[In Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association] Henry Waugh's game-world has been so completely internalized that it creates its own course and meaning, creates its own myths and rituals, entirely cut off from … established mythic traditions…. Henry Waugh's baseball game is so fertile in metaphorical significance that there is virtually no activity in his life upon which the game does not impinge. There is nothing the game cannot include. Henry Waugh is the only character in all of recent sports fiction who can bear the full weight of Eugen Fink's ontological definition of play: "The player experiences himself as the lord of the products of his imagination—because it is virtually unlimited, play is an eminent manifestation of human freedom." In The Universal Baseball Association imagination is so truly protean that it becomes an end in itself. The final vision of the novel is of a complete play-world...