Baseball Universe

A prose novel, television special, graphic novel and film that are all related to baseball.

A friend who works as a professor and writer and knows my taste pretty well recommended The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover. I was unfamiliar with Coover’s work before reading this 1968 novel about a middle-aged accountant who keeps himself young at heart and holds the discrete areas of his life in balance through the tonic of his obsession with his personal fantasy baseball league. Henry Waugh has been secretly maintaining his imaginary players and teams for years, using dice and an increasingly elaborate system of charts and meticulously-maintained records to keep track of what transpires season after season in a private athletic fantasy realm. Professional baseball rewards the recording and analysis of copious statistics and has a richly storied and mythologized history, and Henry similarly, but fictitiously, uses the emotionless determinism of dice rolls as a structure around which to weave a fine tapestry of thoroughly-imagined careers, lives, triumphs and conflicts. In balancing the irrefutability of random happenstance with the glory of human creativity, he’s refashioned statistical accounting into a sprawling narrative of life and death.

I detected early on, and Coover makes it increasingly apparent as the narrative develops, that Henry is also sinking into something deeper than the merely human: he’s fashioned a proprietary reality, a Universal Baseball Association, where he has the god’s-eye-view of a deist Creator. He feels the need to construct unique names, personalities and histories for every single player over the many imaginary decades of his UBA because he can’t (or at least knows he shouldn’t) control the unfolding clockwork history of the universe he has set in motion; within this constraint he can exercise his imagination by imbuing each soul in the UBA with a worthy name and persona and can control how they will respond to every randomly-determined ball and strike and win and loss. He crafts their songs, their political parties and, in a development that sneaks up on him but that an attentive reader will spot coming, their religion. The imaginary players’ religiosity is at first a loose outgrowth of the UBA’s competing political factions, inspired in the players’ minds by a dim but palpable sense that something above and beyond them, known to us to be no more than a fifty-six-year-old accountant with emotional problems, is in charge of their universe. As Henry’s creation gets the better of him and he succumbs to the temptation to start manipulating the dice to procure his preferred outcomes, the imaginary souls populating his imaginary universe become dogmatically, ritualistically religious because the plain fact of their now being not merely observed but also controlled by a Creator means that it would be more insane not to acknowledge Henry’s divine intervention in their affairs. But since all of this is really only happening inside of Henry’s head anyway, this perversion of the relationship between a god and his creation comes to signify Henry’s descent into madness, or at least his submission to a commitment to permanently hole up in his apartment, enacting and manipulating the UBA at the cost of his job, his friends and the rest of the world outside his door.

The parts of the book I enjoyed the least were the lengthy sections set entirely within the universe of the UBA, where Henry as a character fades up into the aether and the reader is deposited alongside the players on their plane of existence. I was thoroughly interested in Henry’s own “real” world of hum-drum, small-city America circa 1968, conjured with more restraint and finesse by Coover than Henry shows in conjuring the corny fictional world of the UBA. But the novel’s chilling conclusion establishes that Robert Coover and Henry Waugh both needed these two distinct but intertwined narrative strata to grate against each other for their collapse in on one another to make the ending as unsettling and affecting as it is. In Coover’s book, what began as a quaint hobby comes to be understood as a hubristic overreach that eventually threatens to send a fragile mind to the showers.

I am a lifelong Peanuts fan and have read all fifty years’ worth of the newspaper strip in chronological order, but there’s a considerable amount of associated animated content I’ve never seen and I was certain that some of it, like much of the original comics, would be baseball-related. It turns out that the second of the famous Peanuts prime-time specials, following on 1965’s breakout favorite A Charlie Brown Christmas, is 1966’s less-well-remembered Charlie Brown’s All Stars!, focused around an arc involving Charlie Brown’s dual role as pitcher and manager for the gang’s baseball club. Highlights include an exciting scene built around Snoopy’s base-stealing prowess and a touching subplot with Charlie Brown declining an invitation to join a league whose rules will exclude his female and canine friends, which leads to Linus donating his notorious security blanket for the tailoring of a bespoke manager’s uniform for Charlie Brown as a gift of thanks from his teammates. The show ends on a typically Schulzian note of uncomfortable reflection and mixed emotion, with Charlie Brown standing sadly but stoically on the pitcher’s mound in a downpour and Linus crowding alongside him to clutch at the corner of the aforementioned uniform. With the exception of 2015’s The Peanuts Movie, which did a surprisingly fine job of updating the Peanuts gang to a feature-length CGI format, Charlie Brown’s All-Stars! is the best piece of animated Peanuts material I’ve seen, both for quality of content and for the vibrant, jazzy Sixties-style design and atmosphere.

Like Charlie Brown’s dropped fly or the vagaries of J. Henry Waugh’s dice, “baseball is won and lost on the little things,” as says the narrator Emmet in Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, a short, stimulating, well-researched graphic novel from 2007 written by James Sturm and illustrated by Rich Tommaso. The cleverness of the choice of Emmet as the reader’s surrogate, along with the relegation of the figure of Paige to a role somewhere between historical legend and athletic demigod, is textured with an inspiring narrative wrinkle: in 1929 at the age of eighteen, Emmet and Paige cross paths with Emmet at the plate facing Paige on the mound. Emmet scores a rare hit on the famous pitcher but sustains a career-ending injury in the process, and the rest of the story compels the reader to quietly ponder the unanswerable question of whether it was worth it, as Emmet endures life as a sharecropper in Jim Crow Alabama and watches from the standpoint of a common fan as Paige charts his journey into the record books. The writing is efficient but expansive and the spare illustration has the kind of subtle stylization that confident cartoonists use to evoke the convincing sense of a bygone era more effectively than most movies or even prose literature can usually do. The supplemental notes at the back of the book allude to one of the most interesting things about the game of baseball — the competing playing styles that develop across different leagues, eras and cultures, demonstrated in Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow with mention of how players from the old Negro Leagues utilized “aggressive base running” and “did not sit around waiting for home runs but rather forced the action.”

In 1956, a decade before the television debut of Charlie Brown’s All Stars!, Masaki Kobayashi directed the Japanese film I Will Buy You, a simmering black-and-white sports/business drama about the machinations, deceptions and dashed hopes behind the process of a major-league baseball team acquiring a promising prospect. The innocent-seeming kid is an exceptional hitter for his college team and the film’s story concerns a big-league scout attempting to maneuver around rivals and collude with or neutralize the player’s girlfriend, family and personal coach to close the deal. Everyone tangled in this web seems surprised to find that everyone else is as cynical and conniving as themselves, except for the wiliest character who sets up the film’s disquieting conclusion by revealing his shrewdness at the last moment. The movie has an unshowy, common-sense compositional approach and creeping, predatory camera movements that suit the snake-pit of the premise’s cultural environment. Much of the filmmakers’ point seems to have been that postwar Japan was booming, that baseball was big business and that, while they have recourse to the rituals of etiquette and civility, there is too much money on the table for characters like these to fuck around with trivialities like honesty or principle. A compelling look at an interesting topic in an overlooked film.