American football had a violent year in 2017. The refusal by all thirty-two National Football League teams to sign free agent Colin Kaepernick, a black quarterback who had started kneeling during each game’s national anthem in the summer of…

  Robert Coover’s oft-forgotten 1968 baseball novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., opens in the middle of a game: “Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! …