SOURCE: "Demon Number: Damon and the Dice," in Robert Coover's Fiction, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 35-58.

Cope is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, Cope examines the significance of names and numbers in The Universal Baseball Association.

[Coover] knows that baseball is America's religion, and that it is so because it is America's special reaction to its own wildness, dream (or nightmare) of a lack of limits: It is the play that can be reduced to number. Or almost so. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is a meditation upon this paradox.

J. Henry Waugh, a fifty-six-year-old bachelor and petty accountant has invented a baseball game played with dice and charts, a double metonymy, a game substituted for a game. He is a genius at games, a mathematical genius who once invented "Intermonop," "a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen...