SOURCE: Caldwell, Roy C., Jr. “Of Hobby-Horses, Baseball, and Narrative: Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association.” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 1 (spring 1987): 161–71.

In the following essay, Caldwell discusses the intersection of sport and literature in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., drawing attention to parallels between the formal game structure of baseball and Coover's authorial game-playing in the novel.

The play-world is not a real situation involving real men; it has an odd character of appearance—it is not real, and yet not nothing.

—Eugen Fink (109)¹

I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his HOBBY-HORSE.

—Laurence Sterne (1:85)

I lay claim in this novel … to the essential features of all games: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium.

—Jorge Luis Borges (75)

When A. Bartlett Giamatti recently accepted his appointment to the presidency of the National League, he commented on his move from academia to the sporting world by observing...