It went on long enough that the crowd curdled and its cheers turned sarcastic. It was the middle of April, just three weeks into a six-month season. The New York Mets had lost eleven games in a row and it was becoming obvious—inevitable, fated, how could anyone have ever believed otherwise?—that they were about to lose a twelfth. Yes, the baseball season is long, but no matter how many games there are in a season, a double-digit losing streak is damning.
Each game in this streak was entrepreneurial, the team devising innovative ways to blow it every night. After Devin Williams, their newly-signed closer (a player whose entire job is premised on his ability to not give up runs in the ninth inning) ceded the two winning runs to the other team, the Mets brought in a pitcher named Austin Warren, a player I hadn’t even known was on the roster. Warren has spent most of his professional baseball career in the minor leagues, getting called up to the bigs only when MLB teams found themselves scrounging for anybody they can reasonably trot out to the mound to, as they say, mop things up, before being sent down again. That evening, Warren was there to mop things up. The Mets’ manager, Carlos Mendoza, looked like he was on the verge of tears when he pulled Williams from the game, accepting what everyone in the ballpark already knew: the game was lost. They just needed to get to the end, and getting them there was Warren’s job. (This is one of the beautiful things about baseball: it forces you to play through to the end, no matter your circumstances.) When Warren proved as adept as Williams had been inept, striking out all three batters he faced to put a merciful end to things, the Citi Field crowd showered him with ironic chants of “M! V! P!” Or maybe not ironic. His was, arguably, the most impressive performance of the night. For those three outs, the unexpected, unassuming Warren had indeed been the Mets’ most valuable player.
The twelve-game losing streak had scrambled the crowd’s reaction, and I admit I was with them. At some point during the free fall, I began rooting for the Mets to lose. I wanted to see how deeply they could plumb the depths.
I’m drawn to baseball, in part, because of the futility embedded in its structure. There are the famous adages: even the best team will lose sixty games in a season, the best hitters will fail 70 percent of the time. It’s a game in which success is the exception and failure is presumed. And the Mets can fail like no other team. Observing the team’s origins in 1962—one of the worst seasons from any team in MLB history—and comparing them to the infallible Yankees, Roger Angell wrote fondly of Mets fans, “This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming.”
By the fourth game of the 2026 Mets’ losing streak, there were already promises from the team that they were “better than that,” a then-dubious claim proven even more dubious by the eight subsequent losses. The team, on paper, was supposed to be good. Before the season, prognosticators with precise mathematical formulae had given them an 80 percent chance of making the postseason (then they told us that no team had ever made the postseason after losing twelve games in a row). Many of the Mets players had histories of playing well; in fact some were among the best in the league, but in April 2026 they were among the worst. There were statistical explanations (the Mets were among the teams with the widest gap between their “expected” and actual results) and psychological explanations (“pressing,” the idea that losing compounds when you try too hard to succeed). The New York Post, characteristically, blamed Mayor Zohran Mamdani: the Mets’ losing streak began after Mamdani appeared in a video with and hugged team mascot Mr. Met. “CURSE OF THE MAMBINO,” read the headline. One commentator, an executive from another team, turned spiritual: “I’m not sure there’s much of a soul to that team.” Those closest to the train wreck refused to offer explanations. There were a lot of players staring off into the distance and shaking their heads during postgame interviews. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mendoza, the manager, said. I knew the Mets were irredeemably in it when multiple outlets reported that a copy of the self-help book The Coffee Bean was placed in each player’s locker. The book promises to show readers “the power inside us to transform our environment”—the environment being, in this case, I guess, the Mets themselves.
The start of the season had not been so dour. I was at the ballpark for Opening Day, a miraculously beautiful Thursday in late March, the only day that week that would get above seventy degrees. I kept score and chatted with the faithful around me. I ate two hot dogs and wondered who would be “my guy” for the season. The Mets won. While there were portents we could’ve heeded—allowing seven runs to the Pittsburgh Pirates—I, and I believe most of my fellow Mets fans, chose to focus on the positive. Only later that night did I read about the dead pigeon that fell onto the grass in the middle of the game. “I’m not superstitious,” Carson Benge, the rookie right fielder, said after the game. No, of course not.
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While the Mets underwent their daily humiliation rituals, I read The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the 1968 novel by Robert Coover newly reissued by New York Review Books. You won’t find the titular Henry at the ballpark, frank in hand. Instead, he orders pastrami sandwiches up to his apartment, where he sweats alone and hunches over his kitchen table, staring down at sheets of paper, pausing only to use the bathroom and grab another beer.
These sheets of paper constitute the Universal Baseball Association (UBA): the game Henry concocted in which every pitch and swing is dictated by a dice roll. Three white dice, 56 combinations, along with “special strategy charts” and a “Chart of Extraordinary Occurrences.” From these odds Henry builds a world, if not quite a universe. It’s part Strat-O-Matic, part Dungeons & Dragons. He keeps detailed records, fills binders with statistics and “historical” accounts, establishes family lineages on the field and political factions within the Association’s management. His players have names like Hatrack Hines and nicknames like “the Old Philosopher.” His imaginary crowds devour hot dogs and down beers, and Henry sees in his mind these “timeless gestures passed.” There are songs and legends making up the culture of the UBA. There’s even room for superstition—at one critical juncture, Henry refrains from washing his hands after peeing, for fear of disrupting his palms’ communion with the dice. Much of Coover’s novel takes place in Henry’s head; the story we read is the story of Henry telling the story of the UBA to himself.
