Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The postmodern writer’s 1968 baseball novel is strange and poignant—a work of fiction that ultimately argues for the vitality of fiction itself.

Hand-colored lithograph of an early baseball game seen from behind home plate, 1887.

An entry on the mothballed Web 1.0–vintage online “Baseball Games” encyclopedia dedicated to the “great American tradition” of dice baseball outlines the necessary equipment, and the basic rule set, in brief: “A pair of standard dice. A scoresheet and a pencil. A little imagination (the more the better). That’s all you need. Fun ensues.”

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Robert Coover’s 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., may not be the Great American Baseball Novel, but it certainly qualifies as the Great American Dice-Baseball Novel. Its tragic hero is the titular J. Henry Waugh, a lonely, horny, half-mad, and middle-aged accountant living in New York City. Cursed with more than a little imagination, Waugh devotes his almost impossibly detailed interior life to the feats and internecine antics of the Universal Baseball Association, an entirely imaginary league. Waugh is its sole proprietor, player, and, in a meaningful sense, a kind of de facto God. He dreams up players, names them—preferring dusty, turn-of-the-last-century monikers like Rag Rooney, Sycamore Flynn, Hatrack Hines, and so on—and controls their fate using three dice and a complex series of probability charts, which Waugh himself has also devised. Fun, or something like it, ensues.

In the grand dice-baseball tradition, strikes, bunts, base hits, and out-of-the-park homers are all determined by the cast of a few dice. But for Waugh, the UBA is so much more. Over the course of 56 seasons, he has devised cults of personality around the players and developed lineages of ball-playing superstars. He has created whole teams (the Knickerbockers, the Bridegrooms, the Beaneaters, the Pioneers) and imagined political parties that draw in the owners and managers. As its name implies, the Universal Baseball Association is more than a mere made-up league—it is a whole cosmos. And J. Henry Waugh (say it three times fast and you might hear something like “Yahweh”) is its prime mover. He records each season’s outcome, along with imagined journalistic dispatches, theory, and dialogues between the players, in a series of 300-page ledgers called, with biblical reverence, “The Book.”

When he’s not in his apartment above a deli, dice-rolling through all-night matches while subsisting on beer and pastrami, Waugh totters down to a local bar and treats himself to belts of brandy. There, his fantasies persist. He recounts match outcomes to the disinterested barflies and, seemingly lost in his own mind, sings made-up folk songs about his various made-up players; he also aggressively flirts with another regular, Hettie, with crude baseball-related come-ons. The book’s opening passages find Waugh in a tremendous mood, “crystalline and impenetrable”—drunk both on booze and the thrills of a particularly exciting matchup, showcasing a hot-shot rookie pitcher named Damon Rutherford.

But Waugh’s ecstasy is short-lived. When the champion Rutherford makes his triumphant return to the plate, a rueful dice roll turns up triple ones. According to Waugh’s “Extraordinary Occurrences Chart,” this results in the rival pitcher, Jock Casey, wiring a fatal bean ball to the wunderkind’s head, killing him. “No one moved. All stared at home plate. Damon lay there, on his back, gazing up at a sun he could no longer see.” Waugh is distraught—but despite his empyrean purview over his universe, he is powerless to reverse the outcome. Waugh and his players, Coover writes, “were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice. That was how it was.”

Rutherford’s death has a destabilizing effect—not so much on the team or the league (though the reader is treated to the players’ extended funerary........

© The Nation