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

by Robert Coover

Metafictional Baseball

Robert Coover has long been included in the canonical list of "postmodern" novelists, by which the makers of these lists intend to point to a certain similarity of concern with the dissolution of post-World War II American culture, with the contemporary fragmentation of the self, and with a predilection for revealing the gears and guywires of fictional technique. This exposure of the novel's inner workings -- known as "metafiction," or fiction about fiction -- is perhaps less overt among the later postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, but their formal experimentation and their manner of questioning cultural representations owes much to this earlier group of metafictionists. Think of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and most importantly, Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop..

Coover, who has been teaching experimental and hypertext fiction writing at Brown University since 1980, has largely fallen below the mainstream reader's radar of late, but Grove Press has begun the project of returning his novels to print, re-releasing Gerald's Party and Pinocchio in Venice in 1997, and The Public Burning in February 1998. The Universal Baseball Association, however, originally published in 1968, has never been out of print. Its remarkable combination of a metafictional exploration of the knife's edge between the "real" and the "fictional" with that core passion of American culture -- baseball -- produces a powerfully engrossing (and slightly mind-altering) read, as well as an ideal introduction to the form of metafiction.

In the novel, we meet Henry Waugh, a 56-year-old accountant who has invented a tabletop baseball game, not unlike that proposed by Paul Auster in his recent memoir Hand to Mouth -- but with a few crucial differences. Waugh's game is played with dice rather than cards. Its voluminous charts and tables of plays, accidents, and extraordinary occurences are based on the soundest accounting principles and actuarial tables. And this game encompasses an entire eight-team baseball league, a league that Waugh has rolled and charted through 55 full seasons of play.

This is the key for keeping the records. He is so little interested in the play itself that he has stopped using his mock-up of the field. Instead, he focuses on detailing the statistics of each game, each player, each season, logging them all in countless ledgers and, most importantly, the Book, which contains the numerical, factual information, of course, but also the ephemera of baseball -- newspaper stories, interviews with players, popular ballads about the greats of the game, and so forth. The Book is in fact a book, an entire world that lives and breathes independently of Waugh, its author. He knows the players, their families, their lives -- lives that are more real to him than his own. In fact, this fictional baseball world has become so complex, so intricate, that the players have begun to form political factions.

The game comes to a head in the 56th season. Damon Rutherford, a rookie playing for the Pioneers, pitches a perfect game, as unusual in Waugh's fictional world as in the real one. Rutherford, son of an earlier star of the game, becomes an instant hero. But Waugh senses himself growing overly attached to Rutherford, a situation that portends disaster in a game based entirely on statistics and chance. And, unsurprisingly, disaster does not lurk far behind; in the very next game Rutherford pitches, he is killed at bat by a bean ball thrown by the opposing pitcher.

While the world of the game goes into mourning for the fallen hero, Waugh's exterior world goes into a tailspin of drunkenness and borderline insanity, in which the game, always present in his thoughts, begins bleeding out into the "real" world. Waugh is fired from his job, alienates his few friends, and focuses all his energies on getting even with the other pitcher, Knickerbocker rookie Jock Casey. But in so doing, he purposefully violates the game's own rules and so irreversibly alters the world inside the Book. The game begins to seem to its players arbitrary, ruled by forces that cannot be counted upon. The political structure of the Association erupts in revolution -- and in its place, once the flames have died down, they find the lore of the game transmuted into legend, legend into myth, myth into religion.

Coover has been, throughout his career, deeply interested in the origins and meanings of the stories we tell ourselves as a culture. Briar Rose, his most recent novel, is a retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty; Pinocchio in Venice likewise explores the well-known story of the puppet come alive. But in The Universal Baseball Association, we find perh...

Genres: Fiction, Baseball, Sports, Novels, Literature, American, 20th Century

242 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

About the author

Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had the deep pleasure of writing at length for this book for the times. Will leave my original review below, link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/bo...

Underrated gem - it's a difficult book, especially in the second half, but it has both beauty and daring going for it. The story of a man who gets more and more into his simulated baseball game. Less about baseball than about theology, and most of all it seems to me to be a parable about writing. Extremely creative. It also bears saying given the rise of fantasy sports: weirdly prescient.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is a story of escapism, a tale of fleeing from reality…

The bus was jammed, they had to stand. People jostled, rammed them moistly toward the rear. Rain drummed on the roof. If skyscrapers were penis-prisons, what were the buses? the efferent tubes? The driver barked orders. Passengers protested at the shoving. Lou was the biggest in sight, so everybody turned their darkest looks on him. A woman complained about getting elbowed, and though it wasn’t Lou’s fault, he tipped his hat in apology, dripping water from the brim onto the evening paper of a man sitting next to them. The paper spoke blackly of bombs, births, wars, weddings, infiltrations, and social events.

