The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

by Robert Coover

  "No!" Henry cried. "The game!" He grabbed Lou's elbow roughly, pulled him up short. "Here! the stove!" He swept away the coffee pot as Lou brought the platter swooping down.

  "Whoo!" gasped Lou. He looked at his dripping hands, then around the kitchen for something to—

  "Here, wash in the sink there," Henry said. "I'll get soap and a towel."

  In the bathroom, he dropped the soap. Why was he so nervous? Lou alone in there, careening around, he could do anything. "It's a good one, Henry!" Lou called.

  Lou charged forward to meet him halfway, dripping water. Henry lunged forward, bound Lou's hands in the towel. Lou's eyebrows arched in astonishment. "Henry, is something . . . ?"

  "No!" Henry forced a loose laugh. "It's just that I was dozing sort of when you came, and you know how a sudden noise can make you jump, I'm still sort of . . ."

  "Oh," Lou smiled. "I'm sorry, Henry, only it was hot and—"

  "Say, it does look good!" Henry said, unwrapping it. Oregano and burnt cheese odors rose up and pleased him greatly. Must be hungry at that. Nothing since those sweet rolls. "Do you want to play a round of the game first, or... ?"

  " Better eat it while it's hot," said Lou, looking for a place to throw his overcoat. Henry reached forward, but too late.

  The coat went sailing over the back of a chair, sent a hurricane ripping through the league on the table. Lou leaned hugely over the pizza to breathe it in, eyes tracing its contours, judging its parts, studying its limits, as though deciphering a treasure map. "Boyoboy! Am I hungry!"

  "I'll get a knife."

  "Where'll we ... ?" Again his eye fell on the table. "Do you think we can make a space?"

  "I've got it all set up," Henry said. "Do you mind using a couple extra chairs for tables instead?"

  "No!" he smiled, rubbing his hands. "Getting cold out," he remarked, "but it's good for the appetite."

  Henry sliced the pizza into segments, obeying its special geography. Oils and juices oozed and bubbled. Herbs spackled the surface. A rich one with onions, sausage, mushrooms and a St. Andrew's cross of pepperonis. Lou Engel: the ubiquitous special customer. He placed half of it on the middle chair arranged by Lou, opened beers. "Ah!" said Lou, reaching for a slice. "Mmm!" said Henry, sinking his teeth in. They both laughed slyly, chewed appreciatively, drank beer, ate some more. "Great!" "Mmm!" "Feast!" "World of flavors!" "A symphony!" "Ha ha!" "Banquet, Henry!" "Mmm!" "Should've bought two or three." "Still another half." "I'm ready!" "More beer?" "You bet!" "Work of art!" "You said it!" "Out of this world, Lou!" "Those mushrooms—mmm! Can't stop!" "Why try? Be merciless!" "Onions, too—sweet!" "Paradise!" "Mmm, that's right—wonder if Adam and Eve could get pizza?" "If they couldn't, Lou, they were right in getting out!" "Ha ha! you (licking fingers) said it! Is there (tipping back to drain)—ah!—any more beer?" "Lots of it!"

  It was a large pizza, enormous in fact, Henry had never seen one as big, and as they neared the end of it, they ate more slowly, drank more steadily. Should get to the game, but an animal satisfaction was on him like a thick blanket, and it seemed criminal even to move. It was Lou, in fact, who brought it up: "What's that up there on the wall, Henry?"

  "The Team Standings Board. It shows where the teams are. I made it myself."

  "The teams?"

  "Well, it takes a little while to explain, Lou." He belched, drank beer, trying to remember how it was he'd practiced it. For one thing, he hadn't meant to begin with the Team Standings Board. "See, the game, well, it's a whole baseball league. Eight teams. Rosters, twenty-one guys—"

  "Guys?"

  "Players. Names. All the teams play each other and I keep the—"

  Lou looked disappointed. "I thought this was a game that two could play, you know, like pinochle or Monopoly or something."

