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

“And so, finally, 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, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“Bottom half of the seventh, Brock's boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go! and Henry's heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on! ”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“Message of the Legalists: without law, power lost its shape.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“History my god. An incurable diarrhea of dead immortals.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“She made them all laugh and forget for a moment that they were dying men.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“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.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“It’s not even a lesson. It’s just what it is.” Damon holds the baseball up between them. It is hard and white and alive in the sun.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“Maybe it all went back to the days when games were decided, not by the best score in nine innings, but by the first team to score twenty-one runs”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“In a way, Sandy did them a disservice, provided them with dreams and legends that blocked off their perception of the truth.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“American baseball, by luck, trial, and error, and since the famous playing rules council of 1889, had struck on an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability—the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action—that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“It was down in Jake’s old barroom Behind the Patsies’ park; Jake was settin’ ’em up as usual And the night was agittin’ dark. At the bar stood ole Verne Mackenzie, And his eyes was bloodshot red”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“I deserve love, truth, beauty, meaning, and eternal life ... but I'll settle for a fuckin' drink.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“An old hand came down and touched a crown, veered past it to elect a seahorse, white as death: it leaped forward, but currents carried it slantwise. To be good, a chess player, too, had to convert his field to the entire universe, himself the ruler of that private enclosure—though from a pawn's-eye view, of course, it wasn't an enclosure at all, but, infinitely, all there was. Henry enjoyed chess, but found it finally too Euclidien, too militant, ultimately irrational, and in spite of its precision, formless really—nameless motion.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history,' intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, 'and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.