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

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is a baseball-themed novel by Robert Coover (1932-2024), originally published in 1968 by Random House.

J. Henry Waugh is a meek accountant with a deep passion for playing a tabletop baseball game. The game, which is peopled by players invented by Waugh, is played by rolling dice which determine the outcome of imaginary baseball games. If Waugh is rather ineffectual in real life, with a boring accountant's job at which he is a small cog in a big office, and few human relationships, in his game he is a veritable God, with power of life and death over his players. Now in playing the league's 56th season - grandiosely written LVI in Roman numerals - there is a sense that the game has stalled and that Waugh is looking for a form of renewal. He tries to interest one of his few acquaintances in playing with him, in order to enrich the experience, but it does not work, as the friend fails to see the magic that enthralls Waugh. The game also seems stuck in the pre-integration era, another sign of its rather constricting character and of the narrow vision of a safe home it provides. But things begin to go seriously awry when Waugh becomes too closely attached to one of his players, Damon Rutherford (his name's similarity to Babe Ruth's is no coincidence) and as a result breaks the rules of the game to correct a bad outcome suffered by his favorite. Waugh studiously consigns all of the happenings of his league in The Book, which has by now reached forty volumes of detailed accounts of everything that has occurred in the fictional universe since Season I.

The novel takes place over seven days of one week, starting on a Tuesday and ending on "Black Monday". However, the final chapter indicates that the game has taken a life of its own and continues to be played long after the death of its creator.

While ostensibly a baseball novel, the book's themes go much deeper, as many critics have pointed out the relatively obvious allegories contained in the work, such as Waugh's initials JHW being a reminder of the biblical tetragram YHVH, or the seven days of his week being a parallel with the seven days over which the world was created in the Book of Genesis. The novel's inherent metafictional content, which is a meditation on the power of creation, has also made it a favorite of critics and scholars, and it is now considered one of the major American novels of its period. It has been constantly reprinted since its initial publication.

See also

• Rutherford Family

Further Reading

• Robert Coover: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Plume, Penguin Books, 1971 (originally published in 1968). ISBN 978-0452260306
• Michel Nareau: Double jeu: Baseball et littératures américaines, Le Quartanier, Montréal, QC, 2012, pp. 100-105, 158-171 and 256-259. ISBN 978-2-923400-91-4