The postmodern writer's 1968 baseball novel is strange and poignant—a work of fiction that ultimately argues for the vitality of fiction itself.
Hand-colored lithograph of an early baseball game seen from behind home plate, 1887. (VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)
An entry on the mothballed Web 1.0–vintage online “Baseball Games” encyclopedia dedicated to the “great American tradition” of dice baseball outlines the necessary equipment, and the basic rule set, in brief: “A pair of standard dice. A scoresheet and a pencil. A little imagination (the more the better). That’s all you need. Fun ensues.”
Robert Coover’s 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., may not be the Great American Baseball Novel, but it certainly qualifies as the Great American Dice-Baseball Novel. Its tragic hero is the titular J. Henry Waugh, a lonely, horny, half-mad, and middle-aged accountant living in New York City. Cursed with more than a little imagination, Waugh devotes his almost impossibly detailed interior life to the feats and internecine antics of the Universal Baseball Association, an entirely imaginary league. Waugh is its sole proprietor, player, and, in a meaningful sense, a kind of de facto God. He dreams up players, names them—preferring dusty, turn-of-the-last-century monikers like Rag Rooney, Sycamore Flynn, Hatrack Hines, and so on—and controls their fate using three dice and a complex series of probability charts, which Waugh himself has also devised. Fun, or something like it, ensues.
In the grand dice-baseball tradition, strikes, bunts, base hits, and out-of-the-park homers are all determined by the cast of a few dice. But for Waugh, the UBA is so much more. Over the course of 56 seasons, he has devised cults of personality around the players and developed lineages of ball-playing superstars. He has created whole teams (the Knickerbockers, the Bridegrooms, the Beaneaters, the Pioneers) and imagined political parties that draw in the owners and managers. As its name implies, the Universal Baseball Association is more than a mere made-up league—it is a whole cosmos. And J. Henry Waugh (say it three times fast and you might hear something like “Yahweh”) is its prime mover. He records each season’s outcome, along with imagined journalistic dispatches, theory, and dialogues between the players, in a series of 300-page ledgers called, with biblical reverence, “The Book.”
When he’s not in his apartment above a deli, dice-rolling through all-night matches while subsisting on beer and pastrami, Waugh totters down to a local bar and treats himself to belts of brandy. There, his fantasies persist. He recounts match outcomes to the disinterested barflies and, seemingly lost in his own mind, sings made-up folk songs about his various made-up players; he also aggressively flirts with another regular, Hettie, with crude baseball-related come-ons. The book’s opening passages find Waugh in a tremendous mood, “crystalline and impenetrable”—drunk both on booze and the thrills of a particularly exciting matchup, showcasing a hot-shot rookie pitcher named Damon Rutherford.
But Waugh’s ecstasy is short-lived. When the champion Rutherford makes his triumphant return to the plate, a rueful dice roll turns up triple ones. According to Waugh’s “Extraordinary Occurrences Chart,” this results in the rival pitcher, Jock Casey, wiring a fatal bean ball to the wunderkind’s head, killing him. “No one moved. All stared at home plate. Damon lay there, on his back, gazing up at a sun he could no longer see.” Waugh is distraught—but despite his empyrean purview over his universe, he is powerless to reverse the outcome. Waugh and his players, Coover writes, “were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice. That was how it was.”
Rutherford’s death has a destabilizing effect—not so much on the team or the league (though the reader is treated to the players’ extended funerary wailings). The primary casualty of this young would-be superstar’s demise is Waugh’s own sanity. As he attempts to dice-roll his way back into his own game’s good graces, he begins missing work, and meals, running afoul of his boss (the menacing Horace Zifferblatt), his fellow inebriates, and his only chum, a lummox named Lou.
The evolution of the league’s complexity, and its own vast mythopoeia, from idle diversion to unhinged mania to religious ecstasy offers a bughouse rumination on America’s own obsession with its national pastime, and with so-called sporting life in general. And Waugh’s ecstatic mania—familiar, perhaps, to any sports fan—teeters into a more formless craziness. His function as omnipotent proprietor-creator begins to seem increasingly pitiable: “Not once, in the Universal Baseball Association’s fifty-six long seasons of play, had its proprietor plunged so close to self-disgust, felt so much like giving it up, a life missed, an old man playing with a child’s toy; he felt somehow like an adolescent caught masturbating.” It is a feeling of total impotence that may again ring true to anyone deranged enough to surrender their own fate and fickle moods to external forces, by throwing in their lot with and root-root-rooting for the hometown team.
It is tempting, when reading The Universal Baseball Association in the present, to ascribe some soothsaying prescience to Coover. Though primitive versions of fantasy baseball games had emerged by the 1960s, they were squarely the domain of the most committed nerds—far from today’s multibillion-dollar industry and widespread cultural preoccupation. Waugh’s mathematicized life-world predates the predominance of sabermetrics, moneyball, pro sports’ contemporary capture by the spreads and the over-unders, and the general conquest of the burly athlete by the bespectacled bean-counting geek. (Tellingly, the Big Bad of Waugh’s imagined association is literally named “Jock.”)
In its modern version, “fantasy sports” offers little in the way of actual fantasy. Instead, it offers a sort-of game above the game, where the actual on-field action is statistically transmuted in the players’ minds, or by any number of proprietary fantasy-sports apps. Such games don’t offer much in the way of make-believe; they merely serve as a skein drawn over the live-viewing experience. One does not fantasize about their fantasy squad as they might fantasize about sex or a great big meal. But J. Henry Waugh does.