Reality seems to be a little bit hostile therefore the protagonist invented a sort of baseball role-playing game and throwing dice literally started dwelling in its virtuality ignoring everything around. And while his real life keeps disintegrating he lives in his cozy virtual world:

But anyway he was glad he had come tonight. Helped him see the bigger picture, loosen up a little. All came out the same in the end, he saw that now. Some won, some lost, it didn’t really matter; what mattered was… well… the Association, this whole thing, bigger than all of them, that they were all caught up in. When he tried to picture it in his mind, it fuzzed into a big blur, but in his heart and when they were all together like this, he knew what he meant. Yes, it was a terrific bunch of guys out there tonight. Most of them were old-timers, ballplayers he’d watched as a kid, old heroes, in their late fifties now…

The living, feats and habits of ballplayers appeal to me no more than life and behavior of cockroaches so in spite of the brilliant mythologisation twist in the last chapter I liked this novel less than the other books by Robert Coover.
We all live in reality but every one of us has one’s own little snug shelter in one’s own dreamworld.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one weird book. But I liked it a lot.

Two personal personality quirks might account for this:

1) The main character has created an entire fantasy baseball league, and is in the process of playing out year 56. Not with real players. Entirely created and maintained and imagined by J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Years are played out, deaths are mourned, injuries happen, he creates complete lives for each player, all centered around the game of baseball.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought at first this was five stars all the way. Loved the hokey old-timey baseball lingo, the imagined play by play, wisecrackery, the names, all the TWIBby "how 'bout that?" boyhood baseball wonder and a box of Cracker Jacks, the joys and sorrows of the personalities and stats, the history and the present, especially in that all of it -- the games and the chatter in the dugouts and off-field scandals -- very explicitly took place in an obsessive gamer's imagination. Laughed out loud when I learned what happened to the young ace at the end of chapter two! Really cared about what happened, saw it clearly, dimensionally. Loved how the story slipped in and out of Henry's fictional reality and the imagined reality occuring within Henry's head. Loved the related light-handed metafictional aspects about author and characters, how Coover is to Henry as Henry is to UBA players. Loved larger theological suggestions about freewill and fate: all just a lucky roll of the dice etc. Loved, therefore, the structure, the beautiful nested levels of reality among characters and themes. For the most part, again, also loved the language, which mostly popped and postured and swerved and swung for the fences with poise. But then after the second chapter, things fell off the table, intentionally, since Henry's deep deep immersion and enjoyment in his game would of course cost him in the so-called real world. Anyone who has something serious going on outside of what they do for money will relate. Poor Henry -- a loveable obsessive loser, a tragicomically thwarted genius up there with Ignatius P. Reilly, I'd say -- so deeply sees his game, so deeply believes in the existence of the players and coaches and alt-reality of the UBA, that he loses his grip, but then what happens if he loses his enthusiasm for the game? What's he have then? Very sad. Surprisingly poignant for such a smart book. Coover mimics the drying up of Henry's enthusiasm in the prose, which works in moderation but after a while weighed on my enthusiasm for the book itself, especially when it comes after a longish Ulysses-like bar scene complete with slurred imaginary baseball player speech. Generally, despite all the love for the above, I felt like things peaked early and then fell off the table in terms of my interest as Henry lost his shit and the game became endangered. Occasionally it perked up a bit but never regained its early peak for me. The ending that so many on here complain about didn't bother me, and in fact I sort of like how the players go on with their existence even if their God (Henry) isn't keeping track anymore. I liked the theological/philosophical suggestions but felt things maybe a little fuzzed with that sort of pomo playfulness involving so many characters (characterized mostly by their kooky names) gesticulating giddily and exclaiming excitedly lotsa silly turns o' phrase in alertly alliterative prose. Three point five stars, therefore, rounded up to four thanks to five-star sections particularly early on and overall inventiveness and great names (Witness York, my favorite). Now I gotta go hunt down my old Strat-o-Matic Baseball game in my parents' crawlspace -- note: the UBA game is more like the Strat-o-Matic boardgame than fantasy baseball, which involves teams consisting of real MLB players and mostly is all online these days. Much preferred the 242 pages of this baseball book to the 150 pages or so I read of The Art of Fielding.

[Rayroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now with Afterword

This is not a book about baseball. It's a book about a man who enjoys his solitude and crates a whole world of stats and player biographies in a fake a basball league that's (real?), the players live and die,break records as it's creator losses his fucking mind. He invets a whole league, he explains that he takes words he sees in real life and turns them into ball player names, I come up with few myself. Here is my starting line up and team name.
note the words used are words I seen working downtown Pittsburgh as a messenger.

