You can do an advanced search on IPDB.org and enter themes for criteria. Not sure it's entirely consistent though.

You can search by tags here on Pinside. For example "music".

Yeah IPDB is probably a great start. You'll need to get a little more specific than sports. Looks like they made over 1,000 sports themed games. Of course for some titles you are facing replay, add-a-ball, and an Italian version for the same game theoretically.

Football- 70
Soccer- 56
Baseball- 269 but deduct 122 bat games and deduct 10 "not a pinball"
Bowling - 72
Billiards- 92

sports theme featuring scantily clad women - 33%

Sci fi theme featuring same - 33%

40 year old rock bands - 33%

You’re welcome!

Great idea and would be cool to hear what you put together to present. Hope you can find enough info to do this.

You can do that here too. Click on the machines link up in the Pinside banner. On the left side mid-page there will be a search bar under category. You can even narrow it down from sports to soccer, football etc... you can also search said categories by manufacture, era, etc...It’s quite the wormhole.

edit to add the search bar you want is labeled “tag”

Someone did a master's thesis on that very topic in the 1980s. I may have some clues, and a search of r.g.p should provide clues.
.................David Marston

I found one reference that's probably relevant, from the late Russ Jensen.
Thesis titled "Art and Design of Pinball Machines; Proposal for More Aesthetically Designed Machines" which was submitted by Chad Dresbach in May 1996 to Kent State University in Ohio for partial fulfillment of a Master of Arts degree.

I think there is another thesis that is more of an inventory approach.
.................David Marston

An article titled 'Trends In U.S.A. Pinball Machine Motifs, 1947-1981' by Terry Cumming appeared in the May-June 1988 issue of The Pinball Trader. I would be glad to post the entire article here but I would prefer to get Terry's permission to do so. If anyone is aware of Terry's whereabouts these days please ask him to contact me. Thanks! [email protected]

This is the lead paragraph to the article:

img20210325_12525603 (resized).jpg

That is the thesis with the inventory approach that I was referencing earlier. Now we just need someone to add 40 more years worth of inventory. I think the IPDB theme keywords should cover the newer games pretty well.
.................David Marston

Hi, I was surfing today and saw this thread. Sports is the one theme on the IPDB where I consistently try to tag a game with both the general term "Sports" as well as the specific sport (baseball, football, etc.).

You may have figured this because your estimation is close to what comes up when Advance Searching for "Sports", 949 games as of today.

But, yeah, there could be games never categorized until I have a second reason to update the listing.

Thank you.