The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.,
J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
The author: Robert Coover, new introduction by Ben Marcus
The details: NYRB Classics, 264 pages, $18.95, originally released in 1968; newest re-release on March 17, ‘26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less:
An efficiently written collection of essays by Cal-Berkeley history professor David M. Henkin, launched into the universe under the title “Out of the Ballpark: How To Think About Baseball,” (Oxford University Press, $18.99, 152 pages, released March 16, ’26) dedicates about a dozen chapters on enlightened questioning of philosophical and cultural issues surrounding the game. Among other things — its obsession with statistics quantifying reality.
“The division between scientific and literary, quantitative and verbal, or left-brain and right-brain approaches to baseball are misleading,” Henkin declares. “They bear some resemblance to the inaccurate portrait peddled by recent Hollywood movies of baseball talent evaluators, which pits the number crunchers and bean counters against scouts who can hear the break of a curveball with their eyes closed and can foretell a player’s prospects by instincts.” Hey, Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Billy Beane in the 2011 film “Moneyball” came out more than seven years after Michael Lewis’ “based on the true story” best-selling book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” Its publishers unflinching points out the book is “One of GQ’s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.” And “the most influential book on sports ever written” declared by none other than People Magazine. So that that for what it’s worth.
But go on, Professor Dave …
“Much as scouts have always combined intuitive judgment against statistical reckoning, the same writers and fans who revel in poetic description and conjure imagined worlds of play tend to be conversant with statistics and are aesthetically compelled by probability.”
Hmmm… Probably right there. Where does that lead?
“Robert Coover’s celebrated novel, ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.’ published three years before the founding of the SABR and the dawn of sabermetrics, brought into public view baseball’s twin obsessions with both literary imagination and strict bookkeeping. The novel’s protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, is an accountant. He is also a literary creator who spins elaborate stories behind closed doors about fictional baseball players but constrains those stories with statistics and probability by methodically and scrupulously using dice to simulate athletic competition.”
Henkin then has as a visual reference Figure 12.1, which may blow us away more than the Coover book reference.
How do you explain that? Henkin tries.
“Traditionalists may bemoan the distortions that this introduces to the fan experience, but in many respects fantasy baseball extends projects that have long been central to the sport: attending to long-term statistical trends, apportioning credit and blame to individual players in a team sport and enlisting the spectator as an active, if vicarious, participant in some else’s athletic performance. All of these projects entail acts of radical imagination … fantasy seems only appropriate … fantasy baseball gratifies the longstanding literary impulse in baseball culture to imagine alternative universes … Baseball as we know it is at core commercial entertainment and projections of worker value have always been part of its discourse and spectacle … baseball has offered many people in various societies a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order and contingency in a modern world. And to the extent that baseball matters, that would be the reason why.”
Why, why, why … and, no, that’s not a reference to the left-fielder in the Abbott and Costello routine.
For those universally unfamiliar with Coover’s coveted and critically held book, you’ve been asked to invest in it during its latest incarnation as part of the New York Review Books’ Classic series “dedicated to publishing an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction from different eras and times and of various sorts.”
To reinforce the book’s classical worthiness, the New York Times Book Review section did a piece last March on this re-release, noting that Coover, “a sometimes difficult, always engaging writer” who published more than 20 books before he died in 2024, indeed saw the bizarre proliferation of Fantasy/Rotisserie Baseball expand to online gambling and insta-betting, but he somehow captured its distorting effect on the human mind long before all this technological craziness.
If you excavate the book’s original review in the New York Times review from July of 1968, writer Wilfrid Sheed gives the first glimpse of how Coover’s main character has the initials JHWH — a shorthand for Jahweh, which in the Hebrew Bible is the creator and supreme being. Sheed explained back then:
“Baseball and theology might seem to make strange bedfellows. But like a medieval schoolman who could make theology out of just about anything, Robert Coover has spliced the two together and produced a species of baseball scripture. His God is a lonely middle-aged accountant who has devised a dice-game that approximates the probabilities of baseball. That is all. Upon the void he projects the laws of chance, the percentages, what managers call, “the book.” … Waugh talks to himself in different voices as he plays, and these voices become independent people. God turns schizoid, giving up bits of himself that his creatures may live, and also that they may interest him.”