Pittsburgh Undertows UBA team ba
1. Sprint Bassett ss
2. Shuck Niagara cf
3. Piatt Mccormick 2b
4. Oliver Randell 1b
5. Brook Coldwell lf
6. Kalbolt Koopers c
7. Bethlehem Seamans rf
8. Mellon Quick 3b
9. Swartz Cherry P


Afterword
What is truly wonderful is that there are so many ways a person can lose thier mind, create worlds out of thin air, drop out and go mad, but what's sane working a job to pay rent to live on the grid, to fuck, to have kids, to buy cars with cameras that help in parking, buy tomatos, tubbed chips, spray cheese,ritz, pork in yellow pakeages, milk that will go bad, friut and veggies (not from trees and garderns) go see the another version of Superman at the multiplex,what's sane about the modern word I tell you....fuck.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who, as a child, invented whole basketball teams: bouncing a ball on the narrow sidewalk between two houses, becoming each carefully imagined player, each with an age, height, weight, scoring average, assists, rebounds, shooting style, tendencies; imagining a basket and a backboard where none existed against the siding, shooting each unique way, and seeing if I could make them score and make them win; well, the idea of The Universal Baseball Association doesn't sound so crazy. I can understand coming across someone's name and thinking what position he'd play. The first time I heard of Abulhassan Bani Sadr, I thought, geez, he'd make a wonderful crafty left-handed relief pitcher.

Now pitching for the New York Mets, Number 23, Abulhassan Bani Saaaaaadr! (scattering of applause)

And Angelo 'Angie' Roncalli was not Pope John XXIII, but a grizzled veteran catcher. Of course, I didn't kill anybody, intentionally or otherwise, with a throw of the dice. And I didn't cross the line entirely and let everyone in real life actually become the individual members of the UBA. Nor did I make light of non-consensual sex. But J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is magnificently imagined, as is his game of dice baseball. Bartleby meets Frederick Exley.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

1968 was a year of many heightened things for the United States. Prominent assassinations, needless soldier casualties, Cold War/space race happenings and other political downfalls. It is a history that I am too young to remember, but many still do. Coover's book came out just as these things were occurring.

On the surface, it's of a man in his mid-fifties that has lived alone his whole life in a big city apartment, unmarried, and perpetually in his head about things. Whether it be the loneliness that has caused his eventual mental illness, we can assume that is the case. Yet, on the outside, when you really think about it, you see layers upon layers of things. Envisage an onion, being peeled or cut. The more you peel, the more you cut, your eyes start to water -- cause and effect. In Henry's world, the die run the show. Yes, the die...and people die. He has control over everything, except for his own life.

I see this firstly as an anti-religious, perhaps mostly anti-Christian novel, especially considering this came directly after his anti-religious satire The Origin of the Brunists, but secondly it could be anti-war or anti-government at the time. So many of our troops were sent to a country mandatorily across the world to fight a supposed dangerous political system that affected us at home. The amount of casualties was astonishing. Many knew it was wrong at the time and in retrospect, the wide majority feel the same now.

The metafiction/postmodern style is definitely not for everyone, not to mention if you're not into baseball, you might be bored quickly, but Coover has a way of keeping you in the moment and also making you think while the subject you're reading isn't very thoughtful on the facade.

Considering this is his 2nd book and I loved his debut, I think these two are an amazing first two novels and should be read if you've read any of Coover's latest books.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting going deep imagining of a man's imagining [about baseball] which if you're not really into it may leave a reader withered, but if you're into it [baseball] you just may love it, mostly, as I did.

[Andrew]

What shocked me, after hearing about Coover, was that the plot of the book isn't the star here, nor the characters. Rather, the charm of the book is almost entirely in the structure, which is remarkably playful, complex, and nuanced. I was expecting some sprawling Pynchonesque thing, but instead I got a fun, almost breezy, frequently comic novel touched with metafictional elements.

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnUi...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

Very dense and occasionally boring, but impossibly rewarding and filled with so, sooo many layers of meaning and with reflections on everything from loneliness to death, from artistic creation to control. A minor masterpiece for sure.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a man sitting quietly at a kitchen table. He sits before a jumble of papers illuminated by an overhead light. He's playing a game by throwing dice. His name is J. Henry Waugh. Suggests Jehovah, doesn't it? It's supposed to. Henry is the inventor of an incredibly complete and complex baseball game in which practically every possible event is determined by the roll of 3 dice. His Universal Baseball Association is a league of 8 teams populated by imaginary players. Henry plays seasons with these teams and players and not only keeps box scores for each game but also complete records and statistics for the current season and each preceding season, as well as a written commentary kept in a shelf-full of bound record books. Henry's zeal and love for his game has inspired him to meticulously record and maintain a voluminous history of the UBA, of each season as he's played it. The game Henry invented is so fully realized that even the biographical details of his players are provided for even into retirement and to the ends of their lives. As the novel opens the UBA is in its 56th season, Year LVI. But the game has become wearying. The impetus driving the game and his interest in it all is running down. He's begun to question why he bothers. This season, however, has a breath of fresh air about it in the form of a rookie pitcher named Damon Rutherford who's winning games and exciting Henry in ways he hasn't felt in a long time. But in this complex game system every possibility is thought of, even the accidental death of players. In this way, in a random throw of the dice, this young pitcher, Henry's favorite, is struck down. Henry's devastated and openly mourns for Rutherford and, in the end, in the spirit of a vengeful Jehovah or an Olympian god of the Greek pantheon, he does what he's never done before: he interferes in the game, changes a throw of the dice. He cheats. In order to save the game and save the world after the death of Rutherford, Henry's sense of balance has to be restored by the loss of another player, Jock Casey, who threw the deadly beanball. Casey's loss can be seen only as sacrifice. Coover has written parody, religious allegory.

