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November 6, 2004
"The Universal Baseball Assocation, Inc" by Robert Coover
This is a book that my dad had been telling me about for years. "It's about a guy who has a dice-based baseball game and during one of the games his favorite player is killed by a pitch," which sounded like a pretty interesting concept. I've always had this book in the back of my mind for some reason, and my brother's recent obsession with Strat-O-Matic baseball (a dice-based baseball game) finally made me pick it up.
This is not an ordinary baseball book and it's more of a commentary on the life of J. Henry Waugh, the main character, than baseball. After the Universal Baseball Assocation's (UBA) rising star Damon Rutherford pitches a perfect game Waugh sends him in, somewhat unrealistically he realizes, the next day to pitch again. The most rare roll of the dice on the game's Extraordinary Occurrences chart shows a mortal result for poor Rutherford and he is struck down dead by a pitch when he comes up to bat.
The traumatic event sends Waugh's life into a tailspin and the book turns dark. His obsession with the game becomes all-consuming. Conversations will real people begin to mix with the UBA in Waugh's mind and the reader's. The author, Robert Coover, blends imaginary conversations with UBA players into the description of the game that Waugh is playing. This serves to make the latter half of the book very confusing but does successfully give the impression that Waugh is certainly going nuts. Unfortunately, it also made me want to skim over large portions of the book. An unsatisfying ending didn't help much either. I can see how some people might consider this a good book but it ended up being a bit disappointing for me. Sorry dad.
Posted on November 6, 2004 at 5:11 PM