  "No reason why not. You take one team and I take another."

  "Okay," he said, popping suddenly up out of his chair like a blimp cut loose. "Let's go! Batter up!"

  "You sure you don't want to know more about the ... the rules?"

  "I'll pick it up as we go along." At the table, he stared down on the heaps of paper, as though not quite perceiving what all that had to do with a mere game.

  Henry washed at the sink, feeling uneasy. It was the way he wanted it, wasn't it? Not exactly: inexperience was one thing, complete and disinterested ignorance another. "Don't you want to wash your hands?"

  "They're all right." Lou wiped them absently on his pants. He'd found the different charts and was shuffling through them.

  "They're not as complicated as they look," Henry said with a weak laugh, drying his hands.

  "I hope not." Lou picked up the dice, fingered them, then tossed them down. He searched the chart. "S if PR/LO; Others Ret S 1B" He scratched his head, looked down at the dice.

  "That's the special chart for stealing second base," Henry explained. "If the runner trying to steal is a pinch runner or the lead-off man in the line-up, he makes it. Otherwise, he returns safe to first. Here, these are the charts for—"

  "I don't know if I'm going to be able to figure all this out, Henry," said Lou frankly. He seemed ready to drop the project, but instead he sat down and began patiently to read more of the charts. He rolled again, compared the result on the different charts. "How do you know which one to use?" he complained.

  "Well, see, there's nine charts because there are six different player categories. A pitcher can be an Ace or a Rookie or a Regular, and so can a hitter. I mean, he can be a Star—"

  "How do you know that?" Lou was staring at him as though to say he must be kidding.

  "There's a mark by his name. The Rookies come up, well, see, each year—"

  "Year?"

  "I'll explain that, Lou. Just wait a minute. Each year, at the end, the eight pitchers with the worst earned-run averages get retired or sent to the minors—they can come back—sometimes, I mean, if they're not too old—"

  "Too old!" Lou blinked. "You know how old . . . ?"

  "There's a chart for that, see . . . here it is. That's for

  Rookies when they come up, tells how old they are. When they're forty, they have to quit, or before if they drop into the twenty bottom batters or eight bottom pitchers—I mean, unless they're still a Star or an Ace at forty—" He could see Lou wasn't with him any more. "Look, don't worry about that part of it now. There's three kinds of batters, three kinds of pitchers. Rookies have a few advantages over Regulars, and Stars and Aces have advantages over Rookies. So there's nine charts, one for every possible combination, Ace-to-Star, Ace-to-Rookie, Ace-to-Regular, and so on, for the Rookie and Regular pitchers. Anyway, pretty soon you get it all memorized and you don't have to worry about this part of it."

  "Memorized! You know all this stuff by heart, Henry?" Lou squeaked.

  "Most of it."

  Lou shook his head. "Where's the playing board?" he asked.

  "Well, you sort of have to imagine it," Henry said. "I used to have a mock-up of a ball park, but it only got in the way."

  Lou stared gloomily at the heap of papers. "Well, let's see what happens." He looked up at the Team Standings Board. "Who am I"

  "The next game is between the Knickerbockers and the Pioneers. It just happens that way."

  "You mean that team at the bottom? Why don't we play with those two at the top? Looks like more fun."

  "It isn't just one game, Lou. It's a whole season. Each team plays eighty-four games. There's an official schedule, just like in the big leagues. We're at the seventy-fifth round of games, and they've all been played but one, and so it's the Pioneers against the Knicks."

  Lou shrugged and smiled generously. Forcing it, though. "I don't care. Who've I got?"

  "You can have the Knicks." Twinge of guilt, but he shook it off. Poor Flynn buffeted by a fat confusion. Henry brought out the scorecard, the line-ups already filled in.

