新书评介：从幻想棒球到神秘宇宙

When John Updike wrote that baseball’s “dispassionate mathematics” made it “an essentially lonely game,” he was not, presumably, envisioning a fabulist on the level of Waugh, following the numbers into deep monastic detachment. As the novel opens, Waugh’s Universal Baseball Association is in its fifty-sixth season, each of which requires some six weeks of fervid dice rolling (a roll of 4-4-6, for instance, yields a single and advances runners by two bases). The UBA’s official archives run to about forty volumes, replete with transcripts, dispatches, bawdy songs from the barroom, “player contributions, election coverage, obituaries, satires, prophecies, scandals,” all shelved handily in the proprietor’s kitchen. …