Robert Coover - The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

POWERand control. In and out. The old eagle, Swanee Law, just reared back and burned them in. In across the knuckles: zip! Zap: skimming the outer edge! Now winging in across the letters, then plunging past the knees: the Law Special. Pappy Rooney was again using nearly everybody he had today, even pinch-hitting a couple pitchers. All his Haymakers got out of all the going in and coming out was one run, but it was enough: Law gave up just two scratch singles to the Bridegrooms and struck out fourteen to win, 1-to-0, Swanee's sixth straight victory. Pappy clapped them in, ragging them about the puny bitting, but they all felt good: it was their thirteenth win in the last fifteen games, and eight of them had been by one run. As for Swanee, not only was it his sixteenth win of the season and his fourth shutout, but the fourteen strikeouts brought his season total up to 219, giving him an outside chance still to hit the magic mark of 300, attained by only five pitchers in UBA history. Law knew what he had going for himself: whenever sportswriters interviewed him, they were shown large charts he kept tacked to his wall, indicating his own game-by-game progress in comparison with that of the five men in history — Hokey Lancaster, Fancy Dan Casey, Timothy Shadwell, Brock Rutherford, and Edgar Bath — he was challenging. Brock had the record: 341, set in Year XXVII. Rooney had to laugh at Law's prostrating himself before the tired and filthy feet of history, but as long as it helped win ball games he couldn't care less. The newsboys, bored, troubled, or revolted by what was happening — or not happening — in the rest of the league, fed on Law as the last hope for revival. You were pretty mean out there today, Swanee. Yuh, he'd say, gazing thoughtfully up at his charts, but we kin be meaner. Gotta be. Photos of him: narrow eyes reflecting concern, determination, square jaw solidly set… a tough old boy.

Elsewhere, the action in the UBA was confused and bewildering. Moreover, Law was a false hope; they'd need more than he could give. In his private offices, high above the day's play, Chancellor Fennimore McCaflree sat with vexed spirit watching it on four television sets going at once, aware that his Association was undergoing a radical transformation, the kind sprung only from situations of crisis, extremity; his worries now were no longer merely political, but ones even of survival. With him sat his old coach and mentor and only surviving ex-Chancellor, Woodrow Winthrop. Squawk boxes, receiving from ball-park spotters, computer rooms, and special agents, chattered out their several messages, creating a low-keyed cacophony, and McCaffree missed none of it; his phenomenal powers of concentration were already a league legend. Used to be, in his day, the quality Woody Winthrop was best known for, though age had loosened his wits some in recent years. He sat now, studying Fenn, amazed as always, wondering who was the protege of whom.

"You see, Woody, it's one thing to say that each of these players and each of these teams is interested in maximizing its expected utility, and another to know — even for them to know — what that utility really is."

"How's that, Fenn?" Went right by him. Conversations with Fenn McCaffree these days got pretty one-sided. He was forever yakking about distribution functions, the canonical form of M, compound decision problems, relations of dominance; like Fenn had somehow forgot the game was baseball.

"Law shouldn't have pitched today."

"Oh." That Woody could understand. Rooney was pitching Law too much, wouldn't have anything left for the stretch.

In his trademark swivel chair! — party symbol for the coming campaign — Fenn pivoted from set to set, his long legs crossed, spine curved, left elbow sharply out-thrust and hand gripping the chair-arm where his intercom buttons were rigged; blacksuited, string bow tie in the high collar, pants cuffs hiked high above the bony ankles and exceedingly long and narrow shoes; high-domed bespectacled head dipped forward, leaning against the pipe held clamped between under-slung jaw and right fist, as an old man might lean on a cane. On the Haymaker-Bridegroom screen, the game was over, and Law and Rooney were being interviewed by reporters; on the other three, the Knickerbocker-Pastimer, Excelsior-Keystone, and Beaneater-Pioneer games were in their final innings. Beaneater left-fielder Bartholomew Egan poled a homer into the center-field bleachers off the Pioneers' Thornton Shad well, and Fenn punched a button: "What did Ingram call for?"

"Low and outside." One crackly report muddled with all the others. Woody heard it because it came in over his own right shoulder.

"Where did he get it?"

"Down the slot."

"Feed it in."

"Check."

Watching his own hand-picked successor in office, Woody realized that he himself had probably been the last of his kind. He'd thought of himself as a rebel, but in reality he'd only brought the old ways to consummation. Under McCaffree, politics, the Chancellorship, even the game had changed. Fenn fooled you. He looked old-fashioned, but he had an abiding passion for innovation. He was the most relentless activist ever to take office, yet he never seemed to move a muscle. He was coldly calculating, yet supremely loyal to old comrades, and what else was it but sentiment that was making him, against all logic and advice, support his son-in-law as the next chief of the party? "You mean," Woody ventured, "Rooney oughta be giving Law a little more rest between games."

"No, I mean he shouldn't be using his best pitcher against inconsequential teams like the Bridegrooms."

"Well, Fenn, it don't matter much who you beat, what Rooney wants is to win ball games—"

Fennimore McCaffree pivoted slightly, almost imperceptibly, to glower witheringly upon the only surviving ex-Chancellor of the UBA, and said acidly: "Well, goddamn it, Mr. Winthrop, I know he wants to win ball games, that's just the point! " Then he turned back to his TV sets, where the Cels had a rally going in the ninth: a long belt up against the screen in right, scoring two runs, and that was the game, Cels 4, Keystones 3. Poor old Tim.

"I'm sorry, Fenn. I don't get you."

McCaffree sighed impatiently. "What if, Woody, we have passed, without knowing it, from a situation of sequential compounding into one of basic and finite yes-or-no survival, causing a shift of what you might call the equilibrium point, such that the old strategies, like winning ball games, sensible and proper within the old stochastic or recursive sets, are, under the new circumstances, insane! "

"Hmmm," said Woody Winthrop. Only word he was sure of was the last one. Above the television sets, electronic score boards, hooked directly to those of the separate ball parks, recorded the surface data of the games, blinking their messages in a slow burn, left to right. Partridge was throwing gopher balls and his Pastimer teammates were fielding like a bunch of bush-leaguers, turning what was supposed to be the game of the day, if not of the year — Knicks vs.the Patsies, with both teams once again tied for the league lead, Jock Casey pitching against Sam Partridge — into a circus. The Patsies' infield, supposed to be the UBA's greatest, had made four errors so far, and the Knicks were winning, 5-to-1, with another rally going in the eighth. The Pioneers had just lost to the Bean-eaters, 8-to-4. Young Thornton Shadwell's third loss; Tim's boy just wasn't going to make it. Woody didn't know exactly why, but he felt things were not going well in the Association. Ever since that boy's death. Like the soul had gone out of it or something, as if Sycamore Flynn's Knicks had stolen it somehow and wouldn't give it back, or couldn't, and the whole balance of things had got thrown off. Feeling antiquated and stupid and disconnected, Woody sighed and said: "I don't know, Fenn. Maybe you're probably right."