  PIONEERS

  2B Toby Ramsey (Rookie)

  LF Grammercy Locke

  3B HatrackHines(Star)

&n
bsp; CF Witness York (Star)

  RF Stan Patterson (Star)

  C Royce Ingram (Star)

  SS Lance Wilder

  1B Goodman James

  P Mickey Halifax (Ace)

  KNICKERBOCKERS

  SS Scat Batkin (Rookie)

  2B McAllister Weeks

  1B Matt Garrison (Star)

  CF Biff Baldwin (Star)

  RF Walt McCamish (Star)

  LF Archie Moon

  C Chauncey O'Shea (Rookie)

  3B Galen Musgraves

  P Jock Casey (Rookie)

  "These are the teams, and here's the roster with the rest of your players, in case you want to make substitutions or anything."

  Lou admired the scoresheets. "Say, these are nice. Where do you buy them?"

  "I have them printed."

  "Aha! Those trips to the printer!"

  "Yes." Henry laughed sheepishly. Had Lou come to play the game, he wondered, or only to smoke him out? Have to be careful. He sat down beside Lou, rearranged the charts so Lou could see them all, pointed out the differences between them. "These here are for special strategy plays or when there's an error or injury or something, and these are the ones we use most of the time. We only need six of the nine, since we have an Ace and a Rookie pitching." He felt miles away somehow.

  "Aha!" Lou said, studying the scorecard. "So that's what this R's for by my pitcher?"

  "Yes," Henry admitted, feeling suddenly guilty: didn't look fair at that. Now he'd have to explain about the rotation of pitchers, rules about when they can pitch and when they can't . . .

  "And your pitcher has an A. Isn't that better?"

  "Well, there's a small difference, but—"

  "Don't my team have any Aces?" Lou squinted at his roster.

  "Yes, but, you see—"

  "Yes! here's two of them!" Lou looked up and grinned, wagged an accusing finger. "Henry ... !"

  "But it was Casey's turn—"

  "Aw, come on now, can't I pitch one of these other boys? How about this fella Whitlowe Clay?"

  "I suppose so, but he pitched two days ago—"

  "Yeah, but he's tough," argued Lou, grinning. I'll start with ole Whitlowe." He erased Casey's name and wrote in Clay. "Where'd you get these names from, the funny papers?" The whole thing was fast becoming pointless. "Now, these little stars, they're for ... ?"

  "Yes, the batters, they ..."

  Lou winced studiously at the heap of charts and rosters. He counted the R's. "Two for me, one for you. But here, you've got four stars batting, and I've only got three. What if I put that Casey fella in as a hitter instead of a pitcher, then we'd be almost even up."

  "The Rookie status for pitchers only helps them as pitchers, not hitters."

  "Oh? why not?" Absent question, spurred by vexation more than curiosity.

  "Just the rules, Lou. It's what I was saying, maybe you ought to let me explain more before we start, see, there's a lot of special things about errors and injuries and relief pitchers and pinch hitters and lead-off hitters and pinch runners and clean-up hitters and—"

  "Hey, wait!" Lou exclaimed. "There's four stars here! You musta left one out!"

  Henry felt his face go hot. "Bran Maverly," he said. "He's been in a kind of slump, and Flynn thought—"

  "Aha!" Lou found him on the roster. Left field. He erased Moon from the scoresheet and wrote in Maverly. Moon had hit 6 for 8 in the last two games: how did Flynn explain it? "We'll just see if he don't snap outa that slump," he said, and winked at Henry.

  "Listen, Lou, I wasn't trying to be unfair. It's just that there's a whole history here, I mean, there's been a long season already, and you're getting in sort of in the middle. You'd understand better if—"

  "That's okay, Henry, don't apologize," Lou said with a grin. "I'd do the same thing." He shook his beer can. "Is there any more?"

  "Sure, I'll get some." From the sink, he watched fat Lou Engel, sitting where he himself usually sat, poking through the charts, tossing sample throws, humming some baroque melody. How has this happened? he wondered.

  "Who goes first?"

  "I'll go first, give you last bats." The game was in the Knickerbocker ball park, couldn't be any other way, but it seemed like the easiest way to explain it.

