The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968)

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, prop. / Robert Coover (1969)

“Read this book add a young kid. Being both a huge baseball fan and a huge fan of the Strat-O-Matic card based baseball game, I can only thank God that I stumbled across this book in my school library. For those reasons I absolutely loved this book and the despair and loneliness of the main character is something that resonated with me even as a young kid.” ( )

Bittersweet sometimes humorous story of a man obsessed with his solo baseball rpg -- dice rolls determine everything, as in many games --nowadays, in the post D&D world, this is normal, but in 1971 he was presented as slightly insane --he is obsessed with the game to the point that it is costing him his job and his social life. The game like many games started as a fairly simple concept --a baseball game vwith resuts of pitches etc. decided by dice rolls --but has expanded to include a wider background including political parties. ( )

One of my favorite books of all time. A book about an ordinary guy who lives a rich and very detailed fantasy life in a baseball game he has created (in pencil and paper, pre-computers and pre-internet). Contains some beautiful vignettes of early 1960's New York City, incidentally. J. Henry Waugh (the protagonist) is author-like, or godlike, in his devotion to his imagined world. ( )

A great baseball book, though I suppose it is only tangentially about baseball. The final chapter is pretty disturbing, as are many of the passages throughout the book when Henry seems to no longer be able to differentiate between real life and the one he's created. This book is somewhat a book of the times, with some of the stream of consciousness-hipster-beat kind of riffing that I'm not all that fond of, but overall an outstanding novel. ( )