In this way, the novel is emblematic of Coover’s bibliography. Across 21 novels and dozens of short stories, Coover’s primary literary preoccupation was literature itself, the very act of storytelling, whether he was deconstructing a familiar fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty in Briar Rose, Hansel and Gretel in “The Gingerbread House”) or giving us an alternative account of a bible story (Noah’s Ark in “The Brother”) or simply (well, nothing in Coover’s writing is ever simply, but for comparison’s sake) depicting the thoughts of a guy as he rides the office elevator (“The Elevator”). Perhaps Coover’s most famous work is “The Babysitter,” from his first short-story collection, Pricksongs & Descants, which narrates the myriad ways a night babysitting in the suburbs might go, from the routine to the romantic to the comedic to the disturbingly violent, all in shuffled order, the variations crashing into each other. The effect is like flipping channels on television, and Coover tips his hand at the end:
“Your children are murdered, your husband gone, a corpse in your bathtub, and your house is wrecked. I’m sorry. But what can I say?” On the TV, the news is over, and they’re selling aspirin. “Hell, I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s see what’s on the late late movie.”
Coover’s approach to narrative is ostensibly democratizing; it is, at least, leveling. For him, no story is more powerful or precious than any other; even the nativity story is “a common kind of story, and not a particularly entertaining one at that,” as the narrator of “J’s Marriage” describes it. It’s story itself, the form, that matters, and the content remains eminently mutable, as expressed in his story “Beginnings.” It is, as I read it, a parable about writer’s block; the story begins with its protagonist shooting himself, the blood splattering on the wall in paradoxical messages about beginnings, and only then can he begin writing. He starts stories but doesn’t finish them, because “it became important to delay the climax.” He fixates on how to tell the stories, and we get glimpses of these, but never the full thing: “He began a parody on Plato’s cave parable, in which he celebrated, not the shadows, but the generosity of the wall.”
Coover is often grouped with mid-century postmodernist and metafictional writers like John Barth and Donald Barthelme, and his style is varyingly described as (admiringly) “a manifestation of the futility of trying to systemize the chaos of human experience,” or (in frustration) “a formal and stylistic cul de sac,” “nothing but mode: a series of acrobatic exercises in technique.” I’m amenable to both interpretations, and there’s a case to be made for each. There’s only so far a story like “You Must Remember This”—which imagines an unseen scene from Casablanca as absurd erotica, with lines like, “his organ luxuriating in the warm tub of her vagina”—can take a reader. But when the writing transcends formal exercise, a Coover story can capture something more human. Take “The Elevator.” It is the story of a person coming alive to their surroundings: “Every morning without exception and without so much as reflecting upon it, Martin takes the self-service elevator to the fourteenth floor,” the story opens, yet what follows is a series of fifteen reflections on this elevator ride. There are cruel accusations of farting from his coworkers (and subsequent revenge plotting), farcical sexual fantasies, and existential reckonings: “Perhaps Martin will meet Death on the elevator.” Coover’s work, at its best, strives to show the capacious possibility within the “deformed browbeaten mind-animals” that we are—even the inside of an elevator can be a cave wall. And yet Coover’s writing always has an ironic undercurrent, which draws our attention to the walls: Martin’s thoughts can be crude and pitiful, circumscribed by his isolation. There is still a limit to possibility, however vast, when it resides within one person.
In The Universal Baseball Association, Henry reckons with the limits of his own universe, and his limits as its proprietor. When the novel opens, Henry is committed to the rational neutrality of the odds he’s given his world. He’s proud of them. He worked through multiple iterations to find the right calibration. “Be prepared for the lucky hit,” Henry thinks mid-game, “that really wouldn’t be lucky at all, but merely in the course of things.” But in this game, the odds align with the story. Damon Rutherford, a rookie pitcher that Henry comes to care about more than any other player, throws a perfect game—no hits or walks allowed, as impressive a feat in actual baseball as in Henry’s version. Henry sees fans storming the field. He envisions Damon inspiring a renaissance within the Association. Through Damon’s feat, Henry, in both his inner world and the outer one, is revitalized.
Henry remains committed to the odds, too, when, in a later game, Damon is killed on the field—one of the possible “Extraordinary Occurrences” come to pass. As the dice roll just so, he perseveres and tells himself that it all comes down to the odds, even in the face of impending cataclysm: “Oh sure, he was free to throw away the dice, run the game by whim, but then what would be the point of it? … He and his players were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice.” He sees it through, and when the dice come up 1-1-1, he laments: “He knew even before he looked … Damon Rutherford was dead.”
