Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go! and Henry’s heart was racing…
The novel opens by putting the reader right into the middle of a play-by-play of a baseball game that transitions like a movie dissolve into the image of the novel’s protagonist reacting to it. This invisible connection between the complete fiction of the imaginary ballgame and the author’s invented fictional character responding to it as if real will continue throughout the narrative as it becomes clearer and clearer that J. Henry Waugh cannot separate his reality from his imagination. The author, of course, is asking the reader to do the same while making it incredibly difficult.
Henry was always careful about names, for they were what gave the league its sense of fulfillment and failure, its emotions.
The gameplay of Henry’s baseball game requires dice and charts and accounting of statistics and won/loss records and all the standard mechanics of the game. For all its reliance on statistics and the mechanics of the game, baseball is about names. Names like Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Ted Williams and Tony Conigliaro. That last name is evidence that baseball did not become America’s Pastime because of the stats of its stars. The game is constructed upon numbers, but its foundation are the names attached to it. This truism is true of Henry’s imaginary. The care with which he personally picks out the names for his players is reflected in the three-dimensional lives he creates for them as well as the manner in which they insist upon intruding into Henry’s real world.
Damon Rutherford was dead.
Rutherford is a legendary play in Henry’s league. A star; a marquee name. And with a few rolls of the dice, the longest of statistical odds are realized and Rutherford is felled by a beanball. His death is easily undone simply by choice. But Henry does not choose to play God. Not in this instance. And Rutherford’s death will have consequences both in the imaginary universe of the league and in Henry’s own real life.
Down in the Pioneer locker room Knickerbocker rookie Hardy Ingram pulls on the old jersey with its bold antiquated “1.”
The opening of Chapter 8 describes the lives of the imaginary baseball players that make up the Universal Baseball Association. Such scenes are not unusual; they have been taking place throughout the previous chapters. What makes the description of Ingram pulling on a jersey that opens the novel’s final chapter unique is that Henry is nowhere to be found. He is non-existent in this chapter, referred to only allusively and obliquely by his creations. They have officially taken on lives of their own, thus completing Henry’s compulsive fantasy.
