The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., creates an alternate reality that echoes and comments on the human condition. Using the game of baseball as symbolic of human life in general, especially life’s spiritual and sexual urgings, The Universal Baseball Association, as the novel is most often known, is a humorous, profound, and often moving work.

The plot is simple. J. Henry Waugh, an accountant with the firm of Dunklemann, Zuber and Zifferblatt, has created a baseball game in which events are determined by the rolls of three dice and a series of tables indicating specific events, as well as by Waugh’s own considerable imagination. Having established a league with eight teams, Waugh plays season after season on his kitchen table. As the novel opens, he is deep into the fifty-sixth season. Not entirely coincidentally, fifty-six is his age.

Damon Rutherford, pitcher son of a famous pitcher of the UBA, accomplishes that rarest of baseball feats, a perfect game, in which the opposing team has no runners reach first base. It is a mystical event in Henry’s life, and he celebrates by making actual contact with another human being by picking up Hettie Irden, the “B-girl” from the local bar, and making wild, passionate love with her.

Henry is late for work the next day, but he does not care. He even leaves early after being lectured by his boss, Horace Zifferblatt. His only interest is in returning home to play the next game of the Universal Baseball Association. Against his better judgment, he has Rutherford pitch with only one day of rest. A sense of foreboding fills the imaginary stadium of Henry’s imagination, and it is fulfilled when Rutherford is killed by a beanball thrown by fellow rookie Jock Casey.

Distraught, Henry loses all interest in his “real” life. He can hardly function at work; his second, and final, sexual encounter with Hettie Irden ends badly; and he plays endless games of the Universal Baseball Association obsessively but without enjoyment. His only passion is to beat Jock Casey and his team. Finally, Lou Angel, Henry’s friend from the office, visits, bringing pizza with him. Henry drives Lou away but eats the pizza and drinks some beer. He then spews out the beer, symbolically purging the troubles within himself. For the first and only time in his league, he cheats, playing a game in which he manipulates the dice so that Jock Casey is killed.

The novel concludes with a jump ahead in time to the Universal Baseball Association’s centenary year. Players reenact the duel between Casey and Rutherford in a ritual replaying of the mythic event. The book ends as the game begins, leaving the reader ignorant of how the final game ends, or if it is indeed final.

Coover's Literary Mastery

In the realm of novelistic brilliance, Coover's work soars to dazzling heights, equaling the ingenuity of his celebrated tales "The Babysitter" and "A Pedestrian Accident." His artistic approach artfully blurs the lines between the world Henry inhabits and the one he conjures. As the pages turn, readers find themselves initially immersed in what seems like a vivid recounting of a baseball game—imagining themselves amidst the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. However, as Henry steps away for sustenance, the narrative perspective shifts; now, perhaps, they are mere spectators of a televised game, surrounded by the unfamiliarity of unrecognizable team names, in contrast to the familiar allegiances in works like Bernard Malamud's The Natural . As Henry devours his sandwich and manipulates the dice, realization dawns...