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

Henry Waugh is a fifty-something accountant with no family, no friends & no future at work. All he has going for him is that he is the creator & sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association. Henry has invented a Stratomatic-type baseball game & taken it to the nth degree. He has rules for virtually every possible occurrence & potential roll of the dice. He has populated the game with players of his own creation. These players even participate in offseason activities, like pinball tournaments, and get involved in Association politics when they retire. There are retired players because Henry has played out over fifty UBA seasons. Henry hasn't simply created a game, he's created a personal Universe.The greatest player in Association history was Brock Rutherford and now his son, Damon Rutherford, is taking the UBA by storm. Henry's enthusiasm for the Association has waned in recent years, but the rise of Damon Rutherford has renewed his interest. Suddenly the game is fun again and Henry's life seems full & interesting. When young Damon throws a perfect game, Henry is so caught up in the excitement that he tampers with his own rules and allows Damon to start his next game on one day of rest. And, of course, when the Creator tampers with his own rules, his creations will pay the price.The first 150 or so pages of this book are absolutely fabulous. As disaster befalls the Association & Henry's life crumbles around him he loses the ability to separate reality from fantasy and the book too becomes confused, but it is still a terrific read.GRADE: A-

Like Malamud's "The Natural," Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association" uses baseball to explore mythology, religion, and the nature of belief. While Coover manages to successfully incorporate all of these, however, the novel meets the first command of great literature: the story stands on its own.The protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, is one of modern American fiction's great creations, a lonley man who spends most of his time in a small New York apartment obsessively ruminating over his great creation: an elaborate dice/board game that serves as the playing field for his Universal Baseball Assn. Waugh plays a full season of games, keeps detailed statistics on each player, and fully documents the history of his league (including the lives and deaths of his "players").The novel turns on Henry's (godlike) intervention into the game's natural course (ruled by the dice) after the death of a young pitcher in whom he has invested his emotions, hopes and dreams. This intervention touches off a series of questions about the nature of God, Man, and Fate. None of these discussions are divorced from the fabric of the story, however. Throughout, our eyes are clearly on Henry, as he slowly deteriorates mentally, the "game" becoming far more real than "real life."This is a superb book. It will naturally appeal to baseball lovers, but those who don't give two figs about baseball will be caught up in Coover's sophisticated storytelling and will be impressed by his flawless narrative control and his ability to transcend the immediate subject of the novel.

Since we see so many extremes in regard to this wonderful short novel, I thought it only fair to add my 2 or 3 cents worth. Like the others here I read UBAI in college, and it served as a opening door to another country of literature. Coover, along with DeLillo and Pynchon, is one of of our late 20th century masters taking, fiction into new realms, and exposing us to alternate ways of viewing our environment and personal relationships. Waugh creates an ordered universe that spins out of his control, moving in directions he never intended. From this, his whole (real) world falls apart; his fantasy world destroys what little relationship he has reality . J. Henry Waugh (read Jahweh) is a flawed God with a (now) flawed creation. This is a wonderful book, but not near as good as his masterpiece, The Origin of the Bruinists, which predicted modern day apocalyptic religious cults and the manipulation of media. Unfortunately this book is now out of print.

Coover's UBAI (as many people refer to it) is a definitive postmodern take on the game. Only Don DeLillo's End Zone comes close in portraying the failure of identity through sportsmanship. Whether the protagonist (whose name recalls J. Alfred Prufock) has found in his made-up game a metaphor for an empty life, or shows himself a schizophrenic through it, is left for the reader to decide. It would be a truism to say that Coover deconstructs the national pastime in this novel; more to the point, he locates the pressure points of a culture's emptiness, replaced with the illusion of meaning through identifying with nonreality. This is not an anti-baseball novel--it could be called the ultimate tribute to the game's addictiveness, and as such it pays tribute to the addictive nature of American leisure activities, used to blank out a hectic, often brutal way of life. How baseball became postmodern--through cable TV dissemination, free agency, and the Oprah-ization of masculinity (Mark McGwire's tearful press conference this fall)--is anticipated in Coover's funny, finally tragic book. Strongly recommended to serious readers.

This book did something that science fiction is often claimed to do, but seldom does: It accurately predicted future developments in human life. Its protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, is an eccentric hobbyist: an accountant who so deeply loves statistics, especially the statistics of baseball, that he has invented an entire fictional baseball league to compute statistics for, and a world to hold it. At the start of the novel, one of the rising young stars of his world is the victim of an improbable accident (which of course was included in Henry's tables!), and Henry is deeply shaken by the event. The reader watches as his life falls apart and as he reshapes his fictional world to reflect his concerns. Now that we have role-playing games and Internet personae, this kind of obsession is familiar to all of us; but it took an unusual kind of insight to portray it with brilliant accuracy years before Dungeons and Dragons was a gleam in Gary Gygax's eyes.