Henry doesn't like the real game of baseball. What fascinates him is the arcane nature of the statistics. He knows that numbers equal magic, especially in baseball with its systems of 3s, 9s, and 7s. So he lives within his game rather than keeping up with the major leagues played every summer. Henry's Universal Baseball Association is so complete and so real that Henry is frequently lost in it, imagines he's surrounded by these players as he goes about his daily routines, drinking in a bar, at work, dining out. He revels in the history of the UBA and sees the rollicking and ribald discourse of the young crop of players as well as the retired oldtimers living on nostalgia and stories of the previous 55 seasons. Henry's surrender to the attraction of the game is such that it's become the most important thing in his life. He's in danger of being absorbed into the game. His social life deteriorates, his performance at work with an accounting firm is so unsatisfactory he's always on the brink of being let go.

The final chapter is a kind of coda. It takes place a hundred seasons later. Fact has become legend. The game has survived the turbulent Year LVI but now the events of that season have become ritual perpetuating the myth. Each season features a sacrificial rite of spring that allows Henry and his ballplayers to impose continuity and order on chaos by fashioning history and truth to fit their needs, just as we do in our lives outside his game. Rather than have his world exist as meaningless, without hope or belief, Henry gives the game an element which renews and casts meaning on the randomness of the 3 dice. All this is in line with the almost religious reverence of baseball as the Great American Game which has mythic meaning and whose heroes of the past approach deification.

I guess my enthusiasm for this novel shows. This was another reread of one of my favorite novels. I'll probably read it again someday. I'll never tire of Coover's rendering of how historical events in our world as well as the UBA tend, over time, to be stitched together with myth and ritual in order to give them meaning.

Rereading again in 2017.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION, INC.
@nyrbooks
Rec’d by @hvbooknerd

GUYSGYSGUYSGUYSGUYSSS THIS IS INCREDIBLE IM GONNA YELL FOR A MINUTE.

Henry Waugh is lost in the sauce. He’s created an in depth fantasy baseball game he plays with dice and score cards. When I say in depth—if you don’t have a friend like I do who has memorized the rules to Gloomhaven, Dune: Imperium, Quacks of Quedlinburg and all the other 98 board games in their closet, you don’t know what I mean by in-depth. (Thank god for friends like that who know the rules for game night!! Also @emerkle I think I found you a book.) This is THAT sort of game Henry’s at. And it’s mesmerizing. I haven’t felt so wrapped up in someone’s weird little inner life since I met Tara Selter.

It’s not about baseball! It’s about the fictions we make, it’s honestly about writing and the way a creator has to live inside that world and lose himself to it to make something any good.

It’s not about baseball. I think it’s about the tendency to lose ourselves in fantasy outside of the time we spend at work, as it has crept into the subtext of our very lives controlling our emotions within and without the walls of the buildings that require us so we can live a life.

It’s not about BASEBALL. It’s about denial when things are falling apart around you, the ways in which the subconscious loses itself into corridors of its own creation to protect itself from the psychic harm of reality and loneliness.

It isn’t about baseball. It’s about chance and happenstance—how our lives are at the whims of some force out there—is the force a thinking feeling being in control, but dedicated to the game he invented? Does he try to intervene knowing he cannot? Is this book about God and THE UNIVERSE(!!!), actually? my God.

It’s not about baseball. It’s about sex and beer and midlife crises and the thin lines that separate acquaintances and coworkers from friends and how hard it is to make real, lasting connection.

Ok yeah it’s a little about baseball. A ton of this book is actually the league and scores in Henry’s head involving the dramas going on in the UBA. But I don’t care about baseball. Yet, I love love loved this book.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Infinite Jest aside--that novel is in a league of its own starring Geena Davis, Rosie O'Donell, and Tom Hanks as the foul-mouthed ex-ballplayer with a heart of gold--this is best thing I've read all year. Here's why:

a) First, it's beautifully written. Robert Coover is often grouped with D Barthelme and J Barth, but he's a clearer writer than the former and a better stylist than the latter. On the strength of this work, I picked up a cheap copy of Pricksongs and Descants, a collection of Coover's short stories.

b) It's the best baseball novel I've ever read. Eric Rolfe's Greenberg The Celebrant was a wonderful bit of historical fiction, and The Natural was a brilliant dark allegory, but both concerned baseball as a spectator sport--the "American pastime," in other words. The UBA, on the other hand, concerns baseball as a record-keeping activity:

"So...he'd found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much--to tell the truth, real baseball bored him--but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history..."

