Coover’s Grand Slam
By Richard Crepeau, Aethlon: the Journal of Sport Literature (VII: 1), Fall 1989, 113120.
Everyone has his favorite novel. It speaks clearly to him, and resonates truths. Those
working in sport literature have their favorites in the various sub-genre. For those
caught up in baseball, choosing a favorite from among the many great baseball novels is
not an easy task. But to me there is one cleat choice, Robert Coover's The Universal
Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. While in graduate school a friend,
both historian and writer of fiction is there a difference?), mentioned to me that he had
read about a baseball novel that seemed fairly interesting, and he rolled out the lengthy
title. A few year<. later while in a Goodwill Store I was browsing the used book rack.
On it was a copy of the UBA. I recognized the title and plucked it from the rack. On the
inside cover I found a handwritten note which said simply: "To all us baseball nuts.
Mad fun." I took this to be an omen. No, more a personal message. So 1 purchased the
book for the princely sum of ten cents, and while standing in the store I opened and
began to read:
Bottom half of the seventh, Brock's boy had made it through another
inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs
to go! and Henry's heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and
tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them!
Oh yes, boys, it was on! He was sure of it! More than just another ball
game now: history! And Damon Rutherford was making it. Ho ho! too
good to be true! And yes, the stands were charged with it, turned on, it
was the old days all over again, and with one voice they rent the air as
the Haymaker Star Hamilton Craft spun himself right off his feet in a
futile cut at Damon's third strike-zingng! whoosh! zap! OUT! Henry
laughed, watched the hometown Pioneer fans cheer the boy, cry out his
name, then stretch-not just stretch-leap up for luck. He saw beers
bought and drunk, hot dogs eaten, timeless gestures passed. Yes, yes,
they nodded, and crossed their fingers and knocked on wood and
rubbed their palms and kissed their fingertips and clapped their hands,
and laughed how they were all caught up in it, witnessing it, how he
was all caught up in it, this great ball game, event of the first order,
tremendous moment: Rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford, son of the
incomparable Brock Rutherford, was two innings-six outs from a
perfect game! Henry, licking his lips, dry from excitement, squinted at
the sun high over the Pioneer Park, then at his watch: nearly eleven,
Diskin's closing hours. So he took the occasion of this seventh-inning
hometown stretch to hurry downstairs to the delicatessen to get a
couple sandwiches. Might be a long night: the Pioneers hadn't scored
off old Swanee Law yet either. (9)
1 find it hard to believe now, having read this novel over and over again, that on
first reading l was well into it before I realized that J. Henry Waugh was playing a
dice game, and not witnessing the real thing. That first paragraph is so powerful that
I still get caught up in the action of the game in much the same way that J. Henry
Waugh did. The power of the writing , with Coover getting so much into this
opening few words, wraps the excitement of the moment a and t symbols
and
rituals of the game Coover's treatment of baseball clearly speaks to me, and it seems
to me that he captures the essence of the game, especially from the point of view of
the fan. As John Steinbeck noted, "Baseball is not a sport or a game or a contest. It is
a state of mind."' And it is the mind of the game that Coover is most skilled at
presenting, revealed within J. Henry Waugh's mind which is increasingly dominated
by baseball. The mind of baseball is Coover's overarching theme. And although the
UBA is
Henry’s peculiar brand of baseball, it carries many of the marks of the stadium
rather than a board game. The differences between them are minimal. Baseball is
baseball. Content overwhelms form.
At the heart of the novel is Henry's total involvement with his creation, which is
nothing less than a complete baseball universe. The UBA carries al l the marks of a
baseball league with a full complement of teams; rosters of players; career statistics;
the folklore and legends of the league; and a full history of each season and offseason. There is even a multi-volumed history of the Universal Baseball Association.
Henry keeps copiously detailed records including notations of retirements and deaths
with appropriate obituaries. The UBA is an eight-team league, playing an eighty-four
game schedule.
