The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Summary: An accountant creates a fantasy baseball league that takes over his life.

Before modern fantasy baseball leagues. Before the invention of Sabremetrics to analyze every possible baseball statistic. In 1968, Robert Coover introduced us to J. Henry Waugh, sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball League. It is a league created in Waugh’s apartment. But no one else knows about it. He named the eight teams after early pro teams. He filled the rosters with players who he named, who took on lives of their own. Games were played by the role of three dice. Waugh had created an elaborate system for each possible dice combination.

As the book opens, the league is in its fifty-sixth (LVI) season of 84 games. But something is wrong, both show more with the league and with Henry. The league just doesn’t seem to have the same excitement. Yet it is taking over more and more of Henry’s life. His day job is as an accountant with a big accounting firm. Then he ran the league in the evening and weekends. His only social life is trips to the local dive bar, his friend Lou from work, and Hetty, his neighbor and “friend with benefits.” A local grocer delivers his food.

But it gets worse. Not only does he play the games, and keep records of all the statistics, promote rookies, and retire veterans. He also has allowed the players to occupy his mind with their lives–their off the field escapades and tragedies. There are long passages of imagined bar scenes with bawdy songs (including one with a rape). And as the league occupies more of his head space, his work suffers and his job is at risk. Sometimes, fantasy dialogue leaks out in real life conversation.

By Season LVI, star players have sons in the game. For example, Damon Rutherford is a rookie pitcher who looks like he will follow in the steps of his Hall of Fame Father Brock Rutherford. The book opens with him in the middle of pitching a perfect game. And Henry realizes that Damon hold the hope of a revitalized league. And then, in the next game it all changes with one roll of the dice that come up 1-1-1. That unlikely combination means a batter hit by a pitch that kills him. And who is at the plate when this unlucky role comes up? Damon Rutherford.

With that, it all spirals downward, for Henry and for the League. He even lets Lou help him with a game, letting him in on his secret obsession. It doesn’t go well. As his job hangs by a thread, he considers winding it all up and getting his life in order. But will he?

Robert Coover invents a character with an unusual fantasy obsession that holds up a mirror to our obsessions and addictions. With the advent of online sports betting, we hear more and more stories of those who have wrecked their lives and their families’ finances with their obsession. But Coover uncovers a more profound truth. What does Henry have to live for that is better than his personal fantasy league?

This is an adult book with adult language and sexual material, some of which may be triggering. But it also explores the adult obsessions and addictions with which we fill our lives when nothing greater and better does. It’s both fascinating and painful. But the life you save may be your own. show less

Chapter I hits the perfect pitch of fan excitement, play-by-play energy of a live pennant broadcast, and lightning-flash glimpses inside the heads of players at key points in the drama. I've not read a better account of a baseball game, whether in fiction or creative non-fiction. Coover captures the dynamics & personality of a live contest and wonderfully sets the stage for so much more than baseball, all in a breathless 29 pages.

Chapter VIII transforms this account into another language entirely, everything pivots from sports journalism to heady moral philosophy, even as it all stays, intact, though prismed from one experience to another. It is psychological, religio-metaphysical, existential. It casts in a harsh light the metafiction show more played out in the preceding seven chapters, and winds up almost an opening chapter to another, dystopian novel.

In between, Coover serves up a character study of a solitary but not necessarily lonely accountant at a turning point in his life. Whether Henry Waugh suffers a mid-life crisis or gains a renewed commitment to an authentic self, is a question left to the reader. Coover's prose is neat but never simpleminded; serious but lit up with a rake's wicked humour; and ultimately teasing in the way Waugh himself is tantalizingly there, and yet, what is imagined and what lies there on the page is not in the end so obvious.

Coover also offers extended puns; lyrics to imagined baseball ballads sounding as genuine and aged as crusty sea shanties; and a lively & true sense of dialogue.

And then, there is the UBA itself: doled out over the course of the novel, the rules and statistics, odds and principles predicated on baseball's unmatched statistical archive. Coover must have kept records as close and accurate as did Waugh in order to describe what little of the UBA he did. It is eerily similar to a game invented by Jack Kerouac as a teen and played through his adult life, including parallels in the number of teams in the league (8), fictional players and backgrounds, extensive context such as financial transactions and trades between fictional owners ... even the fact both Kerouac and Waugh played a fictional horseracing game on the side. (See the NYTimes article linked by the Wikipedia entry for Fantasy Baseball.) show less

The UBA is really a masterpiece. Coover is able to deftly blend exceptional writing, humor, a straight forwardly interesting plot, AND second order speculation about, among other things, the creative process and the nature of the cosmos.

If one were to peruse the reviews from 1968, when the novel was first published, one would find that the New York Times praises the book's metaphorical aspects (and suggests that it's baseball content is ultimately dispensable ) while Sports Illustrated takes the opposite angle (suggesting that UBA is a baseball book through and through... posh on those trying to read too much into it).

What makes the work truly great is that SI and the NYT are both essentially correct. UBA is a great baseball novel show more that also has a host of metaphysically interesting questions that can be found just below the surface level event; minimal digging required. show less

Fascinating novel about a man who invents a dice-based baseball simulator and manages it through dozens of fictional seasons. Conceptually very rich, and I don't think Coover always gets his due as a stylist: sentence for sentence, this is one of the most accomplished novels I've read in the last few years.

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An enduring classic for anyone who has every spent hours rolling the APBA dice (or Strat-O-Matic, etc.) Accountant J. Henry Waugh has become so immersed in the baseball simulation he has created that then when the unthinkable--an extremely rare play--occurs, well...let's just say it gets weird from that point. Truly brilliant and unique. I suppose this could be about any obsession, but there's really no obsession like a baseball simulation, is there? :-)

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.