The Universal Baseball Association, likewise, is only trivially a novel about baseball or sports. The novel has more in common with the fantastical imaginariums of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino than Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, or Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly. Far from offering some meditative, pastoral escape, the Universal Baseball Association is unnecessarily stressful, unfolding both in the ever-clenching mind of its creator and in his dingy apartment festooned with empty beer cans, greasy pizza boxes, and piles of loose paper and scorecards.
The novel’s most substantive connection to “real baseball” is its understanding of America’s pastime as a kind of religious text. In a desultory confession to his buddy Lou, Waugh waxes on about his “funny idea that ball stadiums and not European churches were the real American holy places.” Eventually, he loses interest in the sport itself, realizing that the numbers, “the scorecards were enough.” Why serve as a mere congregant when he can devote himself to the Talmudic study of a box score?
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In time, Waugh lays down the dice and abandons his own league, too. But Coover keeps up. He blasts the reader a century into the UBA’s future. There, the players themselves take to muttering about the rumors of a now-truant God who once oversaw the league. In His absence, rival orders have emerged around the felled pitcher Damon Rutherford. The Damonites mark Damonsday annually; the centerpiece of their celebrations is a reenactment of that fateful showdown between Damon and pitcher Jock Casey, known as the “Parable of the Duel.” Other sects argue that “Damonism is a perversion and tyranny.” Some of this new crop of seemingly self-determined players hold fast to the rituals; others mull their meaninglessness, stewing in existential despair. “I don’t know if there’s really a record-keeper up there or not,” one such doubter confesses. “But even if there weren’t, I think we’d have to play the game as though there were.”
Rather than some farsighted prognostication about the state of fantasy sports or widespread cultural gamblification, Coover’s novel can read squarely as a product of its 1960s milieu. The Universal Baseball Association was published just a few years after an infamous Time cover story asked “Is God Dead?” and barely a year after Roland Barthes had declared the author kaput. Coover’s sometimes grandiose, always acutely self-reflexive concerns with the making of meaning exude the whiff of hippie-era dropout novels, head-shop philosophy grafted onto the ballpark. The novel also functions as a thesis statement for a generation of American postmodern metafictionists whose experiments with the novel’s form are themselves a kind of game-playing and world-building: a testing, flexing, and modification of hoary old rule sets.
Such concerns were a feature of Coover’s fiction. In the ’60s, the author rented a cabin in Canada, where he ate peanut butter and read the Bible from cover to cover. His first novel, 1966’s The Origin of the Brunists, traced the genesis of an apocalyptic death cult organized around the sole survivor of a Midwestern mining disaster. Coover’s best-known novel, 1977’s The Public Burning, rewrites the execution of Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a state-funded extravaganza staged in Times Square, meant to replenish the flagging American Cold War spirit through spectacle. (In that book, accused Soviet courtier Harry Gold is said to “amuse himself at night with a little parlor baseball game played with a deck of cards.”) When religious ritual fails, secular liturgies step in to pinch-hit. What matters is not so much the content as the structure of these sacraments. Coover’s fiction outlines the shape of these rituals: how the prosaic becomes heroic, how pageantry substitutes for religiosity, how the lives of everyday people are subsumed into the grander designs of ideology, politics, or faith.
As the novelist Ben Marcus notes in his introduction to the reissue of The Universal Baseball Association, Coover would become, in the early 1990s, an early and prominent proponent of networked, Web-based fiction. He taught the Hypertext Fiction Workshop at Brown University and took to the pages of The New York Times to declare the traditional print novel “dead as God.” There are echoes of The Universal Baseball Association not only in the Eschaton sequence of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest but in the speculative online fictions of the sportswriter Jon Bois, whose writing and absurdist video essays also grapple with games, play, and their role in American culture.
Alas, as Marcus also reminds us, Coover would later recant his interest in such emergent media as apostasy. In 2014, he published a sequel to The Origin of the Brunists that clocked in at over 1,000 heavy, bound printed pages. He published four more novels before his death in 2024. For all his previous embrace of the inchoate potential and exploratory bells-and-whistles of hypertext fiction and the various newfangled forms, Coover ultimately returned to the good old-fashioned novel, whose imaginative possibilities remained basically infinite, literal binding notwithstanding.
And in that very 1960s postmodern way, The Universal Baseball Association pitches these ideas back at the reader. After all, the nagging question that J. Henry Waugh’s dreamed-up league invites—both for those let in on his little secret and for readers of the novel itself—is: Why bother? Why get so totally wrapped up in the exploits of bogus ballplayers and their just-as- counterfeit dramas? After all, it’s just made up. And it surely follows that reading about such inanities can only be doubly inane. If the UBA’s mad, muttering proprietor is merely some nut, wound in the knots of his own imagination, then what does that say about those drawn into spending a dozen or so solid hours learning about him? What kind of nuts are they? And why do they bother?
As The Universal Baseball Association reminds us, the answer is obvious: Reading, like sports or any other kind of leisure, is as much about ritual as it is about the unmitigated, unembarrassed, half-crazy pleasure of the pursuit itself. The doing of the thing is the thing. To paraphrase one of the novel’s more metaphysically anguished sportsmen, left to mull the meaninglessness of a J. Henry Waugh–less universe, such a state may indeed be terrible. But it’s all there is.
John SemleyJohn Semley is a writer based in Philadelphia. His writing has also appeared in The Baffler, The New Republic, and The Guardian. He is the co-host of Slow Learners, a podcast about books.