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Friday
Since I no longer follow baseball closely, an injury to this or that player doesn’t normally catch my attention, especially if the team is not in contention for a title. In the case of 29-year-old Shohei Ohtani, however, I sit up and pay attention. I also think of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
That’s because it too shows something bad happening to a miraculous player. More on the novel in a moment.
If you don’t know about Shohei, I’m here to tell you that “miraculous” is almost an understatement. Before yesterday’s injury, he may have been both the best hitter AND the best pitcher in the league. As Joe Posnanski wrote in the Washington Post a week ago, Shohei “is doing things on a baseball diamond that scramble the mind.”
Many have noted in recent years that the game has become almost impossible to watch, which is why we’ve seen pitchers and batters put on a time clock and a new element introduced into extra-inning games. Nothing revitalize a game so much, however, as a one-in-a-lifetime talent.
Posnanski pointed out last week that, as a hitter, Shohei was leading or was tied for the lead in the American league in triples, home runs, walks, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. At the same time, he had allowed fewer hits per game than any other pitcher. Batter have been hitting only .185 against him, the best figure in all of baseball. Posnanski notes,
There is no precedent in Major League Baseball. The closest thing was Babe Ruth, who devoted baseball fans will know was a great pitcher before he became a legendary slugger. But even the Babe did not do what Ohtani is doing. He more or less stopped pitching once he became an everyday player. There were great pitcher-hitter combinations in the Negro Leagues, such as Bullet Rogan and Martin Dihigo. But, alas, they spent their careers in the shadows before Jackie Robinson.
In his forthcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, Posnanski has a chapter devoted to Shohei. The player presents a special problem for the author of such a book, however, as he keeps topping himself. In an early draft, Posnanski wrote about back-to-back games against Kansas City in 2022 where Shohei hit two home runs and drove in eight runs on Tuesday and then threw eight scoreless innings with 13 strikeouts on Wednesday. He later rewrote the chapter when Shohei “struck out his friend and teammate Mike Trout, the best player of the past decade, to close out Japan’s victory over the United States in the World Baseball Classic.”
Then, in June, Shohei had what Posnanski describes as “perhaps the greatest month any player has ever had.” The Japanese player hit .394 with 15 home runs in 27 games while also winning two games as a pitcher and striking out 37 batters. Then, in July, he had “the most singular day,” throwing a one-hit shutout in the first game of a doubleheader in Detroit and following that up with “two titanic home runs” in the second game. Posnanski writes, “I might be writing and rewriting that Ohtani chapter for the next decade.”
Shohei has certainly caught my interest, which is no small feat since I fell out of love with baseball years ago after having been a passionate fan, first of the Cubs and then (when we moved to Maryland) of the Baltimore Orioles. I followed the latter avidly for several years, listening to them nightly on the radio as I washed the dishes. I became disillusioned and left the sport when the Orioles’ narcissistic owner (but I repeat myself, as Twain would say*) fired the smart and witty sportscaster John Miller. The magic had gone out of the game for me.
Which is what happens in Universal Baseball Association, where the game had fallen into the doldrums. Coover’s novel anticipates sports fantasy leagues by having an aging accountant invent a game played with three dice. Plays depend on the roll, and Waugh keeps the stats while creating names and personal histories for all the players. The league has played 56 seasons when the book opens so that Waugh can think back to fathers and grandfathers who also played the game.
But the game has gotten stale so that Waugh feels himself just going through the motions. That is, until Damon Rutherford, a rookie pitcher and son of hall-of-famer Brock Rutherford, explodes on the scene. In the first chapter we watch Damon pitch a perfect game (!):
Henry’s heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on! He was sure of it. More than just another ball game now: history! And Damon Rutherford was making it. Ho ho! too good to be true! And yes, the stands were charged with it, turned on, it was the old days all over again, and with one voice they rent the air as the Haymaker Star Hamilton Craft spun himself right off his feet in a futile cut at Damon’s third strike—zing! whoosh! zap! OUT! Henry laughed, watched the hometown Pioneer fans cheer the boy, cry out his name, then stretch—not just stretch—leap up for luck. He saw beers bought and drunk, hot dogs eaten, timeless gestures passed.
