Rutherford Family

Brock and Damon Rutherford are characters in a baseball novel by Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Waugh is a mild-mannered accountant who fills his free time with a fictional baseball game played with paper and dice. The game is played in a superficially similar manner to games such as APBA, Strat O Matic and Replay Baseball, in the sense that players make hits, runs, and outs, depending on the rolls of dice and readings from charts. However, unlike these simulations of real baseball, Waugh's game is completely fictional: the players, franchises, umpires, game mechanics, and league history are a complete creation of Waugh's imagination. Waugh's game contains rules for player aging, and even player retirements and deaths. The Rutherford family are fictional players that feature prominently in the novel, Brock Rutherford as a retired great from the early days of Waugh's league, and Damon as Brock's son, who emerges as a young player and is tragically felled during the novel with dramatic consequences.