"I found out the scorecards were enough. I didn't need the games."

c) It's the best book about the weird, imaginative, and esoteric obsessions that characterize the private lives of many nerdy males (even "normal" ones like Henry Waugh, who are capable of holding jobs, talking to people, etc.). Waugh, for example, invents a game that is really much more than that, as evidenced by the fact that his friend Lou Engel, upon being invited to play it, finds it neither enjoyable nor interesting because he can't "fill in the gaps" between dice rolls with invented storylines in the same way that Waugh does. I've gone through two such phases, first with "e-wrestling" from 1996-2000 and now with the Moustache Club of America (2002-2011)...and I can attest to the fact that the loneliness that accompanies such hobbies is simply ineffable.

d) And finally, when the novel arrives at its absurd conclusion in a league future that's become completely unmoored from its past, tUBA provides an excellent commentary on history:

"Can't even be sure about the simple facts. Some writers even argue that Rutherford and Casey never existed--nothing more than the ancient myths of the sun, symbolized as a victim slaughtered by the monster or force of darkness. History: in the end, you can never prove a thing."

And on agency:

"Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? Why does he swing? Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and rejoice when safe? And when, after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to quit--but what does he mean, 'quit?' The game? Life? Could you separate them?"


If you don't understand or like baseball, speculative gaming writ large, and the like, you probably won't appreciate tUBA. Other reviewers on GR haven't, citing such reasons. But if you do, you'll quickly realize that this is one of the best books written in the last 50 years.

[Virginia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm eager to discuss this book primarily because of how much I disliked it.

Moments ago, I summarized it for my husband, and he said, "That sounds interesting. I'd never read it, but if you were stoned and had that idea for a book, it'd be pretty exciting."

That's the gist: If I were intoxicated or otherwise impaired and had the idea for this book, it would be exciting. Now, running that idea out for 242 pages is simply mad, and let's face it, cruel.

I understand why this book is considered great by some. The premise is intriguing. The climax (if it can aptly be referred to as such) is interesting. The delivery is unique.

However, what Coover bought in originality he sold in execution. Originality does not buy a writer out of good storytelling. The strongest emotion I had during the reading of this: to sock Coover in the face.

I feel strongly that any niche can successfully be exploited for metaphoric value in fiction regardless of its obscurity, so long as it is done well. Baseball is far from obscure, but the metaphor of the game in these pages is so utterly alienating that Coover might as well be writing about bike polo.

In his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon gives comic books as critical a role as any of the main characters. However, the reader doesn't need to be a comic aficionado to appreciate the context. When I finished Kavalier & Clay I wanted to know more about comics; when I finished The Universal Baseball Association I wanted to never hear a word about baseball again.

[Max Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

J. Henry Waugh really puts the “fantasy” in “men losing everything they have to fantasy sports betting”.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this could easily be a five-star book...for someone else. Probably someone who likes baseball a lot more than I do. I'm definitely impressed with what it accomplishes; you could basically say it's an account of a man's life falling apart at the seams due to an obsession with a proto-World-of-Warcraft. And in that way, it's eerily prescient.

Well executed, too. Henry Waugh's fantasy baseball league is imagined from the ground up, complete with its own history and a huge group of fully realized players. I regard this as a major accomplishment for both Henry and Coover. And Henry's own narration drifts seamlessly in and out of his players' narration, which is itself pretty immersive. Towards the end, when Henry's sanity is in danger, he mixes up the names of the players in humorous and believable fashion.

I wish I could more clearly articulate what it was that made this book only okay for me. Part of it is of course that I don't like baseball, but that oversimplifies it. I can be made to like baseball, as I was for Delillo's Underworld. But that scene has a lot more to do with baseball's culture and tactile features: the peanuts, the dull roar, the stickiness of the floor beneath the seats. Waugh explicitly makes clear that he doesn't go in for any of that; he doesn't actually like real baseball. He likes the stats of it, and pares his game down to just that.

The other thing is probably that Coover, in some ways, seems like a poor man's Pynchon. Which is fine, but as I was reading this, I kept thinking, why aren't I reading some actual Pynchon? I've got Mason & Dixon sitting tantalizingly on my shelf right now, after all. Coover's mannerisms are similar: the whimsical raunch, the "Oboy!", the manic wordplay. But he doesn't pull it off quite as well.

Also, the title. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.? Seriously? I almost never picked it up just because of that.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, first things first, I don't give a damn about baseball. This book probably would have meant more to me if I did, but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless. It's too bad my baseball-loving father doesn't give a damn about experimental novels-maybe between the two of us we would have been able to make a bit more sense of this thing.

But anyway, this is only tangentially a novel about baseball. It's more about imagination, and creativity, and statistics, and rules, and (ugh, sorry-but I can't think of a better way to put it) a character's attempt to construct meaning out of nothingness. As Waugh himself reminds us throughout the book, real baseball does nothing for him.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though: J. Henry Waugh is one of the all-time great miserably pathetic protagonists, a man with little to no understanding of life, or the lines dividing life and fantasy, or human interaction, or romance, or sex, or generally speaking how to function as an adult. His solution is to lose himself in a series of exceptionally complex games of his own devising, the most recent of which is the Universal Baseball Association, played by means of dice and charts and populated with some truly hilariously-named players (Pappy Rooney, Swanee Law, Brock Rutherford, Witness York, Hatrack Hines, Darlin' Harlan Handsome, Sycamore Flynn... I could go on for quite some time).

