Robert Coover died

[BPS]

The Universal Baseball Association

NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Coover, the exuberant and rule-defying fiction writer and educator who devised new adventures for literature through such works as “The Babysitter” and “The Public Burning” and through his decades on the faculty of Brown University, has died. He was 92.

Obit

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by BPS

The Universal Baseball Association


Obit

They missed his seminal work. How could they do that?

I read the UBA decades ago. I was a HUGE strat guy, and this book really resonated with me.

[kq76]

I had assumed he had passed long ago. 92 is pretty good! Hopefully his final years were good ones.

I bet a lot of people who read his book, or were at least aware of it, thought of him as a kindred spirit. I don't think the same can be said for many.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by dsvitak

They missed his seminal work. How could they do that?

I read the UBA decades ago. I was a HUGE strat guy, and this book really resonated with me.

Interesting. I thought maybe it was only seminal to us baseball fans, but checking goodreads.com it does have the most ratings of any of his works. I wonder if maybe he wasn't so proud of it as the years waned on and that's why it wasn't mentioned. I read it once and while the concept was cool from a fellow geek's perspective, I didn't think it was nearly as good as some make it out to be. I found it rather depressing actually.

For comparison's sake, If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock is probably the best baseball novel I've read. And while I've seen at least a few others express similar opinions, I haven't seen it get mentioned nearly as much as the UBA does.

[Syd Thrift]

Maaaan... I mean, that book "resonates" in a way but it also was like kind of dark, like I kind of felt bad about this all-consuming hobby I have after having read it. YMMV of course. I'm 125% positive that Henry Waugh would be an OOTPer today...

I enjoyed "If I Never Get Back"; I can't say it's my *favorite* baseball novel since "The Natural" exists (which, also on my short list of movies that ruined books - not to say that the Robert Redford movie is bad, exactly, but it's sappy and nostalgic where the book was... kind of nostalgic for effect but because it was a retelling of the Arthurian legend in the setting of baseball and also a morality play about the effects of gambling on the game which we really could have used in the 80s TBH) but it was fun.