The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

First published: 1968

Type of plot: Psychological study

Time of work: The present and the UBA years LVI and CLVII

Locale: A “major-league” American city, never specified

Principal Characters:

• J. Henry Waugh, the inventor and proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association
• Horace Zifferblatt, his employer and the owner of the accounting firm where Henry works
• Lou Engel, Henry’s friend and coworker
• Damon Rutherford, a promising rookie pitcher for the Pioneers
• Jock Casey, a rookie pitcher for the Knickerbockers
• Sycamore Flynn, the manager of the Knickerbockers

The Novel

The unsuspecting first-time reader of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. will find its first few pages confusing: A character named J. Henry Waugh, greatly excited, seems to be watching not simply an ordinary baseball game but a no-hit game in progress. Henry looks first at the sun, high over the ballpark, then at his watch, but the watch reads almost eleven o’clock, and any American reader knows that major-league baseball is not played in the morning. The confusion intensifies when Henry thinks that it may be a long night—night?—with the sun high over the park? During the seventh-inning stretch, Henry leaves his apartment and goes to the delicatessen downstairs to buy a sandwich. Henry must be watching the game on television, then.

The mystery is resolved soon, though, when it becomes clear that the game is being played only in Henry’s mind. The contest is indeed a game, one directed with dice according to a set of rules of Henry’s devising, and played by characters existing only in his imagination.

The richly colorful world of the Universal Baseball Association, known only to Henry, contrasts strongly with his humdrum existence as an accountant. Henry is a bachelor with numerous acquaintances but apparently only one friend—another accountant named Lou Engel. Yet there seems a fitness in Henry’s attraction to, even fanaticism about, baseball. It is overwhelmingly a game of record keeping: wins and losses, batting averages, earned-run averages, and all the other statistical paraphernalia by which the baseball fan measures out his life and admiration.

Henry prefers the world located in his apartment’s kitchen. He has invented not simply a game—he has created an entire eight-team league and played out fifty-five full seasons by the opening of the novel. The number of UBA seasons (always given in Roman numerals in the novel, for example, LVI) has caught up to the fifty-six-year-old Henry’s age, a fact which seems significant to him. For only part of his passion is the rolling out of the games themselves. He has recorded each game on a scorecard, maintained all the records and statistics, and even created biographies and personalities for each of the players on each club’s twenty-one-man roster. Just as players do in real life, Henry’s players grow old and retire, new ones arrive from the “minors” and succeed or fail. Players marry, have children, and go into business or politics after retirement.

After he completes each “season,” he records all the information (including prose resumes in a parody of sports-page style) in large record books, labeled the Official Archives; forty volumes line the walls of his kitchen.

As a result of this detailed subcreation, by far the most interesting action of the novel takes place in Henry’s mind. As the book opens, Damon Rutherford, son of a Hall-of-Famer and rookie pitcher for one of the clubs, has gone seven innings without giving up a hit. As Henry rolls the dice, his excitement and concentration grow—and Damon does indeed pitch a no-hit game, to Henry’s deep delight. His next day at Horace Zifferblatt’s accounting firm (although “real” in the world of the story) seems hazy and pale by comparison with the vivid and concrete game. Both Henry and the reader wait impatiently for the evening—and the next game—to come.

When Damon next pitches, he begins again to set his opponents down in order, and Henry is nearly frantic at the thought of two no-hit games back to back. He envisions a new era for the Universal Baseball Association—the “Damon Rutherford Era”— chronicled in the future archives of his league. The turning point arrives, however, when the three dice come up all ones. This roll takes the game out of the ordinary by sending Henry to a special “Stress Chart,” according to which unusual events may occur depending on the next roll. On that next roll, each die again comes up showing a single pip, referring Henry to the “Extraordinary Events Chart,” consulted perhaps only once a season. A third consecutive roll of 1-1-1 sends Henry to the fateful line: The batter has been killed by a pitched ball, and the batter is Damon Rutherford.

The event has as heavy an impact on Henry as would the death of a son. He becomes depressed, unable to function either in the real or in his imaginary world. He provokes his employer and endangers his job despite the efforts of his friend Lou Engel to help him, and he is frightened by the depth of his involvement in his fantasy world. As the novel moves toward its conclusion, he invites Lou to play the game with him. Perhaps he hopes by sharing the fantasy to reduce it to manageable proportions, to make it simply another game, like chess or Monopoly.

The plan fails. To Lou the UBA is only a game: In a sense, Lou “demythologizes” it. Henry is angered rather than supported by Lou’s inability to enter the imaginary world. After a short and sharp argument, Lou departs, and with him departs Henry’s last chance for sanity. He is last seen planning for a future that will allow him to do nothing but play his game.

In a moving final chapter, the reader is again in the fiction within a fiction—the Universal Baseball Association—but a league darkly changed. It is season CLVII: one hundred seasons and thousands of games later. The players are fearfully beginning an annual ritual that re-creates the death of Damon Rutherford, perhaps actually sacrificing a promising young player to the god of the game—a god who sits in a kitchen he no longer notices, compulsively rolling dice.

The Characters

J. Henry Waugh is as tormented a character as one could find in a Russian novel; he stands at the novel’s center: Action is seen either through his eyes or within his mind. The people he meets in the “real” world have a certain vitality of their own: his boss Zifferblatt, his friend Lou, Hettie (a B-girl who appears in several scenes). Yet overwhelmingly, the characters of interest are the baseball players. Because the game is constantly on Henry’s mind, he tends to see the real world through the filter of his game.

For example, he sees everything in terms of names. While Henry is riding on a bus passing a bus stop, the word “whistlestop” occurs to him, and he has invented a new character, Whistlestop Busby, a second baseman.

The two pivotal baseball players are Damon Rutherford, a young man of great reserve and confidence, and Jock Casey, a rookie like Damon, but one whom fate will cast as a villain rather than as a hero. Henry’s hatred for this dice-created phantom grows until, for the first time in the novel, he cheats: He arranges the dice to have Casey killed in retribution. As Henry’s grip on reality weakens, it is clear that Jock and Damon are becoming less and less individuals and more and more archetypal figures from myth: Damon, like Baldur in Norse mythology, a dying god, and Casey, the scheming Loki arranging his death.

Critical Context

Robert Coover’s first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), was highly enough regarded to win the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. The critical (and popular) acclaim for The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. showed that Coover was not a writer with only one story to tell but one who followed his first success with a greater one.

To shorten the novel’s title to The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., as is usually done, misplaces its intention: This is a story about J. Henry Waugh, a man who discovers the delights and the dangers of Fancy.

Bibliography

Basbanes, Nicholas, A. “The Traditionalist and the Revolutionary.” Biblio (September, 1998): 10. An interesting profile of Penelope Fitzgerald and Robert Coover that offers insight into the different ways each approaches writing. Although Basbanes does not directly discuss Coover’s novel, the essay does reveal Coover’s thoughts on fiction writing, a subject that has a bearing on The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, and Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. An astute comparative analysis of the differences and similarities between the works of these three authors. The discussion of Coover is particularly perceptive. A bibliography is included for further reading.

Miguel-Alfonso, Ricardo. “Mimesis and Self-Consciousness in Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37 (Winter, 1996): 92-107. Miguel-Alfonso argues, using a baseball motif, that Coover’s novel deals with interactions between the various components of fictional writing. He analyzes Coover’s control of the story, referentiality, the interplay between writer and reader, and other story elements.

Ott, Bill. Review of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover. Booklist 95 (September 1, 1998): 168. A brief but favorable review which addresses the issue of free will in Coover’s novel.