When new editions kept returning into the publishing world — in 2011, it was from a company called Overlook Press, a New York Times book review essay by Matt Weiland about the sport’s best literature of all time included Coover’s piece, in light of how a new Chad Harbaugh baseball novel, “The Art of Fielding,” was being sized up as the genre’s latest tour de force.
Weiland even referenced Kerouac:
“Right from the start the book nearly matches ‘On the Road’ for sheer electricity . . . Coover made baseball on the page seem three-dimensional, exulting in what he called the game’s ‘almost perfect balance between offense and defense.’ He captured what Philip Roth, in a 1973 New York Times essay on baseball, called ‘its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its ‘characters,’ its peculiarly hypnotic tedium’. . . The genius of the novel is in how Coover revels in the sun-bright vitality of the world Waugh has created, full of drink and lust and dirty limericks and doubles down the line – and yet brings Waugh face to face with its darkest truths.”
The Paris Review, in 2017, had its own take on the “oft-forgotten” baseball novel but declared, at that point in time, “the book is more relevant now than ever before. … The magic (and horror) of Coover’s novel is in how deeply Henry’s game envelopes him,” and there is little transition when Coover goes from Henry to the players Henry created.
“Henry’s fake baseball world and those early fantasy-sports board games elicited that pure exuberance far better than today’s money-focused smartphone contests,” the Review adds.
John Thorn referenced Coover’s book in his own 2006 New York Times essay about the game’s literary impact. This was five years before he assumed the title of Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball.
“What Coover may have viewed as a retreat to the womb we today, with our play space diminished from a ball field to a computer screen, call fantasy baseball. In his version of what has transformed a pastime into an obsession, the players generate statistics, a long season, a storybook finish, a game within a game, and a world within a world. Today, millions of desktop magnates preside over teams of their own construction — the statistics are what matter, no humans need apply. In its dark, unreal loneliness Coover’s baseball novel is, for 21st-century readers of fiction, the heights, or depths, of realism. He cuts deep into the cake.”
This is a book with its own Wikipedia page, its own Baseball-Reference BR Bullpen post, its own GoodReads page, and its own Encyclopedia Britannica entry.
In 2002, “The Universal Baseball Association Inc.” was given the No. 61 spot in a Sports Illustrated story declaring the 100 top sports books of all time — not just baseball, and another reason for a re-issue.
In 2021, Goodreads reviewers rated it amidst the “10 Greatest Baseball Novels of All Time,” and a current Goodreads list has it still tracking at No. 9.
It can feel like a roll the dice as to which printed version of “The Universal Baseball Association” to pick up and read these days — the newest one is just as swell as the others since it retains the originally muddy typeface. This also has its own cover artwork to distinguish it and give it a place in this publishing era — it has what look like dice created out of sugar cubes, each deteriorating at their own pace.
Because, as many of us may suspect that life itself is a dice throw, a game of craps, it’s how you approach your own Chart of Extraordinary Occurrences that trigger stress impulses in our heads. Whether it’s 1-1-1 or 6-6-6, we’re aren’t literally going to die from it. Right?
What is fate? What is free will?
Is it OK to create escapism — a religion of baseball — from a chaotic reality? Can it then be bound up and preserved for future generations?
Just give yourself some grace if, at first it seems disorientating, unsettling, confusing and just makes you uncomfortable and want to put it down, stay with it. Remember this is framed as a satire/black comedy by most reviewers.
For context, it landed a year before the Baseball Encyclopedia came out to give everyone access to anyone who ever set foot on an MLB field. Fantasy baseball games that competed for attention and imagination go back to the 1930s, when Clifford Van Beek designed a board game called National Pastime, which contained customized baseball cards of player that took life upon a dice roll. More kids geeked out over APBA — the American Professional Baseball Association — when it came out in 1951. Again, dice included. The Strat-O-Matic board game emerged in the late 1950s, hit retail stores in 1961, and — maybe because of Coover’s book, maybe because of SABR launch, maybe because it saw a new future — supersized itself with an advanced strategy version in 1971.
But in those cases, the user had existing stats based on real players.
Coover had a new spin, an almost sinister plan, to exploit.
With Coover’s UBA, Inc., it’s uneasy following along how a grown man deteriorates into some kind of mental illness spiral as his game gets too real for him. The device Coover uses to jump back and forth between describing Henry and his work/life friends and then dropping the names of the players he creates for his rosters can be unnerving.
