Baseball and Accounting
J. Henry Waugh is an accountant as well as the proprietor of the extensive imaginary universe of his baseball league. When the imagery baseball begins to take over the real life accounting part of his life, his boss is not happy and tries to explain it terms he hopes Waugh can grasp. Metaphorical terms.
“Accounting like baseball is an art and a science a rough competitive business.”
Baseball, Baseball Everywhere
Henry's obsession with his imagery baseball league begins to infiltrate his mind at every point along the way of real life. Imagination begins to commingle with reality in a way that speaks to compulsive behavior. The obsession begins:
“Hunched-up cars pushed throughout the streets like angry defeated ballplayers jockeying through crowds on their way to the showers.”
Wordplay
Sometimes the author engage metaphor not just to create an image, but as a type of wordplay. Very often this wordplay gets quite sophisticated. A much simpler example takes advantage of the author giving one of his characters a German name which translates into “dial” or “watchface.”
“Zifferblatt was a militant clock-watcher.”
The Drama of the Game
Henry’s imaginary baseball league is one that plays out its game using dice in which the numbers rolled are used to consult with charts from which is derived gameplay. These things are real, however, and the league grows into an obsession not because of them, but because of the lives of the players which are infused by Henry’s imagination. The right name for each player, therefore, eclipses any stats created by randomly chosen numbers:
“The dice and charts and other paraphernalia were only the mechanics of drama, not the drama itself.”
"men turned into boys"
The metaphorical image quoted above could, of course, be applied to Henry’s state of mind throughout the novel. He is, after all, just playing a game of imagination and like boys playing with action figures that world takes on a reality as palpable as reality itself. What is interesting about this phrase, however, is that it is actually part of a sentence which describes the feeling of men who are reacting to the recent death of one of the league’s all-time greats, Damon Rutherford. Those men and Damon Rutherford are all projections of Henry’s imagination; they do not exist except in his head. Therefore the image so delineated is a metaphor within a metaphor.
“There they were, men turned into boys, overwhelmed by awe and adolescent wistfulness.”