But this fealty causes Henry to unravel and reveals his ultimate allegiance. The game in Henry’s head slowly bleeds into his corporeal existence. He’s caught talking to himself in public, imagining the UBA. He inhabits his characters’ personas when drinking at the bar and ordering at a restaurant. His grief over Damon’s death— “Later, he’d have it rain,” he thinks, to match his mood—fuels an increasingly manic obsession with the game; he plays sixty games in 24 hours, skips work and risks getting fired, then becomes sloppy with his own UBA bookkeeping. Henry is not unaware of his descent—he feels a sense of shame, “like an adolescent caught masturbating”—but he can’t help himself. In desperation, he upends the fundamental logic of his fictional world. He intervenes in his game. When presented with the opportunity, Henry fixes a roll, switches the dice to kill the player who threw the pitch that killed Damon. He chooses the revenge narrative over sheer chance. Then he vomits pizza all over his paper charts and goes to sleep.
Henry is seduced by a fantasy of control, and this explains why he chooses the UBA over real baseball. For though the UBA is, ostensibly, governed by impartial odds, they are still his odds, as he has determined them. As Henry reminds himself early in the novel, “the dice and charts and other paraphernalia were only the mechanics of the drama, not the drama itself.” In the end, the story is the one Henry decides to tell. At one point, Henry’s friend Lou—his only friend, as far as we can tell—asks him why he doesn’t go in for real baseball. Henry explains that he went to a few games at the ballpark, but no matter what happened on the field, they left him cold. “Fantastic game. And I nearly fell asleep,” he confesses. Neither did Henry ever have fantasies about playing the game himself, being “just an ordinary ballplayer.” He prefers, instead, the numerical detritus of the game: “Then, a couple days later, at home, I would pick up my scoreboard. Suddenly, what was dead had life, what was wearisome became stirring, beautiful, unbelievably real … I found out the scorecards were enough. I didn’t need the games.”
Ben Marcus, in his introduction to the NYRB edition of The Universal Baseball Association, writes that “Coover’s metafiction was never about cute self-consciousness and references to an author who kept annoyingly reminding us that he was the one writing what we were reading.” But there is undeniably a persistent anxiety about authorship throughout Coover’s work. A UBA player thinks, “I don’t know if there’s really a record-keeper up there or not … But even if there weren’t, I think we’d have to play the game as though there were.” And, like Henry with his odds, Coover often wants to give the illusion of losing control over his stories by insisting on their proliferating possibilities. In “The End of Books,” his 1992 essay on how internet-fueled “hypertext” could revolutionize literature, Coover looks forward to a fictive mode “favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author.” He is, in my opinion, looking for baseball.
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As soon as Henry imposes his own desired storyline on the game, once he fixes the dice to kill Jock Casey, the UBA ceases to be baseball and becomes fiction—and we never see gameplay again. In this way, Coover’s novel is the most honest of baseball novels, because it is about the impossibility of a baseball novel. Baseball—sports in general, really—is a fiction that transcends an author, because there are as many authors as there are players, coaches, umpires and even fans, and this proliferation, and the tensions between them all, results in the presence of genuine chance. The game is, as Coover might remind us, an artificial construct that requires something like a suspension of disbelief—or, rather its opposite, the adoption of belief, the acceptance that the rules of the game matter—but one that adheres to no single participant’s narrative. Baseball can be used as a literary device, a metaphor, but a fictional baseball game can never provide the same experience as an actual baseball game because a fictional game is, despite Coover’s hopes, always the “definitive utterance” of its creator. It is, definitionally, contrived. Whereas I watch baseball because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither does anyone else. An alternative approach to baseball fiction is to forgo fictionalizing the game altogether and instead fictionalize around the game, as in Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall. Initially published as a story in Harper’s, Pafko is the novella that opens DeLillo’s Underworld and was reissued as a standalone volume by Scribner in September to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the actual baseball game it depicts: Pafko is Andy Pafko, left fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers in game three of their three-game playoff in 1951 against the New York Giants, and he’s at the wall because he’s watching Bobby Thomson’s game-winning home run fly into the stands. This was “The Shot Heard ’Round the World” in one of the most famous baseball games in history, in which the Giants completed the most improbable of improbable comebacks to overtake the Dodgers and win the pennant.
It’s a game as steeped in legend as any from the peak of Henry’s mania, and despite being based on true events, DeLillo’s story is only marginally less fantastical than Henry’s imaginings. DeLillo is writing forty years after the events of the game, and he imagines it as a kind of mid-century apotheosis. The story is narrated from three perspectives: the fan that ends up with the home-run ball (the ball itself subject of myth, and a recurring presence in Underworld); Russ Hodges, the radio announcer who delivers the famous “The Giants win the pennant!” call of the game; and the muckety-muck quartet of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover, the latter receiving word of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb test in the middle of the game. Albert Einstein, too, gets a mention. “Some reporter asked him to figure out the mathematics of the pennant race,” one character explains. “What are the myriad possibilities? Who’s got the edge?” Einstein is asked by someone who wishes real baseball were more reminiscent of Henry’s UBA. “The hell does he know?” another retorts. “Apparently not much. He picked the Dodgers to eliminate the Giants last Friday.”
