The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

Henry hadn't been so excited in weeks. Months. That was the way it was, some days seemed to pass almost without being seen, games lived through, decisions made, averages  rising or dipping, and all of it happening in a kind of fog, until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association, and everybody would suddenly wake up and wonder at the time that had got by them, go back to the box scores, try to find out what had happened. During those dull-minded stretches, even a home run was nothing more than an HR penned into the box score; sure, there was a fence and a ball sailing over it, but Henry didn't see them--oh, he heard the shouting of the faithful, yes, they stayed with it, they had to, but to him it was just a distant echo, static that let you know it was still going on. But then, contrarily, when someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on, why even a pop-up to the pitcher took on excitement, a certain dimension, color.

Henry, the namesake "Prop" of Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., is the world's first fantasy baseball player--and I do mean fantasy. He spends all of his spare time simulating baseball games with three dice and a few dozen charts that describe what each roll means. With these simple tools, he's able to reproduce whatever can happen on a baseball field, from pop flies to sac bunts to home runs to rarer events like fights and injuries. Henry simulates whole seasons at a clip, pitting teams with names like the Pastimers against the Haymakers and the Beaneaters, and players with names like "Sycamore Flynn" and "Melbourne Trench." At this speed, the league takes on a history, and a lore, of its own, Henry watches fifty years of baseball history go by at a clip. As the league grows in imaginative size, so it takes over Henry's life, leaving him on thin ice at his accounting job. When a new star is in the midst of a breakout season, the energy and enthusiasm it provides gives Henry even a kind of sexual prowess at the local bar; but the league's slumps are Henry's slumps.

Fantasy baseball is the obvious touchpoint for The Universal Baseball Association, but there are others that make more sense. What Henry does is actually closer to a one-man roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, combining personal modifiers and the power of chance. Like D&D, Henry's game is inertly mathematical until enlivened with the power of imagination, and imagination is where Henry thrives. At the beginning of the season depicted in The Universal Baseball Season, an up-and-coming pitcher named Damon Rutherford has thrown a perfect game at the onset of a season that promises to be legendary. The novel "drops in" to the perspective of the players themselves, caught up as Henry is in the larger narrative of Rutherford's rise and the magical tension of the games. (A stunning amount of the novel is just Coover describing, grippingly, the events of a baseball game.) I would suggest that what Henry really is is a writer, and that the book is a kind of metacommentary on the relationship between the novelist and the world he creates.

The crisis of the book is set off when a stray roll sets off the "Extraordinary Occurrences" chart--and an errant pitch hits and kills Damon, the star pitcher. The death is a seismic event in both the Association's life and Henry's, provoking existential questions. To what extent is Henry responsible for Damon's death? He is, after all, the one who made the chart. And what can he do about it? Is it permissible for him to "load the dice" and punish Jock Casey, the supercilious young pitcher who felled the young prince? Or is the crisis an empty one, the game all vanity, and something that should be chucked in the garbage bin entirely? Why is it that we got so invested in these fictional worlds? After all, aren't I, the reader, a little choked up when I read about Damon's father, the league legend Brock Rutherford, climbing down from the stands to get to the body of his son lying at the plate? In a Muriel Spark sense, Henry is both author and God, pushing his inventions around and hiding his hand.

In fact, I want to suggest one more touchpoint: the story in Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum about a computer simulation of life in which the relationship between the simulated beings and their programmers is a perfect analog of that of us and God, a relationship with an impermeable barrier at its heart. The Universal in Universal Baseball Association is pointedly chosen; to these players, the diamond is the entire world. Henry suggests the weirdness this produces early on when he describes the players as organizing themselves into political-type "parties," which actually might be more like sects. The culmination of this aspect of the novel is the bravura final section, and "in-universe" short story about a future generation of the Association where players ritualistically reenact the death of Damon Rutherford, now a kind of quasi-religious figure. It's unclear whether the player representing Damon is actually at risk of being killed; it's unclear whether anyone actually plays baseball anymore. It's totally strange, totally unexpected, and cranks the strangeness level of the novel nearly past what it can bear. But fascinatingly, it suggests that the players have a life of their own, and if God--Henry--is around, he's chosen not to make himself known.