[In Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association] Henry Waugh's game-world has been so completely internalized that it creates its own course and meaning, creates its own myths and rituals, entirely cut off from … established mythic traditions…. Henry Waugh's baseball game is so fertile in metaphorical significance that there is virtually no activity in his life upon which the game does not impinge. There is nothing the game cannot include. Henry Waugh is the only character in all of recent sports fiction who can bear the full weight of Eugen Fink's ontological definition of play: "The player experiences himself as the lord of the products of his imagination—because it is virtually unlimited, play is an eminent manifestation of human freedom." In The Universal Baseball Association imagination is so truly protean that it becomes an end in itself. The final vision of the novel is of a complete play-world, personalized and separated as myth, art, and religion. (p. 210)

For Henry Waugh, and for Robert Coover playing with his protagonist, baseball surely has the force of an idea. It is an abstraction to be played with and explored as the focus of Henry's imaginative universe. Real baseball always bored Henry. What initially attracted him to the game was "the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances…. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery." (pp. 210-11)

The remarkable richness and vitality of Henry Waugh's Association mark it as a self-enclosed world. Indeed, the ascription "Universal Baseball Association" forewarns the reader that nothing as petty or parochial as "American" or "National" is intended. The Association has its own metaphysics and must be seen as the product of a godlike creative act…. The Universal Baseball Association confronts the reader with a vision of play and reality as radically interdependent. In addition to the figure of Henry Waugh, who plays with the actors in his game-world, the reader is never allowed to forget for long that Robert Coover is playing with Henry Waugh, with numbers, with language, and with myth. Even the players in the Association play baseball and act out rituals. The playfulness of the book thus exists on several levels simultaneously and shatters the idea that reality must be played out against a fixed and stable background.

One of the most important aspects of the game—and a sure sign of Coover's delight in playing games—is the naming of players. The inspiration for a player's name often comes from a sign Henry happens to see, but any words that happen to catch Henry's attention are played with, possibly recombined, until the sound is right for a ballplayer's name. (pp. 211-12)

Because of its long tradition as the national pastime, and because of the accessibility of its records and statistics, baseball is a fine metaphor for history, process, and order. It is history and continuity which most fascinate Henry…. (p. 212)

[In Henry's game of Universal Baseball, the] game is played by tossing three dice; the numbers determine what happens on the playing field…. Every contingency has been accounted for; even the eventual demise of players is tabulated with the aid of Henry's actuarial tables. While Henry is the creator of his game, his power is limited by the rules and forms of the game itself. His only real choice—at least initially—is whether or not to actuate the game by throwing the dice. (pp. 212-13)

There would appear to be a strong measure of dispassionate logic about all this; the game contains within itself an order which seems unshakeable. If Henry himself were a dispassionate god, the history which he records would be as mechanical as the tossing of the dice. But Henry is not at all detached. (p. 213)

[Unless] Henry realizes that he and the game are part of the same stakes, that both he and the game are subject and object of play, he is destined for a severe blow, which comes swiftly enough in the death of Damon Rutherford.

The game-world has always had the apparent means for dealing with death but always in the abstract form of statistics; older, retired ballplayers are "sorted out" of the Association on the basis of Henry's actuarial tables. But death in the impalpable form of mere statistics is an evasion. The death of Damon Rutherford marks the introduction of something new and significant into the game-world and makes death, for the first time, a concrete reality. Henry is more deeply committed to Damon than any other player in the Association, and that personal involvement … makes him more vulnerable than a god-figure should be. (pp. 214-15)

The introduction of death into the game is eventually positive because it makes the game more profound; it projects the game, and Henry's conception of the game, into a more serious stature by bridging the gap between the game and external reality. More than any other recent novel, Coover's book directly challenges the reader's tendency to dichotomize play and seriousness, game and reality, by portraying a game-world which becomes increasingly integrative and whole. (p. 215)

The extent to which Damon's death reaches beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the Association is manifested in Henry's complete inability to function outside the play-world and the overwhelming influence which the Association begins to have on Henry's external relationships. (p. 216)

Above even Henry is the impersonal force of fate, physically represented by the dice but more interestingly conceived of as Robert Coover. The coincidence of Casey killing Damon precisely on Brock Rutherford Day is an authorial machination, a contrivance designed to point up the limitations of Henry's commitment to the dice. Henry himself begins to see that commitment as a sign of his own impotence. He vows revenge on Casey…. When play resumes, Casey's every move is unpredictable, some even contradict his manager's signals, but as if in defiance of Henry's will, everything Casey does is successful. (p. 217)

Henry sees his apparent loss of control as part of "the new and wearisome order" of the game. But the order of the game has not changed at all, only Henry's understanding of his increasing identification with the play-world and his personal involvement with its players…. Henry begins to see himself as Coover has always intended the reader to see him: as both the subject and object of play, as player and toy, as creator and participant. (pp. 217-18)

Henry murders Casey by controlling the dice instead of submitting to them…. The implications of this scene go beyond the use of violence in any other recent sports fiction. Henry, acting as a participant-god in the play-sphere, has introduced murder as a means of saving the play-world. (pp. 218-19)

The self-sufficiency and completeness of Henry's Association are emphasized by the startling vision of the last chapter of the novel, in which the tragic deaths of Damon Rutherford and Jock Casey have been transmuted into the full mature play of ritual. Henry's violation of the rules of the game, his assertion of his superior personality, paradoxically confirms those rules and establishes the primacy of the game over his personality…. Henry Waugh has ceased to appear as a character. The harmony of play has evidently become so complete that there is not even enough conflict to insure survival. Henry's identification with the Association is so total that … all play and no work have made no Henry. The imaginative recreation of sport as play has become the world. There is not the slightest sign here of any other reality; even the existence of a creator external to the play-world may now only be inferred. (p. 219)

The Parable of the Duel [in the last chapter must] be seen as the central myth of the Universal Baseball Association. The creation of a myth is essential to full mature play…. Coover has foreshadowed the very idea of turning the history of the Association into myth even before Damon's death. He has Henry see with uncanny irony that the pitcher's duel between Damon and Casey is "Not just a duel of dynasties, but a real duel, a duel to the death…." (p. 220)

Given the overwhelming concern with history, order, and process in the Association, the Parable of the Duel as myth and ritual seems natural…. The transformation of history into myth provides the distance necessary to mitigate and contain [Henry's involvement in the murder]. It allows for a playful response to climactic events which must be transcended to maintain order but which, also to maintain continuity in the play-world, may not be excluded.

What is excluded from the play-world is anything that is not essential to it…. [By the last chapter] the only world that exists is the one that has been imaginatively recreated. The separation of this world is so total that it has finally given rise to its own dualism: the players in the Association are now trying to distinguish between the reality of their own world and the ritual they are about to perform, a play-form within the play-world. The conflict necessary to insure survival no longer comes from Henry's vacillation between two worlds but from within the play-world itself. (pp. 220-21)

The final vision of the eighth chapter is strikingly indeterminate. There are no final answers for the players in the game world, for even the mythic order of the Association is only one possibility among many…. The ritual is not played out; a ninth chapter would have implied the perfection of a completed baseball game, an orderliness and tidiness which the novel argues can never be absolute. What makes the Association universal, the only absolute in the game-world, is the play-attitude. Play encompasses the joy, creativity, and freedom which engendered the Association; play produced the story which became its central myth; and play is the essence of ritual, through which the myth is acted out…. [The] Universal Baseball Association is [a] most supremely playful imaginative recreation of sport, and, since it is mythic, and thus timeless, it partakes not so much of "real time" as "significant time."… (p. 222)