What makes DeLillo’s portentous scenes work is that he grounds them in an actual game as it actually happened, however improbably. His fiction seeks out the systems undergirding everything, but in baseball, at least, he respects the inexplicability of event. “The difference comes when the ball is hit,” DeLillo writes, “the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play.” Or, in other words, between the gridlines of the box score. In Henry’s UBA, conversely, we always see the hand behind the game. This, then, cannot be baseball, the essence of which is indomitability. In Pafko, Hodges recounts his past radio work narrating recreations of baseball games, “inventing ninety-nine percent of the action,” not unlike Henry constructing the action of his UBA. Hodges spent those years dreaming of one day “doing real baseball from a booth in the Polo Grounds.” Real baseball, he clarifies, is “the thing that happens in the sun.”
It helps that DeLillo uses a game that needs little embellishment, and so instead of concocting the dramatic events of a dramatic game, he captures the experience of watching such a game. There is frequent reference to “the crowd” throughout Pafko, and the baseball fans throughout the city. “They’re eating and drinking baseball,” DeLillo writes. He describes the fans tossing paper trash from the stands to mess with the Dodgers’ fielders, receipts and napkins and pages torn from Life. (At one point, Hoover examines one of these pages showing Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death and gets turned on.) Even clapping takes on heightened meaning. A “rhythmic applause starts … this is how the crowd enters the game. The repeated three-beat has the force of some abject faith, a desperate kind of will toward magic and accident.” I feel my own experience as a baseball fan in Pafko, confronting my cynical approach to Mets fandom: “You know that thing that happens when you give up before the end and then your team comes back to perform acts of valor and you feel a queasy shame stealing over you like pond slick.”
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If only the Mets had come back to perform acts of valor. The statistics that predicted a triumphant Mets season turned out to be their own kind of fiction too. The further stats are removed from the game as it is actually played, the more they veer into prediction and abstraction rather than description of the game, the more they become a mere story imposed on the game’s unpredictability. They are revealed to be what they are: meager attempts to control an uncontrollable phenomenon, to salvage knowability from the unknowable. There’s a reason why, as they say, you play the game.
But I, too, am tempted by the desire to foist a narrative on the game. Isn’t that why I rooted for the Mets to lose? Their fall from favor, their immiseration, made for the more compelling story than random mediocrity. Literary critic Arlen J. Hansen links Henry in The Universal Baseball Association to Einstein’s famous admonishment of quantum physics, that God “does not throw dice” (the same Einstein who couldn’t predict the Giants’ pennant in 1951), and the novel shows just how discomfiting it would be, were it so—enough to drive even God to choose story over probability. Henry could not ultimately abide by his own system of rationality, and so he destroyed the baseball in the Universal Baseball Association. By the end of the novel, the UBA has transformed from baseball into a ritual recreation of Damon’s death, the events of the preceding pages fogged in rumor and speculation, Henry himself absent from the narration. There is no longer talk of dice rolls or scenarios on a chart. Now adrift, the players of the UBA contemplate fate and free will, the accident and invention of history. They turn to folklore, myth, religion. One concludes, “God exists and he is a nut.”
Every explanation is a story. The Mets did not stop losing games after their streak came to an end, they only stopped losing so unceasingly. I ventured back out to the ballpark on a Wednesday night at the end of April. The weather was as miserable as Opening Day had been lovely—April baseball is always a crapshoot, weather-wise—but a modicum of hope induced me to brave the chilling wind and forecasted rain; the night before, the team looked like they were finally coming alive, winning confidently and resembling something close to a competent ball club, and I wanted to say I’d been there for the turnaround. The Mets lost, of course, in a dispiriting fashion that made me feel foolish (and, by the next morning, sick with a sore throat). Later, I fried in the August sun watching as the Mets finally strung together a few impressive wins, giving us just enough hope for next year—there is, tritely and truly, always hope for next year—and sat through more wind and rain during the last home game of the season in late September, the team going out the same way they came in, frustrating and listless.
The conversation remained much the same all summer. “There’s some psychological effect,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns posited, before admitting the team’s continued failure was “really tough for me to explain.” (After the end of the season, with the Mets finishing near the bottom of the standings, Stearns described the year as an “uncapped downside scenario,” a phrase I think Coover could’ve had fun with.) Austin Warren was sent down, and then quickly returned, and he continued to be more or less reliable out of the bullpen. At the end of June, the Mets fired Mendoza, and most agreed that his termination did not represent a verdict on his job performance so much as it constituted a sacrifice to the baseball gods (their benevolence remained elusive). In July, news broke first that the Mets had been trying to use AI for in-game strategy, then that the Mets had become the first MLB team to officially partner with a prediction market, both of which I have no comment on. Once again, Juan Soto proved baseball’s resistance to the single author; he was one of the best players in the sport this year (when he wasn’t injured, at least), trapped on one of the worst teams in the league. When Pete Alonso, the former fan favorite no longer on the team, returned to Citi Field for the first time, he garnered more enthusiastic cheers from the crowd than the current Mets players, and the latter took some offense. I couldn’t blame either party. For my part, I retained my own perverse interest in watching the Mets lose. There was, for example, the game on July 5th, in which the Mets almost blew a seven-run lead in the bottom of the ninth inning, something that hadn’t been done in more than 25 years. They ended up winning the game, just barely, yet I can’t help but feel it would have been better had they lost. It would have made for the better story.
