The Universal Baseball Association

"This is my favourite of all baseball books, and I think it is one of the great novels of its period. Coover is one of the most interesting but ignored novelists of that time. He was writing what we now call metafiction in the sixties, alongside people like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. What I love about the book is the idea of someone who is a rather nondescript and average person using baseball as a way of elevating himself into being the creator of a universe. He has invented a simulation game of baseball – these existed in the days before fantasy sport, which is a different thing. Fantasy sport is more or less asset-stripping the statistics of the game. But simulation games exist because baseball is the best sport for them, as it is so well documented statistically. The way they generally work is on probabilities out of a thousand, so in some games you would roll three dice to get a three-digit number – a one in a thousand probability – and you would then use the number charts to get a result which would reflect the baseball statistics, and that is what happens in the game. Henry Waugh [the protagonist] has his own teams and players, and when the son of one of the great players of all time comes along as an exciting rookie, Henry rolls his dice. Then something bad happens. And at that point, as the creator of the universe, he is forced to make a decision. But I don’t want to give it all away. Yes. He goes to bars every night when he is not playing his baseball game. He has a very depressing relationship with a woman whom we might describe as a floozy, and he lives within his baseball fantasy. The full title of the book is The Universal Baseball Association Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop – and J Henry Waugh anagrams into “Jahweh”, which of course is the Hebrew unspeakable name for god. I went back and looked at the original review of the book in The New York Times , by Wilfrid Sheed who is a very good writer himself. He said, “Not to read this because you don’t like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don’t like boarding houses. Baseball provides as good a frame for dramatic encounter as any. The bat and ball are excuses. Baseball also involves a real subculture, a tradition, a political history that were, in some sense, preordained, … That the players and fans might be shadows in the mind of a Crazy Accountant up there is not only believable but curiously attractive.” I think he is absolutely right, and the idea of God as a crazy accountant makes as much sense as any other. This book most definitely deserves to be read even if you are not a big fan of baseball. There is a mythic element to baseball because in effect it is a pursuit of dreams, but not just the dreams of the player. You can look at it almost as a science-fiction novel, but it is prescient in the sense that fantasy baseball has taken over the sports fans’ universe. He is a wonderful writer in complete control of what he is doing."