Thoughts & Reflections on The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. by Robert Coover

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. is a book experienced something of a revival of attention in the Spring of 2026, and with the premise of a person spending life obsessed with a version of fantasy baseball certainly seemed pretty up my alley, I was looking forward to reading this and was hoping to come out of the experience with a new favorite book. Unfortunately, it was a disappointing and frustrating letdown — and that’s without getting into the cringe-y misogyny.

Henry is a middle-aged accountant slaving away at some firm, and he spends almost all of his free time playing a tabletop fantasy baseball game that he created himself, complete with events tied to rolls of the dice and a whole encyclopedia’s worth of fictional players with histories and legacies. While Henry may have a pretty active imagination, the players he’s imagined have almost no color or substance. Even the name of the player who died and set off Henry’s mental decline is pretty forgettable. 

Jack Kerouac once did something like this, and indeed there seems to be a Kerouacian influence in the editing choices that make this a pretty clunky read, and it can be difficult to ascertain whether Henry is talking about real life or his pretend baseball life, especially whenever he ventures outside his apartment and without Lou to bring him back to reality.  

That Keroacian energy is indeed present, and that energy can carry the book, but it’s a lot of energy for so little actual substance. The book is most alive when Lou is invited to participate in the game, and it is all too easy to relate to him sensing the absurdity of the whole deal, as well as his impatience and frustration and incredulity he expresses while still maintaining curiosity and fascination at Henry’s audacious and wild invention. 

But the rapey parts….yeah, that shit is problematic. It’s one thing for a fiction author to invent a fictional character who makes up a whole-ass fictional world within an imagination that doesn’t exist, and it’s another thing for an author to have his fictional character make up a rape that happens in that world. A book I was very excited to discover and read suddenly got a whole lot less pleasant, and completing it felt like a trudge. There is a very interesting book inside this book, but a problematic relationship to women sully much of the enjoyment.

Cover Image: The photo of the baseball game is circa 1923, author unknown, and is under public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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