This fantasy league gives meaning to a life that is otherwise spent working for a dull accounting firm during the day and ordering home delivery deli sandwiches in the evening, along with an occasional trip to the local bar and a fling with an aging prostitute. While Waugh is unable to explain this private passion to others, they can see how his excitement over Rutherford’s achievement lights him up.
Sports can do that, structuring our time and our passions in ways that seem disproportionate to their actual importance. After all, it’s only a game.
But because sports has this outsized influence, Coover uses the fantasy baseball league to further explore the meaning of life when tragedy hits. In the midst of Rutherford’s rookie glory, Waugh twice rolls three sixes in a row, which takes him to “the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart.” Anything can happen here, from a fist fight to a fixed game. The chart, Coover explains, is what gives the game its special quality, making it “much more than just a series of hits and walks and outs.”
Unfortunately for Waugh, the chart indicates that Damon, the future of the league, has been struck by a beanball and killed. With this sudden reversal of fortune Waugh’s life, which had seemed redeemed by sports success, suddenly appears existentially and tragically absurd.
So how does Waugh cope? At first he doesn’t but instead spirals into madness, experiencing fully the bleakness of his existence.
I’m not saying that the lives of baseball enthusiasts will suddenly feel bleak with Shohei’s injury. Furthermore, there’s a possibility that he will come back from this tear in one of his elbow ligaments. I can’t see him ever having another season like the one we’ve just seen, however. I fully expect him to give up pitching.
In the novel, Waugh makes a devil’s bargain in an attempt to pull himself out of his madness. Since he happens to be the divine creator of this world (J. Waugh can be read as Jahweh), he can do what he wants. Einstein famously said that “God does not play dice with the universe,” and here is the game’s proprietor choosing, for once, not to play dice. Or rather, he deliberately fixes a throw, which is the same thing. To restore balance, he believes the pitcher who killed Damon must be killed in return, so he arranges a trip to the Chart of Extraordinary Circumstances and has him knocked off by a hard-hit line drive.
The baseball universe has now become unrecognizable, however, as the players sense strange patterns occurring within their lives. Take free will and chance out of the equation and reality begins to look much different.
Which means that Coover’s novel can provide us insight into more than sports. (Warning: I’m about to veer from sports into politics so feel free to stop reading.) Since many Americans these days like to think that they can create “alternative facts” (to quote Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway) that will correspond with their desires—for instance, they believe they can wish away climate change and Covid—we get a glimpse of what life would look like if that were true.
A quick history lesson here. Contempt for the so-called “reality-based community” was expressed by a member of the George W. Bush administration, who dismissed those who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” This official went on to say,
That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Donald Trump, of course, took “creating other new realities” to a whole new level.
So what happens in the novel? Well, the players start formulating elaborate conspiracy theories about how the world is constructed. (Waugh by this time has disappeared from the book so that we only see his mad creations.) They start noticing prophetic number combinations and repetitions of old dramas. Fatalism and paranoia begin to rule their lives.
It’s a reminder that life is much more enchanting if it is not predetermined, if we have free will. Think of how facing up to reality—including climate change and Covid—can bring out the best in human beings as we discover new sources of energy and new vaccines. Think of how interacting with other races, ethnicities, and nationalities—uncomfortable though some find it—causes us to adapt and expand in ways that confining ourselves to the familiar never does.
And think of how truly wonderful it is when a player like Shohei Ohtani bursts on the scene, even if only for a brief moment. We couldn’t have imagined him before he showed up but, once he did, he stand in awe. We thought we understood how reality is configured, only to discover our vision was limited.
*Twain quote: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”