Baseball is my second favorite sport (the first being
So imagine my surprise when the head of NYU talks about baseball as a "path to God," and in his curriculum he lists a bunch of books that supposedly illustrate this. One of them is "The Universal Baseball Association," by Robert Coover.
I didn't really understand John Sexton's point about the theological aspects of baseball, and frankly I found an even more interesting angle to reading "UBA": Namely, the main character is a fan of franchise play. Sports franchise play.
Let me step out for a second and briefly go over what that is. You know those video games like MLB The Show, NHL '9x/20xx, or Madden? You know how many of those games have "Franchise" modes, where you play the game over a number of continuous seasons? Well, "UBA" is about that, except in the most bare-bones way possible.
The book is about the proprietor of one such league, but this is no video game he's playing. He's using dice. Dice baseball, which happens to be a hobby of mine, played in the 1960s (I didn't realize the book was written so long ago when I first picked it up). So this guy was playing franchise sports before there was even a single video game in existence.
Lemme step out again and briefly describe dice baseball: You roll the dice, and depending on what the numbers are, something happens (a hit, a homerun, a strikeout, etc.). You keep track of the game by writing shit down on scorecards and whatnot. It's more complicated than it sounds.
So I already had a keen interest in the subject matter going into the book. When you play franchise sports, be they dice-based or bit-based, you really get into it (if you're doing it right; most people quit after one or two seasons for reasons I'll talk about briefly). You watch the league grow, you might keep track of some records, of some stats, and if the game is well-balanced and stuff, it can sustain itself for a long period of time. If it holds your interest.
In order to really get into franchise sports, though, you need to have a really good imagination (and a really good platform to base the sport on, otherwise shit gets too wild to reasonably continue). When someone sits down to play a game of Madden, they play with all the familiar names, so they have no need to imagine what kind of virtual people they're controlling. Everyone knows who Peyton Manning is, what records he holds, how the team does with him playing, etc.
But what if the next season you played, Peyton was gone? Retired. Traded. Was killed in a hunting accident with Eli :clap clap:. In his place was Gorp Snrub, a rookie, generated by the computer and drafted to your team. At that point, the frustrated Colts player may drop the game, not wanting to go on with his familiar and popular player in exchange for a (ltierally) faceless replacement who probably sucks and has a swagger rating of only 55? Come the fuck on.
This is where imagination comes in. Instead of having Gorp Snrub be just a random bit of pixels filling a role on your roster, what if you fleshed the little bugger out? Gorp hails from Scranton, PA. He went to college at Oklahoma. He's not married but he's not looking. He's nervous filling in for Peyton, especially since Peyton departed so suddenly. He's under a lot of pressure. The media is all up his ass. He looks like he's taking it well but secretly he hopes his teammates can support him.
I've never even seen Gorp before and already I've crafted a simple backstory for him. Now extrapolate that out over 10 seasons, with hundreds of other players getting the same treatment. NOW you're doing franchise sports properly.
In this way, franchise sports becomes less about playing the game and more about creating a world and populating it with diverse fictional people. Sure, there are archetypes you can have (the wild-eyed rookie who plays over his head and crashes in his sophomore season, the No. 1 prospect everyone expects to do well, but will he live up to his promise? the dark-horse guy who comes into the league late but becomes a valuable role player, etc.). But it's up to the player to keep an interest in these fake guys who will never exist, and if you stick with it long enough, you can have an entire league history to play with.
If this sounds like super nerd shit to you, well congrats. P.S. NICE PHOTOS, NERD.
So now that I have that dissertation out of the way, let's get to the book. The book is about one such nerdlinger who uses dice to act out his fictional baseball league, the UBA. But this nerd is HARD CORE. When the book opens, we're entering into the 52nd or something year of the league (though in reality it takes like three months to do a season, not a bad pace all things considered).
The nerd in question is J. Henry Waugh, a 56-year-old actuary or something. After work, he usually heads straight home to play dice baseball all night. It's his life, his obsession. And like a good franchise sports nerd, he acts out the motions of the league and its games in his head, creating a story-within-a-story narrative where the fictional players he created exist. They play the game, completely unaware that their every action is being controlled by dice.
On the first night, Henry oversees the completion of a perfect game pitched by the son of one of the league's greats. Henry's on cloud 9, seeing the fulfillment of a pretty nifty storyline. But then tragedy strikes. The next time the star player is out there, he's hit by a line-drive and killed. Henry faces a dilemma all franchise players face: Does he call a mulligan and roll the dice again? Or does he accept what the impartial dice say, and Damon Rutherford (the unfortunate player) dies?