Even his work pal, Lou Engel, who looks out for his well being at the Offices of Dunkelmann, Zauber & Ziffenblatt, tries to hang in there with him and allows himself to come to Henry’s apartment to give the game a try amidst the beer cans and pastrami sandwiches. Turns out, it’s not Lou’s thing. He’d rather escape his own reality at a movie theater.
You have to grasp that fact that “real baseball bored” Henry. He could get his head around patterns, data, strategy vs. luck. Making up his own names that “gave the league its sense of fulfillment and failure and emotion.” He would admit that a real game’s scorecard “were enough … I didn’t need the games.” The dice and Henry’s charts and journalistic documentary were only “the mechanics to the drama, not the drama itself.” Henry understood in his job of accounting, as well as in this fantasy baseball world, without numbers or measurements, there would be no recording of history. And once in a while, Henry would even give a glimpse of real history — a reference on page 189, for example, to the death of Jim Creighton in 1892 (see a review of a book about that circumstance).
Now it’s got us daydreaming. Imagine J. Henry Waugh, a baseball Walter Mitty, portrayed in a Hollywood film — whether or not Professor Dave might object. If not Anthony Perkins reprising “Psycho,” there’s Robert De Niro from any one of three rolls — Gil Renard from “The Fan,” Max Cady in “Cape Fear,” or Rupert Pupkin from “The King of Comedy” We won’t even go as far as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” In the hands a Wes Anderson, we’d be better entertained with a Jason Schwartzman-Bill Murray pairing of Henry and Lou. Then we’d know it was OK to laugh at very dark places (and it would be visually amazing).
It’s not out of the question to just get out an iPhone and make your own movie version.
Admittedly, it took us a couple of stars and stops to get into the murky maneuvering of Coover’s parallel lanes of fiction to get into the flow and out of the confusion. We eventually made it safely to the end — and then had our equilibrium blown again. We accepted the fact that, even on page 125, Coover gives us the insight that Henry was “thinking that this was sure a helluva thing for a grown man to be doing at dawn on a working day.” It could also feel like it was a reflection of “a life misused, an old man playing with a child’s toy; he felt somehow like an adolescent caught masterbating.”
In the new introduction by New York author Ben Marcus, justifying this latest release reflects on Coover’s recent passing and how “Coover could execute a perfect baseball story, sound every expected note — then use that perfection to detonate the form from within. …He showed he had literary genres down cold, which is possibly why he could trigger their collapse with such disruptive invention and glee …
“(Here) baseball is a fiction inside of fiction, doubly unreal. Henry … is a master of ceremonies but he’s helpless to control what these ceremonies unleash … Coover is clear about which world matters more, not just to Henry but inside the ontology of the book. The prose overflows with energy in description of the imaginary games, channeling the ghosts of old radio announcers. The invented world is drenched in baseball’s weird poetry — the dying quails, the Baltimore chops, the runners left stranded. The real world gets a prisoner’s ration of neutral language, prose deliberately drained of blood. It’s a trap, of course …
“By the end, we watch imaginary characters conduct their own weird ceremonies in some distant future, well after Henry himself presumably died. They’re still playing out the consequences of an unfortunate roll of the dice, turning into myth, unable to escape the history of their career set in motion. The game, if it is a game, continues without the man who invented it.”
If only we could get audio of Rod Serling reading those paragraphs, then we’d know for sure we’d just entered “The Twilight Zone” of baseball lit.
How it goes in the scorebook:
Submitted for your approval: Classic truth telling and mind-messing.
Retro can be cool, we’ve discovered, when it’s not hung up so much on transactional nostalgia.
More to followup:
== The Universal Baseball Association is the name given to a YouTube.com channel that focuses on baseball dice games.
== Will Leitch has a review of the re-release for The Wall Street Journal.
== First-edition signed hardcover copy of Coover’s book can list for $359 at AbeBooks.com if so fanatically inclined. Or a $450 for rare softcover. Even a Mylar-wrapped dust jacket alone fetches $60 (and for $25, someone can create their own faux dust cover).
== The NYRB is open to suggestions ol books readers would like to see back in print, with a new contextual introduction. How about … “The Natural”? NYRB is already planning a reissue of Coover’s “The Orgin of Brunists,” last in paperback in 2015.
== A review of the book from Tabletop SportCast:
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