The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.

Description

J. Henry Waugh, a lonely and unhappy accountant, devotes his evenings to an eight-team tabletop baseball league governed by dice, charts, and decades of meticulously recorded history. As its fifty-sixth season begins, brilliant rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford throws an exceptionally rare perfect game, renewing Henry’s delight in the elaborate competition. Henry does more than calculate scores: he imagines careers, families, rivalries, and political struggles for every player in his private universe. When a disturbing turn of chance strikes the league, however, his pleasure becomes grief, and his fantasies darken as coworker Lou tries to reach him. The novel turns a solitary game into an unsettling inquiry into chance, authorship, loss, and the porous boundary between creation and life.

Themes