Image credit: Don Harrison (Flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)
It went on long enough that the crowd curdled and its cheers turned sarcastic. It was the middle of April, just three weeks into a six-month season. The New York Mets had lost eleven games in a row and it was becoming obvious—inevitable, fated, how could anyone have ever believed otherwise?—that they were about to lose a twelfth. Yes, the baseball season is long, but no matter how many games there are in a season, a double-digit losing streak is damning.
Each game in this streak was entrepreneurial, the team devising innovative ways to blow it every night. After Devin Williams, their newly-signed closer (a player whose entire job is premised on his ability to not give up runs in the ninth inning) ceded the two winning runs to the other team, the Mets brought in a pitcher named Austin Warren, a player I hadn’t even known was on the roster. Warren has spent most of his professional baseball career in the minor leagues, getting called up to the bigs only when MLB teams found themselves scrounging for anybody they can reasonably trot out to the mound to, as they say, mop things up, before being sent down again. That evening, Warren was there to mop things up. The Mets’ manager, Carlos Mendoza, looked like he was on the verge of tears when he pulled Williams from the game, accepting what everyone in the ballpark already knew: the game was lost. They just needed to get to the end, and getting them there was Warren’s job. (This is one of the beautiful things about baseball: it forces you to play through to the end, no matter your circumstances.) When Warren proved as adept as Williams had been inept, striking out all three batters he faced to put a merciful end to things, the Citi Field crowd showered him with ironic chants of “M! V! P!” Or maybe not ironic. His was, arguably, the most impressive performance of the night. For those three outs, the unexpected, unassuming Warren had indeed been the Mets’ most valuable player.
The twelve-game losing streak had scrambled the crowd’s reaction, and I admit I was with them. At some point during the free fall, I began rooting for the Mets to lose. I wanted to see how deeply they could plumb the depths.
I’m drawn to baseball, in part, because of the futility embedded in its structure. There are the famous adages: even the best team will lose sixty games in a season, the best hitters will fail 70 percent of the time. It’s a game in which success is the exception and failure is presumed. And the Mets can fail like no other team. Observing the team’s origins in 1962—one of the worst seasons from any team in MLB history—and comparing them to the infallible Yankees, Roger Angell wrote fondly of Mets fans, “This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming.”
By the fourth game of the 2026 Mets’ losing streak, there were already promises from the team that they were “better than that,” a then-dubious claim proven even more dubious by the eight subsequent losses. The team, on paper, was supposed to be good. Before the season, prognosticators with precise mathematical formulae had given them an 80 percent chance of making the postseason (then they told us that no team had ever made the postseason after losing twelve games in a row). Many of the Mets players had histories of playing well; in fact some were among the best in the league, but in April 2026 they were among the worst. There were statistical explanations (the Mets were among the teams with the widest gap between their “expected” and actual results) and psychological explanations (“pressing,” the idea that losing compounds when you try too hard to succeed). The New York Post, characteristically, blamed Mayor Zohran Mamdani: the Mets’ losing streak began after Mamdani appeared in a video with and hugged team mascot Mr. Met. “CURSE OF THE MAMBINO,” read the headline. One commentator, an executive from another team, turned spiritual: “I’m not sure there’s much of a soul to that team.” Those closest to the train wreck refused to offer explanations. There were a lot of players staring off into the distance and shaking their heads during postgame interviews. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mendoza, the manager, said. I knew the Mets were irredeemably in it when multiple outlets reported that a copy of the self-help book The Coffee Bean was placed in each player’s locker. The book promises to show readers “the power inside us to transform our environment”—the environment being, in this case, I guess, the Mets themselves.
The start of the season had not been so dour. I was at the ballpark for Opening Day, a miraculously beautiful Thursday in late March, the only day that week that would get above seventy degrees. I kept score and chatted with the faithful around me. I ate two hot dogs and wondered who would be “my guy” for the season. The Mets won. While there were portents we could’ve heeded—allowing seven runs to the Pittsburgh Pirates—I, and I believe most of my fellow Mets fans, chose to focus on the positive. Only later that night did I read about the dead pigeon that fell onto the grass in the middle of the game. “I’m not superstitious,” Carson Benge, the rookie right fielder, said after the game. No, of course not.
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While the Mets underwent their daily humiliation rituals, I read The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the 1968 novel by Robert Coover newly reissued by New York Review Books. You won’t find the titular Henry at the ballpark, frank in hand. Instead, he orders pastrami sandwiches up to his apartment, where he sweats alone and hunches over his kitchen table, staring down at sheets of paper, pausing only to use the bathroom and grab another beer.
These sheets of paper constitute the Universal Baseball Association (UBA): the game Henry concocted in which every pitch and swing is dictated by a dice roll. Three white dice, 56 combinations, along with “special strategy charts” and a “Chart of Extraordinary Occurrences.” From these odds Henry builds a world, if not quite a universe. It’s part Strat-O-Matic, part Dungeons & Dragons. He keeps detailed records, fills binders with statistics and “historical” accounts, establishes family lineages on the field and political factions within the Association’s management. His players have names like Hatrack Hines and nicknames like “the Old Philosopher.” His imaginary crowds devour hot dogs and down beers, and Henry sees in his mind these “timeless gestures passed.” There are songs and legends making up the culture of the UBA. There’s even room for superstition—at one critical juncture, Henry refrains from washing his hands after peeing, for fear of disrupting his palms’ communion with the dice. Much of Coover’s novel takes place in Henry’s head; the story we read is the story of Henry telling the story of the UBA to himself.
