Roving Eye is the Book Review’s essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books.
Picture it: a spring day, baseball players in the eternal sun. A rookie, Damon Rutherford, is pitching a perfect game. But don’t just imagine it, live it: the screaming fans, the hot dogs, the beautiful athletes in their primes. The pitcher rears back to throw — time dilates.
And the scene distorts. A late-middle-aged man, an accountant, stands over his kitchen table late at night. He holds dice that will determine the outcome of his homemade tabletop baseball game. Overcome by unfortunate bodily needs, he runs out for pastrami and beer, then makes a trip to the toilet before returning for the final roll.
Catharsis. A perfect game. No hits, no walks, no errors. One of the rarest feats in baseball, achieved entirely inside a lonely bean counter’s apartment.
This is the opening of Robert Coover’s persistently prescient 1968 novel THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP. (New York Review Books, 242 pp., paperback, $18.95). Coover, a sometimes difficult, always engaging writer, published more than 20 books before he died in 2024. At Brown University in the 1990s, he taught one of the first courses on electronic and hypertext literature, though one can trace his interest in branching narrative pathways back to early stories like “The Babysitter,” from his 1969 collection “Pricksongs & Descants.”
Coover is perhaps best known for his novel “The Public Burning” (1977), a rollicking account of the Rosenberg trial told partly from the perspective of Richard Nixon. He continued to write cutting-edge fiction into his 90s, but “The Universal Baseball Association,” his recently reissued second book, remains my favorite.
The mastermind of the U.B.A. is J. Henry Waugh, whose monomaniacal obsession unites Coover’s career-long preoccupations: sex, religion, systems, the American mythos. The novel, which precedes Dungeons & Dragons by several years, offers an intense depiction of stochastic storytelling, the kind of participatory, chance-driven narrative that role-playing games, first on paper and then on screens, would eventually make commonplace. Eight short chapters produce a seemingly endless Borgesian labyrinth. As Wilfrid Sheed wrote in his 1968 New York Times review, to not “read it because you don’t like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don’t like boarding houses.”
Indeed, to Henry, the Association is more exciting, more real, than the major-league contests it simulates. “Nothing like it, really,” we’re told at one point. “Not the actual game so much — to tell the truth, real baseball bored him.”
Fantasy sports were little known when Coover wrote “The Universal Baseball Association,” but he brilliantly captures their distortion of the underlying games. I’m a fantasy player, and I often find myself rooting for a byzantine series of outcomes that are disconnected from a team’s actual performance: A specific linebacker needs to make a tackle, the cleanup hitter must fail to win the game so his teammate can have another chance to bat. (I refuse to play fantasy basketball; the sport is too beautiful to alter.)
The increasingly overwhelming prevalence of online gambling — in sports, in politics, in life — has further separated gameplay from reality, creating a litany of myopic viewers. That Coover saw all this coming is a bit like David Foster Wallace predicting the dysmorphic anxieties of presenting oneself online in “Infinite Jest.”
While invented, the players of the U.B.A. are not just the abstract integers of sabermetricians; they’re characters invested with personalities by both the game and its creator. “Call Player A ‘Sycamore Flynn’ or ‘Melbourne Trench’ and something starts to happen,” Henry explains. “He shrinks or grows, stretches out or puts on muscle. Sprays singles to all fields or belts them over the wall.”
These athletes have backgrounds, families. Damon, the player who records the perfect game, remaps history with his achievement. His imaginary father, Brock, was a great pitcher decades earlier, but those illustrious times “seemed now like the foundling days” of the league. Henry decides to henceforth call that period the Brock Rutherford Era. “Damon was not only creating the future,” Henry notes, “he was doing something to the past too.”
In this pursuit of narrative, Henry is the embodiment of a novelist. He scavenges inspiration from his banal life (his job is tolerable only when he can secretly play his homemade horse-racing game) and tracks the happenings of the league in long journalistic notebooks that never reveal the game’s dice-rolling mechanics. Henry is even aware of the shift in his lyricism over the years — his youthful, energetic prose is reactivated by Damon’s win.
Coover’s excellent stylistic rendering allows for near-constant slippage between Henry’s real and fantasy worlds. At one point, “hunched-up cars pushed through the streets like angry defeated ballplayers jockeying through crowds on their way to the showers.” This invasion of games into life is often called the Tetris Effect, which I know all too well. After too much online chess, I move through the world like a bishop. Too much Balatro and everything in my bedroom is a playing card.
Henry’s monomania can be uncomfortably pervasive, spawning flitting hallucinations across the scrim of his consciousness. Sandy Shaw, a onetime pitcher, writes countless ditties that pepper the text and sometimes slip out of Henry’s mouth; one particularly unpleasant song tells the story of a rape. (Like much of Coover’s oeuvre, this book is hyper-libidinous, reflecting Henry’s perceptions of his players’ machismo.) When Henry has sex with a neighborhood friend, Hettie, he tells her to call him Damon.
The abbreviation of Henry’s full name, JHWh, is a conscious echo of YHWH, the Hebrew name for God, and the book teems with religious symbolism: Ball stadiums, Coover writes, are the “real American holy places.” But because Henry has created a clockwork universe, a procedural generator whose rules are fixed, theological intervention is impossible. The dice control everything from off-season sports to a complex system of politics — all of which is highly entertaining to read.
But the dice can also cause tragedy. In one indelible scene, a freak sequence of rolls brings out the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart, which details the unlikeliest (and unluckiest) scenarios. Henry can’t accept what he sees, and what he’s done to his favorite player. But to cheat the rules of the game would be to render the whole thing meaningless. His hands tremble. Disaster has struck.
After a challenging smear of drunken grief, the second half of the book amps up the uncanniness, bordering on horror at times, particularly when Henry’s only friend, the hapless Lou, tries to join the game. To explain obsession always ruins its charm, and Henry, Patient Zero of the male loneliness epidemic, loathes having to open himself up.
Coover was onto something here. People still love simulators of all stripes. They build imagined cities and design virtual islands and theme parks. Their Sims get married, have children, live happy lives. This actuarial impulse provides solace and — no small irony — a sense of community. We shut ourselves in to control new worlds.
As Henry destabilizes in the wake of the crisis, his Association becomes totalizing. Even in fantasy, darkness serves a purpose, giving new meaning, new narrative. A hundred years later, the players of the U.B.A. re-enact the tragedy, now a foundational parable, at the start of every season. That done, another spring can come: Baseball’s on.
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