Baseball
Henry lives his life inside his mind in the imagination that brings to life not just baseball games, but the players and their wives and personalities. That imaginary life becomes as real—more real—than his reality. The collection of symbols all serve to make baseball a metaphor for life, but it also exists as a simple symbol on its own: life is game with rules and a collection of statistics that really say nothing about a person and eventually become meaningless.
Dice
Henry’s imagination creates the emotional sphere of his players, but the game itself is dependent up the strictly defines rules of the game. Those rigidly enforced rules, however, are in turn dependent entirely upon the random chance of a roll of a dice. This make the dice, therefore, a symbol for fate and the unknowable mystery of the future which makes us all equal.
Henry
J. Henry Waugh is the proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, but he is always referred to as Henry. The obvious connection has been made that when one removes the “Henry” what is left—J. Waugh—is so remarkably similar-sounding to Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God, that it could not possibly be mere coincidence. Especially considering Henry’s deity-like status as a creator of life.
The Floral Shop
Henry walks into a flower shop, dazzled by the beauty and selection of the flowers only to realize that they are all artificial. They are fakes, the handiwork of the florist who assures him they will last forever to which Henry replies that it isn’t really the point. But, of course, as a symbol, it is the point. Henry’s artificial world of the imagination is really just an internalized aspect of the seeing of perfection through the artificial that marks contemporary life.
Names
Names become the symbol for the investment of life in Henry’s baseball world. Baseball itself he finds boring and even compiling the statistics—the lifeblood of the game—can be merely a consumer of time. The world of his imaginative players does not exist because of the game itself which can be boiled down to a rote acting out of mechanical behavior; only when he has found the perfect name for the player does that player become real. And the process of finding, considering, accepting or rejecting names becomes a process that consumes as much of his daily reality as the actual gameplay.