In this way, the novel is emblematic of Coover’s bibliography. Across 21 novels and dozens of short stories, Coover’s primary literary preoccupation was literature itself, the very act of storytelling, whether he was deconstructing a familiar fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty in Briar Rose, Hansel and Gretel in “The Gingerbread House”) or giving us an alternative account of a bible story (Noah’s Ark in “The Brother”) or simply (well, nothing in Coover’s writing is ever simply, but for comparison’s sake) depicting the thoughts of a guy as he rides the office elevator (“The Elevator”). Perhaps Coover’s most famous work is “The Babysitter,” from his first short-story collection, Pricksongs & Descants, which narrates the myriad ways a night babysitting in the suburbs might go, from the routine to the romantic to the comedic to the disturbingly violent, all in shuffled order, the variations crashing into each other. The effect is like flipping channels on television, and Coover tips his hand at the end:
Coover’s approach to narrative is ostensibly democratizing; it is, at least, leveling. For him, no story is more powerful or precious than any other; even the nativity story is “a common kind of story, and not a particularly entertaining one at that,” as the narrator of “J’s Marriage” describes it. It’s story itself, the form, that matters, and the content remains eminently mutable, as expressed in his story “Beginnings.” It is, as I read it, a parable about writer’s block; the story begins with its protagonist shooting himself, the blood splattering on the wall in paradoxical messages about beginnings, and only then can he begin writing. He starts stories but doesn’t finish them, because “it became important to delay the climax.” He fixates on how to tell the stories, and we get glimpses of these, but never the full thing: “He began a parody on Plato’s cave parable, in which he celebrated, not the shadows, but the generosity of the wall.”
Coover is often grouped with mid-century postmodernist and metafictional writers like John Barth and Donald Barthelme, and his style is varyingly described as (admiringly) “a manifestation of the futility of trying to systemize the chaos of human experience,” or (in frustration) “a formal and stylistic cul de sac,” “nothing but mode: a series of acrobatic exercises in technique.” I’m amenable to both interpretations, and there’s a case to be made for each. There’s only so far a story like “You Must Remember This”—which imagines an unseen scene from Casablanca as absurd erotica, with lines like, “his organ luxuriating in the warm tub of her vagina”—can take a reader. But when the writing transcends formal exercise, a Coover story can capture something more human. Take “The Elevator.” It is the story of a person coming alive to their surroundings: “Every morning without exception and without so much as reflecting upon it, Martin takes the self-service elevator to the fourteenth floor,” the story opens, yet what follows is a series of fifteen reflections on this elevator ride. There are cruel accusations of farting from his coworkers (and subsequent revenge plotting), farcical sexual fantasies, and existential reckonings: “Perhaps Martin will meet Death on the elevator.” Coover’s work, at its best, strives to show the capacious possibility within the “deformed browbeaten mind-animals” that we are—even the inside of an elevator can be a cave wall. And yet Coover’s writing always has an ironic undercurrent, which draws our attention to the walls: Martin’s thoughts can be crude and pitiful, circumscribed by his isolation. There is still a limit to possibility, however vast, when it resides within one person.
In The Universal Baseball Association, Henry reckons with the limits of his own universe, and his limits as its proprietor. When the novel opens, Henry is committed to the rational neutrality of the odds he’s given his world. He’s proud of them. He worked through multiple iterations to find the right calibration. “Be prepared for the lucky hit,” Henry thinks mid-game, “that really wouldn’t be lucky at all, but merely in the course of things.” But in this game, the odds align with the story. Damon Rutherford, a rookie pitcher that Henry comes to care about more than any other player, throws a perfect game—no hits or walks allowed, as impressive a feat in actual baseball as in Henry’s version. Henry sees fans storming the field. He envisions Damon inspiring a renaissance within the Association. Through Damon’s feat, Henry, in both his inner world and the outer one, is revitalized.
Henry remains committed to the odds, too, when, in a later game, Damon is killed on the field—one of the possible “Extraordinary Occurrences” come to pass. As the dice roll just so, he perseveres and tells himself that it all comes down to the odds, even in the face of impending cataclysm: “Oh sure, he was free to throw away the dice, run the game by whim, but then what would be the point of it? … He and his players were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice.” He sees it through, and when the dice come up 1-1-1, he laments: “He knew even before he looked … Damon Rutherford was dead.”