Over the years while rolling through the seasons as both fan and baseball historian, it
has seemed tome that at the heart of the game is a rhythmic pattern, present in each
inning, each game, each season. It is probably most obvious in the seasonal pattern:
Each spring even the writers covering the worst teams generated some
hope, sometimes sustaining it into the early days of the season. Often
some poor team might have a brief spurt in the spring and win maybe
eight or ten games, which set off even greater optimism. But slowly, as
the weeks and months passed, disillusionment set in, first for the worst
teams, then, eventually, it came for all but the pennant winners.
Resignation to defeat came in the fall as the last hopes of the contenders
faded. Some had already been overcome in the heat of August, a month
of legendary proportions in baseball, which only the most fit survive.
Finally the colorful spectacle of the World Series arrived in early
October. In the winter, the game moved off the field to the warmth of the
hot stove league. Just as there was a kind of flow to every baseball game,
there was this flow for an entire season coinciding with the cycle of
nature. In the process the periodic renewal, with a flush of hope and
optimism. . . . suggested the particularly American approach to time and
history.... The cry of "Wait till next year" and the irrationality of spring
training optimism both serve to reaffirm the basic truth at the heart of
America's outlook on life.2
Henry's UBA has many of these same features. Each season is played out and the
records are carefully kept. Henry's history recounts the season and the games,
following the players from rookie, to veteran, to old-timer, and finally to the grave. But
Coover goes beyond this:
Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless
succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What
difference in the terror of eternity, does it make? He stares at the sky, beyond which is
more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He Paul Trench, is utterly absorbed in it,
entirely disappears, is Paul Trench no longer, is nothing at all; so why does he even walk
up there? Why does he swing: Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and
rejoice when safe? Why is it better to win than to lose? (171) Coover has hit something
of great significance here and he takes it on further having one player tell another: "'I
don't know if there's really a record-keeper up there or not, Paunch, but even if there
weren't, I think we'd have to play the game as though there were'. Would we? Is that
reason enough? Continuance for its own inscrutable sake" (172). Indeed it is! That is
exactly the point ,it the game or i e. e pain of the strike of 1981 was one reminder of
the importance of continuity. What Dallas Green called the "split-fuckin-season,"
only served to reinforce the need of "continuance for its own inscrutable sake."
Coover also goes into the heart of each game, the games within the games. H lets
you see Damon Rutherford, cool, detached, and perfect on the mound. He makes you
fee
the tension mount inning by inning, pitch by pitch, as Rutherford
rolls to his perfect game. Even more impressive are the game fragments which
appear as Henry plays out a season, or the recollection of games and players as
Henry's mind is dominated more and more by the happenings of the UBA, and he
slowly slips away into his own creation. The power of Coover's writing lends
credibility to the power of the UBA over Henry's mind. It almost seems logical when
Henry finally disappears inside the UBA, its rituals and its history. It is also a bit
frightening.
W.P. Kinsella in his introduction to The Thrill of the Grass writes, "it is the
timelessness of baseball which makes it more conducive to magical happenings than
any other sport."3 The magic runs through the UBA. It is also true that both baseball
and history, while marching thro time, assume the timeless, seeking to transcend
time, to escape the boundaries imposed by such a mundane human construct. There
is within this novel and within Henry's games the sense that the whole is greater than
the sum of the parts, and more important that the whole is essential to the parts. The
import context is overwhelming-the crowd, the sun, the stadium, the gr grass, the
sky, and the endless succession of games. Who is J. Henry Waugh? In his "normal"
life he is an accountant, but in his baseball life he is among other thins a historian.