The temptation Henry faces is akin to quitting a game you're losing in progress because goshdarnit, the fuckin' AI's cheating again and what the hell I meant to clear the puck not shoot it into my own zone, THAT'S FUCKING INSANE. NO. NO. I WILL NOT ACCEPT LOSING TO THE DEVILS LIKE THAT. FUCK THIS STUPID GAME I HATE IT.
Henry accepts the roll, though, and lets Damon die, which sends shockwaves throughout the league AND Henry's personal life. His relationship with his only apparent friend, an annoying fatass, becomes severely strained. His work suffers tremendously, to the point where he risks being fired. His love life, already barren, may become even more barrenererer. And worst of all, he's losing the will to keep the league going after all these years.
Henry's personal life eventually takes a severe tumble, but he fights through with the power of baseball (and by giving in to temptation and tipping the dice to get an outcome that allows him some release from his demons). The league survives, and we see in a super-long epilogue the league, 100 seasons later, doing... something.
At some point after Rutherford's death, the narratives in the book break down. I think the main culprit is Coover's writing style. If there's only one way to describe it, it's this: "Purple FUCKin' prose." All over the place. All. Over. The place. Every sentence feels like a run-on even if it's only three words long. Every word can be read in the voice of an overzealous vaudevillian. The book has been described as "Joycean." Having read enough excerpts to know what that means, I can say YES, it is Joycean, and if you like Joyce, you might derive some enjoyment out of this.
Me? I don't like Joyce. I'm p. sure that Coover's writing style made the book (242 pages in my edition) added 100 pages of pure nothing to the story. I understand why he did it, though. He was trying to recapture the way baseball was described in Ye Olde Earlier Dayes, where writers would drone on and on about PEPPER! ROUND-TRIPPERS! OH BOY THAT WAS TOPS!!! I suppose he does a good job of doing that, but it's irritating to have to slog through five paragraphs of that shit just to get to the next relevant plot point.
And perhaps Coover got so distracted by how he was writing the story that he kinda lost track of where his story was going at points. Henry's baseball world is a world filled with old-timey players with old-timey names, with an Adjective first name and more often than not an Alliterative last name. It's a world where the ball makes a plfuff sound when it's hit than a solid crack. But it's not a terribly fascinating world.
When the narrative switches to the perspective of the fictional players, not only does the purple prose go into overdrive, the story nosedives into layers of existentialist shit so hard that it scarcely comes back up. When the players are not on the diamond, they spend most of their time talking to each other. Or, I should say, they talk at each other, like cartoon cutups, making noises but not having any meaning behind them. They sing songs, they tell old tales, but nothing is actually advanced. It's like watching a real-life bar scene and expecting a narrative to unfold. But it doesn't because real-life bar scenes don't have narratives and stop looking for meaning in them. Also who pissed in the corner?
Maybe Coover's intention was just to capture the feeling that the fictional characters are going through, but I didn't get much of it. Perhaps it's the dilemma franchise sports enthusiasts face when trying to get others interested in their franchise (it's almost impossible as nobody else shares the same point of reference the creator does, and therefore can't understand why some things are important or whatnot). Perhaps the book is "postmodern," which is a term that is not yet clearly defined and therefore I won't touch with a 10-foot-pole (otherwise known as MY DICK, SCORE :hi-fives all the bros:). But any way you slice it, the fitional baseball narrative goes nowhere and ends up nowhere. I can't even begin to tell you what's actually going on in the final chapter.
Henry himself isn't that interesting a character, and his supporting cast are even shallower than he is. We're never really led to understand why he picked up dice baseball or why it became such an obsession. Coover, though, does understand the intricacies of maintaing and making the most of such a hobby, and he does a good job mentioning the league's various histories, greats and records. For someone writing before any of this shit was as established as it is today (and when everything had to be written down, no less), he really grasps the subject matter well. Or he did. I have no idea if Mr. Coover's still alive.
But the story, unfortunately, devolves into a whole pile of nothing. It's a good vignette, I suppose, but it's too damn long and too damn in love with its own damn purple damn pr-damn-ose. Unless you're able to sustain the travails of Joycean narration and you're really interested in gleaning some insight into how franchise sports players operate, I suggest you give this one a wide berth.
Now, play ball!
It doesn't matter if I liked or disliked the book, I was gonna end that way.
