What I Am Reading: "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover

Robert Coover's book about baseball (not to be confused with Ry Cooder's song about baseball) is actually a book about a different game. J. Henry Waugh is a middle-aged accountant by day; but by night he runs a massively elaborate tabletop baseball simulator, using dice to determine the outcome of every pitch of every game. He not only maintains detailed statistics on all matches, players, and the eight teams in his league; but over the course of the seasons (he is on season 56 as the book starts) he charts their retirements, post-baseball careers, involvement in Universal Baseball Association league coaching and politics, and deaths. He produces not only the records, but the journalism and other cultural ephemera that surround baseball.

As you can guess, Waugh is a bit of an obsessive, though this was probably more remarkable when the book was published in 1968 compared to our post-D&D era. He lives solely for his game; when picking up women, he thinks of himself as one of his young-buck players. As the book gets going, his promising season is derailed when an unlucky series of dice rolls leads to a rising star pitcher, Damon Rutherford, son of previous all-time great Brock Rutherford, being killed by a bean ball. After this, Waugh, already a mediocre performer at his accounting firm, goes downhill. As he becomes disillusioned with the thing that his life is centered around, fantasy and reality blur together. He misses work, sees bar patrons as his players (admittedly it is unclear if this happened before the downhill slide), and considers giving up on the Universal Baseball Association altogether. He might look to more of a social life, or to the next game; in addition to one-off games he runs (usually detailing the subsequent careers in other sports of his former players), he has also come up with a large-scale complex version of Monopoly, or brainstormed a Space Race league.

Moving somewhat erratically, he decides to bring his friend Lou in on the game, thinking that this may be the revitalization he needs. This ends up as a disaster: Lou, not enthused by the game at first, gets into it as he blunders his way to absurd victory, but brings things to a crashing halt when he ruins a portion of the current season's records. This, along with Waugh's some-time girlfriend's earlier mockery upon learning about the game, leads Waugh to rock bottom. The last thing he does before going to sleep that night is finish their game by arranging the dice to again activate the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart, and hit Jock Casey, the pitcher who had killed Damon, with a bean ball of his own, killing him as well.

This isn't the end for Waugh or the Universal Baseball Association though; as the idea of new ephemera, a history of the league by Barney Bancroft, Damon's coach (and a former player) rejuvenates him. The season with two tragic deaths has led to a paradigm shift. He quits his miserable job and arranges for an alternate source of income as he gets to work. In the book's final chapter, the scene shifts to season 157. Here, the players (as you might imagine, these appear sometimes as characters in their imagined scenes, sometimes interspersed with Waugh's activity) are celebrating Damonsday, the opening of the season. In the intervening time, the sport has taken on the aspect of a religion, with Damonites and Caseyites and their varying schismatics; Bancroft had won the election for League president and subsequently been assassinated. The fictional players, in spite of some of their doubts, find spiritual fulfillment from conceiving of the martyred Damon Rutherford. So Waugh, who skated close to the edge of being a sad-sack Willy Loman type, seems to have done alright, at least in my eyes.

As you can tell, this books leans heavily into the mythologizing of American baseball, as seen in countless movies starring Kevin Costner. Waugh is scrupulous about his play, the above incident aside, and lionizes his players as real people, with real days of glory. One former player, Sandy Shaw, writes countless songs, sad or happy, about his friends and colleagues and their days in the ballpark, and Waugh even sings them to people in moments of indiscretion. The players all have outdated, WASPy names like Lew Lydell and Sycamore Flynn, bringing to mind the same halcyon Honus Wagner type days mythologized in the childhood of baby boomers (I know that’s not a perfect chronology, but those would have been the stories of old-timers they heard when they were young). It invokes all that with a twist, Field of Dreams with players that never were. I suppose that that is what games, and novels, and games within novels, allow us to do.