Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much – to tell the truth, real baseball bored him – but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.

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

I would argue that the “Z” (UNUSUAL PLAYS) chart was Barnes’ greatest invention of all, for the draw of a “Z” amid the flurry of FACs being overturned throughout the game meant a respite from the grind of flipping and notating and recording. “Z” was weird; “Z” was liberating. For instance, here is “Z” no. 15: Batter hits apparent home run down foul line. Umpire calls it a FOUL BALL, JUST FOUL. Batter argues and umpire rejects his opinion on eyesight. Batter kicked out of game.

Well, this requires innovation, for the number 15 is going to come up several times over the course of typical summer, and the scenario that one must play out in one’s head is dependent on whether the batter in question is Reggie Jackson or, say, Paul Molitor. In order to make the game real, in order to maintain the narrative, each “15” must be unique (at least in one’s own mind), and this can be burdensome.

This is the brilliance of Barnes’ invention: It was grounded in formulas, but it was elastic enough to foster creativity. What I devised in those summers was my first unfinished novel.

—Michael Weinrab on Statis Pro Baseball

The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and supreme, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game.

—Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke, p. 152

However all this was understood in 1943, when I came upon it, the idea that a single reality underlies music and mathematics, art and science, expressible only in a nonverbal language of very cool hieroglyphs, was irresistible, attracting the serious psychedelic vanguard and the daily dope smokers alike. It was easy to feel that our late-night speculations in aromatic Hoboken lofts or Topanga cottages were games of the same kind, and we were players (though doubtless we more closely resembled the vain and fatuous spielers of the Feuilletonist Age). But we were drawn also by a game “played” more as music is played than as a sport is played, a game that players spend a lifetime learning and yearning to excel in, but in which they can excel only by cooperating, not competing: you triumph at the Glass Bead Game only insofar as other players do too. No one is defeated. That’s what got to me, and what I talked about with others, when I first read the book.

—John Crowley reconsiders The Glass Bead Game for Lapham’s

The city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone defenseless in it, your moves not even your own.

—Robert Coover, Noir

You roll, Player A gets a hit or he doesn’t, gets his man out or he doesn’t. Sounds simple. But call Player A ‘Sycamore Flynn’ or ‘Melbourne Trench’ and something starts to happen. He shrinks or grows, stretches out or puts on muscle…. Strange. But name a man and you make him what he is.

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