Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Coover, Robert
Marcus, Ben

Paperback

FantasyHumorGeneral Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.95

ISBN13: 9798896230182
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Mar 17 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.56 Width: 5.13 Depth: 7.96
Language: English
Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

Somewhere in a major-league American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh--no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh's life, as far as he is concerned, is lived in his head, where he is sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, which is now entering its fifty-sixth season. The games are played with dice and scorecards, and the players are just numbers and names, but for Waugh they're more real than the dreary office, the dive bar, and the dingy apartment in which he spends his days. Still, being sole proprietor is a lonely business, and when a few rolls of the dice spell tragedy for the rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford--a player Waugh believes will reinvigorate the game--the whole association is imperiled, along with the sanity of its isolated creator.

Robert Coover's fiction was a map of America, and The Universal Baseball Association is smack-dab in the center of it. Baseball, in Waugh's world, is an escape, and Waugh is nothing if not an all-American escapist with a capacity for denial so profound that it can only be called optimism.

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