We can all guess what's coming, of course: he confuses real people with his own characters, assumes the identity of various baseball players and managers, is plunged into despondency by make-believe tragedies, and so on. Coover manages to make this immensely enjoyable to read about, though--up until the epilogue, which is up there (for me) with Blood Meridian in terms of sheer head-scratching confusion. I'll have to re-read it, I suppose.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

My venture through the works of Robert Coover continues with his second novel The Universal Baseball Association of J Henry Waugh Prop. First published in 1968, this work of metafiction fits right in line with the big names of the time that popularized the style. While popular in its own right, Universal Baseball Association isn’t typically discussed with other works of that year in establishing the style, if anything it transcends it.

I’ve owned this 1971 Plume Books edition for a few years now. I would have gotten to it sooner but I wanted to save it for after my first reading of The Public Burning and I thought the spring, during the baseball season open would be the perfect time to read this. I certainly enjoyed reading this alongside the season openers but this book can be enjoyed year round.

In typical Coover fashion there is a rush of excitement to his writing. This is a very fast paced read with lots going on but overall not too difficult to comprehend. The narrative of this book follows Henry Waugh, an accountant who mostly keeps to himself. He spends nights at home or by himself at the bar playing a game he has developed where dice rolls determine each and every play of a baseball game.

This game has many rules and Waugh has committed them all to memory, notating each action in his log book. The world of the game, the Universal Baseball Association, is more than just a series of dice roll baseball games. The UBA is an entire league of eight teams, each with their own name and mascot as well as a roster of players each given a colorful nickname. These players play in a league with a fifty year plus history. There are legacies and rivalries that go back generations.

It is quite early on that readers are exposed to the depth of this game world, leaving a level of awe in Coover’s worldbuilding abilities. Having read Coover’s later work, What Ever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? I’ve learned that Coover appreciates the peripheral around the world of sports. He has an appreciation for the games themselves but also the culture and atmosphere that they cultivate.

The narrative of Universal Baseball Association alternates back and forth between the world of the game and the world of Henry Waugh, at times blending them more directly. The juxtaposition of the two really is what offers the metafictional aspect of this book. Having a world and set of characters that are just a creation of a higher being character who is ultimately just a creation of Robert Coover. Some of the other metafictional works of this time are more flashy in their gimmicks than what is displayed here but that isn’t to say that it isn’t done well by Coover.

In the world of Henry Waugh we see that playing this game has enveloped his life. He is losing sleep staying up late and doing poorly at his job because of it. As he loses interest and desire in the mundane aspects of his dull modern life he sinks deeper into the fantasy of the UBA.

To me this is the greatest aspect of this book. While I enjoyed the excitement of some of the baseball game atmosphere, what really drew me in was this exploration of obsession. You really feel Henry’s life degrading in real time and want him to turn things around or take a break. The real horror is relating so much to this scenario in various parts of my life.

Coover really captured this “tetris effect” mentality when it was only in its primitive stages. While I’m sure some tabletop dice games existed back in the 1960s, we are still years out from the popularity of things like Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer, let alone the phenomenon of video games as a whole. Given how nearly everything on a screen is focus tested to farm dopamine from users I’m sure everyone reading this in a modern context can relate to this self destructive level of obsession.

To me the peak of this book is the chapter where Henry has his coworker over and is trying to play the game with him. The level of frustration he exhibits while his friend is lacking in reverence and interest in the game is horrified to witness. Once again this comes from a relatability aspect, having a mirror held up to you and your cringe displays of obsession around something that others could care less about.

While there is a lot that I loved about this book I don’t know if I would say I fully loved it. I really think your overall enjoyment of this book hinges on your interest in baseball. While not a big fan I am familiar with the sport and have an appreciation for it. With how fast paced the book is a lot of the play by play action of the game can start to feel like a blur after a while. I definitely felt this at times and some of the baseball player character dialog definitely dragged at points. To a degree this feels intentional as a way to showcase how elaborate this world is.

I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the ending. Seeing Henry fail in his current life just to pick himself up and move on to the next thing feels very optimistic in a 1960s way but in a modern context you know someone this far gone in an obsessive habit is likely to fall even harder. I was expecting a darker ending and if this book was written post The Public Burning I have a feeling it would have.

Overall, I don’t think you need to be a huge baseball fan to read this book and walk away with a sense of enjoyment. Coover is a great writer whose energy and ideas can engage with anyone. I certainly feel the momentum going in my continuation to read through Coover.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sports...

"War seemed to be a must for every generation. A pageant to fortify the tribal spirit. A columnist plumped for bloodless war through the space race. Henry sympathized with the man, but it could never work. Mere abstraction. People needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable runs scored. Besides, war was available to everybody, the space race to few: war was a kind of whorehouse for mass release of moonlust. Lunacy: anyway, he sure wasn't inventing it."

