a game in 20 minutes. You can do a double header in an hour.

“This is a family game,” he continued. “Two brothers, whether they are 9 and 11 or 69 and 71, can play the game. But a 10-year-old could also play with his grandfather. Video games are fantastic, but grandpa cannot keep up with a grandson on a video game.”

Manning’s own family (his wife, Jill, and their three children) played an important role in the game’s development. That aspect is reflected in the name of the web site—www.manning5games.com.

“At times they sat at the table and they were coloring some of the cards with me,” said Manning of his family. “It has been a labor of love.”

Manning’s wife was the one to encourage him early on in the process after seeing him play the card game for more than 40 years.

“She would say to me, ‘Can’t you do something with it?’” Manning said.

Family is also motivating the entrepreneur’s bottom line. Manning said a portion of profits from JIMMYjack Baseball will go back to some Little League baseball field in need of repairs. He hopes that perhaps that baseball field could then be named Jimmy Dalton Field.

“If you do things for the right reasons,” Manning said, “you will be successful.”