He keeps the records and writes the histories. w y. e seeks continuity and meaning
within the historical record, meaning which transcends the humd rum world of time
and account books. He is the historian endlessly searching for the confluence of time
and eternity. The only differences between Henry and other historians are the nature
of his evidence, which seems less real than that of the historian, and the fact that
Henry gets lost in his evidence. Henry is fascinated by baseball's history and
continuity, and the league he creates is permeated by those qualities. Base a is ritual,
transcending time and reenacting the patterns of nature, the cycles of birth-life-death,
be it UBA or MLB. Beyond this Coover captures other intriguing aspects of the
game. Henry tries to explain to his friend Lou what it is about baseball that
captivates him:
The crowds, for example, I felt like I was part of something there, you
know, like in church, except it was more real than any church, and I
joined in the score-keeping, the hollering, the eating of hot dogs and
drinking of Cokes and beer, and for a while I even had the funny idea
that ball stadiums and not European churches were the real American
holy places. (121)
But ultimately, confessed Henry, the games themselves were boring, and it was
only later when he looked over the scorecards from the games that he found them
coming to life. In the end we found he didn't need the games, the scorecards were
enough. (Was he a SABR member?) What went on in the mind was more important
than what went on in the field. This of course is no surprise to those who still find that
in many
ways a baseball game on the radio is much more satisfying than a game
on television. The game in the mind, and of the mind - not a bad description of
baseball, or as Coover writes - "He wants to quit ... But what does he mean 'quit'? The
game? Life? Could you separate them?" (171).
Henry had over the years invented numerous other games-basketball,
horseracing, war games, card games. He even invented a twenty-four board
monopoly game played by an unlimited number of players involving multinationals
and international power politics. But he always came back to baseball. Why?
... the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual
and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern,
power and intelligence. 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 may have seemed, so much ultimate mystery.
(38)
And mystery there is, with part of it coming from the names. To Henry the
naming of his players was of utmost significance. Names must be chosen "that
could bear the whole weight of perpetuity. Brock Rutherford was a name like that;
Horace (n) Zifferblat wasn't.... Strange. But name a man and you make him what he
is” (39). It is in fact a funny thing about names, and nicknames, in baseball. They
often do seem just right: Nolan Ryan, Eric Davis, Damon Berryhill, Vic Power,
Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Dazzy Vance. Or try some of
Henry's names: Damon Rutherford, Witness York, Hatrack Hines, Jock Casey,
Goodman James. But Richard Crepeau? You just know he couldn't hit the curveball with a name like that. Kevin Kerrane in Dollar Sign On the Muscle tells us that
the scouts look for players with the "good face." Perhaps they should just run down
a list of names.
Coover makes the observation that baseball contains the possibility for perfection
only for the pitcher. Henry notes this while recording the statistics from Damon
Rutherford's perfect game with all those zeroes. The only thing comparable to a
zero, the absence of number, is infinity, and infinity is not available to the batter.
He cannot hit an infinite number of home runs. Furthermore baseball has other
peculiarities in this area. The perfect game offers an occasional glimpse at perfection,
but for the batter the rule is failure. Fail 7 of 10 times and you area good hitter; fail 3
of 5 times and you are a great hitter. The margins of this game are very small. Here
again one finds a large part of the beauty and delicate balance of baseball revealed in
Henry's mental meanderings. Part of that wonderful balance is described by Lois
Gordon, who points out that baseball is a game of "tremendous excitement, it pits
control against chance; each and every move offers its players potential great accomplishment, public adulation, and even immortality."4 Not to mention their
opposites.
Closely related to this is Henry 's fascination with numbers which are another of
the mysteries in the game.
... it seemed somehow central to the game to maintain the balance
provided by any power of two. To say a team finished in "first division"
implied the possibility of further divisions, but a five-team division
couldn't be further divided. Moreover, seven -the number of opponents
each team now had-was central to baseball. Of course, nine, as the square
of three, was also important: nine innings, nine players, three strikes each
for three batters each inning, and so on, but even in the majors there were
complaints about ten-team leagues, and back earlier in the century, when
they'd tried to promote a nine-game World Series in place of the
traditional best-out-of-seven, the idea had failed to catch on. Maybe it all
went back to the days when games were decided, not by the best score in
nine innings, but by the first team to score twenty-one runs ... three times
seven. Now there were seven fielders, three in the outfield and four in the
infield, plus the isolated genius on the mound and the team playmaker
and unifier behind the plate; seven pitches, three strikes and four balls;
three basic activities - pitching, hitting, and fielding - performed around
four bases.... (148)
Or later:
Numerology. Lot of revealing work in that field lately. Made you wonder
about a lot of things. Like the idea Damon was killed in Game 49: seven
times seven. Third inning. Unbelievable. Or like that guy who's
discovered that the whole damn structure from the inning organization
up and double entry bookkeeping are virtually identical; just multiply it
by twenty-one, the guy claims, and you've got it all. Grim idea. (158)
Lois Gordon and others have discussed the religious symbolism of the
numbers both in baseball, and in Henry's rolling of the dice. This also fits well
with Coover's portrayal of the game as religious ritual, especially in the final
chapter, when the events surrounding the death of Damon Rutherford are
reenacted in the Parable of the Duel and the Great Atonement Legend on
Damonsday, with its implication of ritualistic human sacrifice. These events
take place one hundred seasons after Damon's Death, and the players have
learned of these events from their catechisms.