"The dice and charts and other paraphernalia were only the mechanics of the drama, not the drama itself."

...or spectator sports? Reading this Coover dredged up a lot of childhood debris, a lot of loose material affectively sedimented around baseball. My mother remarried in 1990 when I was 8. Master Sergeant Dad had forever been off at Ft. Hooah doing whatever. Suddenly playing catch and watching the 6:30am SportsCenter before work and school became a thing. An entire era of my dirt poor Georgia-boy life is concentrated in the mindlessly specific signifier "Sid Bream." I had baseball cards in laminated sheets in 3-ring binders, Beckett guides, enthusiasm and opinions and a family! We played and cheered and knew all the names and had favorites and memories and speculations! As adolescence dawned a short couple years later, my sister moved out and I followed suit as soon as I could, trading a known quantity of religious repression for an unknown quantity of drunken military domineering (where at least skateboarding was ok even if long hair was seditious). They pawned my card collection for unpretty pennies but I kept my glove. I haven't given a shit about sports for 25 years. Not even when it was my turn to be stepdad and I co-coached a 12-and-under team from a 1-11 start to a skin-of-the-teeth championship 2 years later. But I like ping pong and frisbee. In theory.

Sports provide drama, history, and politics for millions of people with poor taste. For the perennially disempowered it purveys the mirage of something happening, whereby that guy doing that thing with that ball assumes cosmogonic significance. I've lived it, I get it, but I don't hear the music. People should play more and watch less. Fandom is the hollowest solidarity. That's already too much soc-pol-econ vitriol for today.

Coover makes clear that it's all about the story: the names, the frames, chummy argot, mythical sagas and struggles, irreversible climaxes and missed chances. For J. Henry Waugh, it makes no difference that it's all completely made up, or any difference it does make makes it better. DeLillo (in that other book about a baseball) was rightly fascinated by the fact that radio announcers in olden-times would have to conjure a game from nothing but a scoresheet. Coover beat my expectations with this one, despite some repetitive sections getting the glossy speed-read, but his imitative tone is dead on and I just love the way he writes, like some Hemingwayesque acolyte on absinthe doing a screenplay for the next Marvel Superheroes movie about the Marquis de Sade, as told by John Wayne (Gacy).

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, I love baseball. It's hard to write about the literary merits of this mind-bending book, of which there are DEFINITELY many (in short, without talking about baseball, the created world becomes the real world), without talking about baseball. And the fact that Coover created a complex board game equivalent of modern fantasy/tabletop baseball that used statistics in ways that were never discussed until Billy Beane's SABRmetric-focused appearance in "Moneyball." But the world that Coover creates is a beautiful mix of old baseball (reminding me a lot of old WP Kinsella novels, harking back to the glory days of early 1900s baseball) and experimental literature immersed in philosophical pursuits of perfection, fate, death, and, of course (because every goddamn book I read better get at this question at some point), what is the meaning of everything.

Highly recommended, though recommended all the more to people who know a thing or two about baseball, otherwise you might get lost in the stats and the gameplay descriptions, though there's a lot more going on in the text.

[Olin Postlethwait · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly 2.5 Stars. I don't know if it was the high expectations (Robert Coover's "The Public Burning" is one of my all time favorite books) or if it was the story. But I was generally uninterested throughout the book.

I was expecting more focus on the main protagonist (who ends up more as a D&D-esque sports narrator than a protagonist) rather than a book revealing the drama of an imaginary baseball season that plays in Henry's head.

I think the level of disappointment adds to the 2-star rating vs 3-star. Not a bad book by any means, just meh.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love to read a book, especially when recommended by a friend, and think “oh yeah, this is an all-timer for me.” I love everything about this book. The beatnik-esque prose, the imagination behind the fantasy baseball game, the themes of healthy/unhealthy passion, isolation, and the longing for someone to just please fucking understand what you’re trying to do with your life every single day. A beautiful, bruising novel.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this one by Coover. It's probably as aided by the fact that I also love baseball. I listen to podcasts and the radio broadcasts of my favorite team. The way Coover captures the game is pitch perfect. In fact the only quibble I have is that Coover is a Reds fan.

[Luke Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Come for the baseball, stay for the songs.

