Why Baseball Simulations Captivated a Future Novelist: A Personal Reflection on J. Henry Waugh’s Universal Baseball Association

There was a time—during the final years of college, when my confidence bordered on arrogance—when I believed I understood what a real novel was and what it was supposed to achieve. From the books I consumed and the reviews I pored over, novels seemed to revolve around one central theme: a man trapped in an unhappy marriage. Sometimes he was English, sometimes a college professor, and sometimes a corporate executive. That was the extent of the narrative universe I recognized.

Some of these books, which I both admired and enjoyed, may still hold up today. I’m likely being unfair to writers like Saul Bellow, who explored not just the experience of being a man in an unhappy marriage but the feeling and meaning behind it. Yet even when I grasped their purpose, something felt stifling about the formula. It wasn’t just that I lacked the life experience to relate to these stories—though that certainly played a role. The deeper issue was the realization that this was all there was: an endless cycle of adult discontent, replaying in settings I knew only from other books. It didn’t resonate with me.

To be clear, this disillusionment didn’t mean I abandoned my ambition to pace anxiously through those same familiar corridors for the rest of my life. I didn’t give up on becoming a great American novelist until nearly a decade after graduation. What began as a personal identity crisis gradually morphed into something far more liberating. Looking back, I see why books that shattered those familiar walls—or simply refused to follow the expected script—felt so exhilarating. I had spent so much time scrutinizing the fixtures, the finishes, and the clever design of those rooms that I never stopped to notice how suffocating they had become. The air inside felt recycled, thin, and stale.