But this fealty causes Henry to unravel and reveals his ultimate allegiance. The game in Henry’s head slowly bleeds into his corporeal existence. He’s caught talking to himself in public, imagining the UBA. He inhabits his characters’ personas when drinking at the bar and ordering at a restaurant. His grief over Damon’s death— “Later, he’d have it rain,” he thinks, to match his mood—fuels an increasingly manic obsession with the game; he plays sixty games in 24 hours, skips work and risks getting fired, then becomes sloppy with his own UBA bookkeeping. Henry is not unaware of his descent—he feels a sense of shame, “like an adolescent caught masturbating”—but he can’t help himself. In desperation, he upends the fundamental logic of his fictional world. He intervenes in his game. When presented with the opportunity, Henry fixes a roll, switches the dice to kill the player who threw the pitch that killed Damon. He chooses the revenge narrative over sheer chance. Then he vomits pizza all over his paper charts and goes to sleep.
Henry is seduced by a fantasy of control, and this explains why he chooses the UBA over real baseball. For though the UBA is, ostensibly, governed by impartial odds, they are still his odds, as he has determined them. As Henry reminds himself early in the novel, “the dice and charts and other paraphernalia were only the mechanics of the drama, not the drama itself.” In the end, the story is the one Henry decides to tell. At one point, Henry’s friend Lou—his only friend, as far as we can tell—asks him why he doesn’t go in for real baseball. Henry explains that he went to a few games at the ballpark, but no matter what happened on the field, they left him cold. “Fantastic game. And I nearly fell asleep,” he confesses. Neither did Henry ever have fantasies about playing the game himself, being “just an ordinary ballplayer.” He prefers, instead, the numerical detritus of the game: “Then, a couple days later, at home, I would pick up my scoreboard. Suddenly, what was dead had life, what was wearisome became stirring, beautiful, unbelievably real … I found out the scorecards were enough. I didn’t need the games.”
Ben Marcus, in his introduction to the NYRB edition of The Universal Baseball Association, writes that “Coover’s metafiction was never about cute self-consciousness and references to an author who kept annoyingly reminding us that he was the one writing what we were reading.” But there is undeniably a persistent anxiety about authorship throughout Coover’s work. A UBA player thinks, “I don’t know if there’s really a record-keeper up there or not … But even if there weren’t, I think we’d have to play the game as though there were.” And, like Henry with his odds, Coover often wants to give the illusion of losing control over his stories by insisting on their proliferating possibilities. In “The End of Books,” his 1992 essay on how internet-fueled “hypertext” could revolutionize literature, Coover looks forward to a fictive mode “favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author.” He is, in my opinion, looking for baseball.
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As soon as Henry imposes his own desired storyline on the game, once he fixes the dice to kill Jock Casey, the UBA ceases to be baseball and becomes fiction—and we never see gameplay again. In this way, Coover’s novel is the most honest of baseball novels, because it is about the impossibility of a baseball novel. Baseball—sports in general, really—is a fiction that transcends an author, because there are as many authors as there are players, coaches, umpires and even fans, and this proliferation, and the tensions between them all, results in the presence of genuine chance. The game is, as Coover might remind us, an artificial construct that requires something like a suspension of disbelief—or, rather its opposite, the adoption of belief, the acceptance that the rules of the game matter—but one that adheres to no single participant’s narrative. Baseball can be used as a literary device, a metaphor, but a fictional baseball game can never provide the same experience as an actual baseball game because a fictional game is, despite Coover’s hopes, always the “definitive utterance” of its creator. It is, definitionally, contrived. Whereas I watch baseball because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither does anyone else. An alternative approach to baseball fiction is to forgo fictionalizing the game altogether and instead fictionalize around the game, as in Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall. Initially published as a story in Harper’s, Pafko is the novella that opens DeLillo’s Underworld and was reissued as a standalone volume by Scribner in September to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the actual baseball game it depicts: Pafko is Andy Pafko, left fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers in game three of their three-game playoff in 1951 against the New York Giants, and he’s at the wall because he’s watching Bobby Thomson’s game-winning home run fly into the stands. This was “The Shot Heard ’Round the World” in one of the most famous baseball games in history, in which the Giants completed the most improbable of improbable comebacks to overtake the Dodgers and win the pennant.
It’s a game as steeped in legend as any from the peak of Henry’s mania, and despite being based on true events, DeLillo’s story is only marginally less fantastical than Henry’s imaginings. DeLillo is writing forty years after the events of the game, and he imagines it as a kind of mid-century apotheosis. The story is narrated from three perspectives: the fan that ends up with the home-run ball (the ball itself subject of myth, and a recurring presence in Underworld); Russ Hodges, the radio announcer who delivers the famous “The Giants win the pennant!” call of the game; and the muckety-muck quartet of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover, the latter receiving word of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb test in the middle of the game. Albert Einstein, too, gets a mention. “Some reporter asked him to figure out the mathematics of the pennant race,” one character explains. “What are the myriad possibilities? Who’s got the edge?” Einstein is asked by someone who wishes real baseball were more reminiscent of Henry’s UBA. “The hell does he know?” another retorts. “Apparently not much. He picked the Dodgers to eliminate the Giants last Friday.”