OR: Dungeons and Dragons for the deeply mentally sick who also love Lou Gehrig

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me be the millionth person to offer this aperçu: when one gets onto a Tetris jag and plays for hours at a time and then, say, walks outside for the first time in a week, one will absolutely start to see bricks and breezeblocks and shingles on the façades of buildings falling in the shape of tetrominoes and one will be inclined to manipulate them in one’s mind ’cause Tetris is some seriously addictive, hallucinogenic shit. Tetris is also, pace comrade Pajitnov, pretty simple. I have never, while in the nadir of a Tetris bender, considered, for instance, the inner lives of the shapes, what their thoughts were about fashioning completed rows, or whether they resented being manipulated by an unseen actor. Perhaps, like model Soviets, they relished their collective labor. Perhaps too, the six regular pieces all came to resent the most coveted long column-y one (some animals are more equal than others, etc.). So then consider an impossibly more complex game, like baseball, and how one’s mind might be altered by reckoning with the pieces and possible moves of such a monstrously elaborate network of possibilities and outcomes. Enter Coover’s Universal Baseball Association and J. Henry Waugh, the proprietor of his own alternate reality. The UBA is Waugh’s invention, essentially a boardgame, akin to Dungeons and Dragons, that simulates a baseball game through the use of three dice, nine schedules dictating the outcome of rolled dice combinations, and one really robust imagination. Waugh, who works (badly) as an accountant by day, has conjured (and memorized) enough players to populate eight teams for fifty-six years of play, and he keeps the records of all games played, and statistics from those games, in volumes throughout his nondescript apartment in an unspecified city. The real animating element of Waugh’s play – and the reader’s insights – comes in the crafting of what is called The Book, the chronicle of the league’s heroes and villains and historically significant moments and evolution from pastime to professional sport. The Book that Waugh keeps – that which he kind of composes in his mind throughout his waking life – is about half of what the reader reads in this novel, which novel shifts between the third-person narration of Coover writing Waugh and of Waugh writing the UBA, which latter gradually takes over as the novel develops, concluding with total immersion. So, okay, so the gist here is that the novelist is like the isolated D&D player pathetically inventing a world peopled by characters that most people won’t care about in the hopes that some might (the novel here being a game of infinite permutations (like baseball) within a structure of rules and expectations). And then also we see here an iteration of Baudrillardian simulacrum whereby the subject can’t distinguish between the real and the simulation of the real in the person of J, Henry Waugh who slowly but inexorably becomes separated from his reality. Coover, though, doesn’t do a lot to emphasize these points, and can’t seem to offer anything of Waugh’s inner life – outside of what he’s thinking about the game – to allow the reader to sympathize with or understand him more deeply. I came away wanting to know more about Waugh, and more about how he writes The Book, and more about what it felt like to lose an imaginary friend. But then I know what it feels like to get lost in a game, to have a meaningless game present itself as a vastly more captivating world than the one I normally occupy, and so maybe I know enough about Waugh already and can infer what his loss feels like. If you’re really into baseball or Dungeons and Dragons (or Tetris) this is worth your time.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of this novel reads like a Charlie Kaufman script - sad sack at dead-end job creates and immerses himself into a creative world that fractures then floods what little arks of order and sailboats of sanity buoyed and bounced the boy through the seas of anonymous adulthood. And, to make it more painful, attempting to explain the rules and regulations, the priveleges and privations of the population of this interior planet just pushes real ("real" i.e. adult, happy in day-to-day anonymity) people away. Hell, scares the livin' bejeebus out of them. To borrow and bend from David Foster Wallace a bit, these outsiders walk away thinking, "You have all that inside you, and to me it's a mess. Want no part of it. No, no part for me. Loon." Sure, the guy in this novel is playing a tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons in a Dugout, but he could also be writing poetry, collecting old photographs, singing ballads into a boombox.

You get the point.

But what really elevates this book into the realm of majesty is the eighth and final chapter (funny how Coover stuck so close to baseball numerals that he didn't find a way to divide the novel into nine chapters) that reveals baseball (in main character's world) to have transcended its origins as a game, a sport and pasttime, and become a sort of annual ritual sacrifice of a handpicked Favored Son, like something out of The Golden Bough (Sir James Frazer). ... Yes... That's right... Boughsball.

Note: Also enjoyed the list of Other Signet Paperbacks at the back of the book, like Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In No. 1: "It's chicken jokes, party time, graffiti, etc. twenty-four hours a day instead of one precious hour per week!" Also, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In No. 2: Mod Mod World. Haw!

[Pat Settegast · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, this is a pre-D&D roleplaying geekout disguised as a quite elegant baseball novel. The sports writing is stellar but the plot seems to plod pretty predictably along, and frankly I didn't get the ending at all...! I thought there'd be nine chapters because of all the stuff about numerology, but there were only 8... and the author decided to create this kind of meta-russian roulette round out of the last chapter: that seemed a little sloppy: I was just starting to like some of the other imaginary people and then its like climax time and we begin introductions all over again. I could have missed something, but I doubt it. So, I'd recommend this book to anybody who likes either baseball or larping (I know wierd combo, right?) or anybody who wants to write better about baseball because some of the sport language just sings! But forget the ending, you know? Or better yet, write your own.

[Daniel R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like being trapped in an elevator with a downward spiraling hallucinating individual. You keep hoping that the visions will pass and some sensible narrative will form but instead the sporadic glimmers of sanity quickly fade back into nonsense. Viewed as a case study in obsession and imagination the book does I wonderful job, I just found the execution on that theme excruciating.

[Campbell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointed with this one. I wanted to learn more about Henry but instead the focus was instead on the players he created. Ultimately frustrating.

[Molly Hadfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I too love to crash out about fantasy baseball.