  He sat, took up the dice. He tried to get his mind down into the game, but Lou's bulky presence seemed to blank him out, and all he saw was paper. He didn't seem to be playing with Lou, but through him, and the way through was dense and hostile. "Toby Ramsey batting," he announced, but self-consciousness made him keep the announcement brief and hushed.

  "What's he?" asked Lou, poking his nose in front of Henry to peer down at the lineup. "R. Rookie. Which chart . . . ?"

  Henry showed him. "We only need these three, now that we've both got Aces in," he said.

  "Ace to Star, Ace to—yes, I see," Lou said, then pursed his lips in an undisguised imitation of Zifferblatt.

  Henry threw. "Fly out to center."

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Yes, FO CF—but what's this?"

  "Runners advance one. But there aren't any runners."

  "Oh yes. I see. Okay. Just want to get it all. What's that now? One out . . . ?"

  "That's right." Henry marked the scoresheet, threw again, this time for Regular batter Grammercy Locke. Single. He waited for Lou to find it.

  "Single, advance two," Lou read. "How can you advance two on a single?"

  "That means the baserunners, if there were any, would advance two."

  "I thought it was a disadvantage to be a plain type."

  "It is. Only about eighteen per cent of a Regular's possibilities against an Ace are hits, while for a Star, for example, it's over twenty-five per cent."

  Lou showed surprise. "You really got it all figured out!"

  "Yes."

  "Still, those aren't very good averages," he reasoned.

  "Well, there are other parameters: walks, errors, injuries, different combinations and charts—"

  "Per a what? Whew!" Lou leaned back, shook his head, picking his nose absently. "I'm never gonna catch on to this, Henry."

  "You're just not used to it yet. It gets simple when you play it awhile." He rolled for Hatrack Hines.

  Lou drank beer. "That was a good movie today, Henry. You should've come."

  "Was it? Look. Hines is a Star and he struck out. See, Lou, you never know."

  Lou watched carefully as Henry penned a K on the score-sheet. "There was this guy who kept bees. He was making tape recordings of the sounds they made, see, because he wanted to see if he could communicate with them."

  Witness York sent a line-drive single into left center, moving Locke around to third. "Way to go!" Henry said.

  "What's that?" Lou put down his beer to take a closer look. He read the numbers on the dice, searched the chart.

  "That's the one for Rookies, Lou. Here, this one." This was going to take all night.

  "Let's see, 4-4-6: that's that single-advance-two again."

  "Right. Puts York on first, Locke on third."

  Lou stared down at the table, trying to see it. "I'm already lost, Henry."

  "Oh, for God's sake, Lou," Henry cried, losing patience, "it's not that hard. Look, two out, men on first and third, forget who they are. A Star batting. Watch." Infield fly, shortstop. Rally choked off. Somehow he felt it was Lou's fault. In a way, it was. On Casey's chart, it would have been a base on balls, bases loaded. Of course, Locke wouldn't have got his—forget it. "Well, what is it?"

  Lou frowned, looked on the wrong chart again. "I don't—"

  'This one, Lou!"

  "Don't get mad, Henry, I'm only trying—here it is: what's that?"

  "Infield fly."

  "He's out, hunh?" Henry nodded. "How many is that, Henry?"

  "That's three."

  "I'm up now?"

  "Yes." Henry handed him the dice.

  Lou livened up, studied the line-up, saw he had a Rookie batting, put his finger on the Ace-to-Rookie chart, and threw
the dice. Strikeout. Lou's finger ran down the chart. "Aw," he said, "that's a strikeout." He threw for McAllister Weeks. Another strikeout. Anyway, Halifax was on the ball today. "Base on balls."

  "You're on the wrong chart again, Lou." '

  Lou winced despairingly. He found the right one. "Strikeout. Heck." He rolled again. Three in a row. "Infield . .. no, wait: I remember, Henry, he's a Star. Ummm: strikeout! again! It sure seems awful easy to get a strikeout in this game," he grumped.