What makes DeLillo’s portentous scenes work is that he grounds them in an actual game as it actually happened, however improbably. His fiction seeks out the systems undergirding everything, but in baseball, at least, he respects the inexplicability of event. “The difference comes when the ball is hit,” DeLillo writes, “the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play.” Or, in other words, between the gridlines of the box score. In Henry’s UBA, conversely, we always see the hand behind the game. This, then, cannot be baseball, the essence of which is indomitability. In Pafko, Hodges recounts his past radio work narrating recreations of baseball games, “inventing ninety-nine percent of the action,” not unlike Henry constructing the action of his UBA. Hodges spent those years dreaming of one day “doing real baseball from a booth in the Polo Grounds.” Real baseball, he clarifies, is “the thing that happens in the sun.”
It helps that DeLillo uses a game that needs little embellishment, and so instead of concocting the dramatic events of a dramatic game, he captures the experience of watching such a game. There is frequent reference to “the crowd” throughout Pafko, and the baseball fans throughout the city. “They’re eating and drinking baseball,” DeLillo writes. He describes the fans tossing paper trash from the stands to mess with the Dodgers’ fielders, receipts and napkins and pages torn from Life. (At one point, Hoover examines one of these pages showing Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death and gets turned on.) Even clapping takes on heightened meaning. A “rhythmic applause starts … this is how the crowd enters the game. The repeated three-beat has the force of some abject faith, a desperate kind of will toward magic and accident.” I feel my own experience as a baseball fan in Pafko, confronting my cynical approach to Mets fandom: “You know that thing that happens when you give up before the end and then your team comes back to perform acts of valor and you feel a queasy shame stealing over you like pond slick.”
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If only the Mets had come back to perform acts of valor. The statistics that predicted a triumphant Mets season turned out to be their own kind of fiction too. The further stats are removed from the game as it is actually played, the more they veer into prediction and abstraction rather than description of the game, the more they become a mere story imposed on the game’s unpredictability. They are revealed to be what they are: meager attempts to control an uncontrollable phenomenon, to salvage knowability from the unknowable. There’s a reason why, as they say, you play the game.
But I, too, am tempted by the desire to foist a narrative on the game. Isn’t that why I rooted for the Mets to lose? Their fall from favor, their immiseration, made for the more compelling story than random mediocrity. Literary critic Arlen J. Hansen links Henry in The Universal Baseball Association to Einstein’s famous admonishment of quantum physics, that God “does not throw dice” (the same Einstein who couldn’t predict the Giants’ pennant in 1951), and the novel shows just how discomfiting it would be, were it so—enough to drive even God to choose story over probability. Henry could not ultimately abide by his own system of rationality, and so he destroyed the baseball in the Universal Baseball Association. By the end of the novel, the UBA has transformed from baseball into a ritual recreation of Damon’s death, the events of the preceding pages fogged in rumor and speculation, Henry himself absent from the narration. There is no longer talk of dice rolls or scenarios on a chart. Now adrift, the players of the UBA contemplate fate and free will, the accident and invention of history. They turn to folklore, myth, religion. One concludes, “God exists and he is a nut.”
Every explanation is a story. The Mets did not stop losing games after their streak came to an end, they only stopped losing so unceasingly. I ventured back out to the ballpark on a Wednesday night at the end of April. The weather was as miserable as Opening Day had been lovely—April baseball is always a crapshoot, weather-wise—but a modicum of hope induced me to brave the chilling wind and forecasted rain; the night before, the team looked like they were finally coming alive, winning confidently and resembling something close to a competent ball club, and I wanted to say I’d been there for the turnaround. The Mets lost, of course, in a dispiriting fashion that made me feel foolish (and, by the next morning, sick with a sore throat). Later, I fried in the August sun watching as the Mets finally strung together a few impressive wins, giving us just enough hope for next year—there is, tritely and truly, always hope for next year—and sat through more wind and rain during the last home game of the season in late September, the team going out the same way they came in, frustrating and listless.
The conversation remained much the same all summer. “There’s some psychological effect,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns posited, before admitting the team’s continued failure was “really tough for me to explain.” (After the end of the season, with the Mets finishing near the bottom of the standings, Stearns described the year as an “uncapped downside scenario,” a phrase I think Coover could’ve had fun with.) Austin Warren was sent down, and then quickly returned, and he continued to be more or less reliable out of the bullpen. At the end of June, the Mets fired Mendoza, and most agreed that his termination did not represent a verdict on his job performance so much as it constituted a sacrifice to the baseball gods (their benevolence remained elusive). In July, news broke first that the Mets had been trying to use AI for in-game strategy, then that the Mets had become the first MLB team to officially partner with a prediction market, both of which I have no comment on. Once again, Juan Soto proved baseball’s resistance to the single author; he was one of the best players in the sport this year (when he wasn’t injured, at least), trapped on one of the worst teams in the league. When Pete Alonso, the former fan favorite no longer on the team, returned to Citi Field for the first time, he garnered more enthusiastic cheers from the crowd than the current Mets players, and the latter took some offense. I couldn’t blame either party. For my part, I retained my own perverse interest in watching the Mets lose. There was, for example, the game on July 5th, in which the Mets almost blew a seven-run lead in the bottom of the ninth inning, something that hadn’t been done in more than 25 years. They ended up winning the game, just barely, yet I can’t help but feel it would have been better had they lost. It would have made for the better story.
Image credit: Don Harrison (Flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.