Many of Robert Coover's novels and short stories are formidable expressions of imagination and creativity and The Universal Baseball Association is no exception to this rule. Henry Waugh is an accountant during the day for Dunkelmann, Zauber, & Zifferblatt and, during the night, he turns himself around as a creative inventor of new worlds, new characters and, above all, new games. One of the most interesting and fascinating one is the Universal Baseball Association, which is already in its 56th season at the beginning of the book. The game is a complex array of dice luck, complicated rules, but, above all, of interesting imaginary characters.
             The most important of these is definitely Damon Rutherford, the best pitcher in the Universal Baseball association and an entirely interesting and comfortable personality. Most likely, like all the other of his creations, Rutherford represents the virtual reality that Waugh thrives for, possibly a son he never had or the potentiality of family life.
             Waugh's character balances between a sad, pathetic one and an original creator of a new world. The fact that he creates the game obviously denotes a significant incapacity to integrate in the real world and the real society, along with his likely dissatisfaction with his own existence. He has no family, only one friend, a job as an accountant which offers few interesting perspective and, simply, a boring existence. This creation offers him the possibility to project himself in a Demiurge role and simply use his imagination to create. He can play with the rules, he can play with the lives of the people he creates and he can create his own world as an alternative to the one that rejects him.
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