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

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read this one before, long ago, and re-read it now with a purpose: to see if it’s a good fit for a class a friend and I are preparing on fandom and faith. This one certainly has both. Our protagonist – whose name may be a play on Yahweh – invents a fantasy baseball game and populates it not just with statistics but also personalities. When a character emerges as a great new hope for him, but is then killed through an unlikely and unlucky roll of the dice, he eventually reimagines him as a quasi-Christ figure, a necessary sacrifice for the league to continue. And since the league increasingly becomes his life, since he increasingly loses touch with reality, it’s a sacrifice to give his own life continued meaning.

Even a capsule summary like that gives a sense of the potential poignancy and black comedy that sit side by side. Henry craves connection and he craves meaning, but the modern world denies him. As an accountant, he’s drawn to the power of probability, of the capacity for numbers to give a skeleton of meaning. He needs more, though, and that’s where the stories and characters of his imagined world are born.

This is a classic of its time. That’s evident in part by the way it foreshadows a condition we see fairly often in the 21st Century. Most of us know someone caught up in – if not altogether lost in – an imagined online community. Most of us see some of that impulse in ourselves, whether through Facebook, fantasy sports, or just idly web-surfing.

In such a light, this novel takes on perhaps a new power than when it was written. It lets us see this contemporary phenomenon as it looked to someone with the capacity to imagine it before we could really experience it. In that way, I admire it maybe more than I did when I read it a quarter century ago, when it was already established as one of the works of the early 1970s with a chance at enduring.

At the same time, this is uncomfortably in love with its concept at a technical, narrative level. It’s not so much that it’s hard to read as it slips from fantasy to reality without warning, but rather that it isn’t that joyful a reading experience. Henry has a sense of these characters, and that sense comes to define him, but there isn’t quite enough meat in the stories of the Association itself. That is, much of what fascinates Henry is actually pretty tedious – and I say that as a fan of baseball and baseball literature.

I love the concept here; this is a high and memorable imaginative achievement. As I re-read it, though, I can’t imagine sharing it with students; I imagine most would be thrown by the method and bored by the details of the imagined world.

I wish this were a short story instead, and I imagine in such form that it would be as powerful as it is in novel form with the benefit of allowing Henry to emerge more fully from his imagined universe. As it is, this remains haunting and hysterical. Some of its writing technology hasn’t aged well, but there’s no mistaking it still as anything but an inspired look at madness, fandom, and the weight of religious faith.


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