Along with this use of the numerology of the game and its religious
overtones, Coover makes marvelous use of the language of baseball. As noted
earlier, his game descriptions are vivid and evocative. But beyond that he
takes the language of baseball into other settings. His use of baseball language
to describe sexual intercourse is certainly not new, but Coover's particular
descriptions of Henry's romp with Hettie, the B-girl, are beyond the ordinary:
Oh, come on, come on, Henry, here, come on home! Yes, and they're
pulling for him, Hettie, and he rounds second, he's trying to stretch it
to third, but I don't know, it's still a long ways to the plate, no, he
just can't make it, not this time, and the second baseman, he's got the
ball, and he's gonna-No, no, Igot it, Henry, 1 got it! come on! come
on! keep it up! Behind his butt, she clapped her cold soles to cheer
him on, Yes, he's pushing toward third now, yes! and he's picking
up, yes, that's it! he's hard to stop now, he's churning, he's pouring it
on, and he's around third! on his way home! but they've got him in a
hotbox! wow! third to catch! back to third! ha! to catch! to pitch!
catch! pitch! catch! pitch! Home. Henry, home! And here he comes,
Hettie! He's past'em! past'em! past'em! he's bolting for home,
Spurting past, sliding in-POW! Oh, pow, Henry! pow pow pow pow
POW! They laughed softly, hysterically, flowing together. She let go
her grip on theball. He slipped off, unmingling their sweat. Oh, that's
a game, Henry! That's really a great old game! (31)
Coover also explores the linkage between baseball and the American pastoral, tying it
to country music and noting the ironies: "Funny thing about both country music and
baseball with its 'village greens;' they weren't really country, not since they got their
new names anyway, but urban" (32). Henry writes country music ballads about the
game, the players, and the legends not unlike, but considerably more colorful than,
Terry Cashman's minor growth industry, "Talkin Baseball." The most colorful of
these ballads is "Long Lew and Fanny," which recounts in bawdy and colorful verse
the story of how Fanny McCaffree lost her virginity to Lew Lydel. Henry sees
baseball, the whole atmosphere of the game, as "Formulas for energy configurations
where city boys come to see their country origins dramatized, some old lost fabric of
unity... " (121). Coover allows pastoralism to run amuck in Henry’s
mind. Oh,
Cooperstown and Abner Doubleday, no wonder you will not give way to the so-called
facts!
Near the end of the novel Henry, while looking over his records and history of
the UBA, was struck by the optimism with which he had written in the early years of
the league. Over the years he had changed. He could no longer write with optimism and
jauntiness, but he was still caught up in the action, the games, the rituals and the history.
These were the attractions of the game that ultimately enveloped J. Henry Waugh, and
which Coover used so skillfully. They also explain why, after all the scandals and
money grubbing, the agents and lawyers, the strikes and the lockouts, and afterall the
innocence of youth has passed, baseball still holds a tight grip on all of those who, along
with J. Henry Waugh, have felt the mysteries.
Notes
1. John Steinbeck, "Then My Arm Glasses Up," Sports Illustrated, 23 (December
20,1965), p.100
2. Richard Crepeau, Baseball: American's Diamond Mind, Orlando, Florida:
University Presses of Florida, 1980, pp. 64-65.
3.
W. P. Kinsella, The Thrill of the Crass. New York; Penguin Books, 1984, p. xii.
4.
Lois Cordon, Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process, Carbondale,
Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983, p. 40.