Jack Kerouac: The poet’s game
Back when I was a sophomore in art school, I needed a literature class to fulfill my course requirements. These were the days before computers, and each semester class enrollment entailed waiting overnight outside the curriculum office along with hundreds of other students. If you turned up too late, as I unfortunately did that semester, many classes would be full, and you would end up with ones you did not want. When my turn finally arrived, the only literature course left was a class in writing poetry.
Now, I had always been a big reader, and even had some success at writing short stories. But poetry seemed such a highbrow indulgence to me. I had never even considered writing a poem before, and the thought of taking an entire class doing so really scared the hell out of me. What do I write about – flowers and trees, love and longing? Hell, I was from New Jersey, and we were taught to keep all that stuff to ourselves.
Fortunately for me, the professor for that class was an old poet named Joe Cardarelli. He was a big, bearded guy, built like a football player, not your stereotypical idea of a poet. For one of my first assignments, I penned a piece about listening to a baseball game on the radio. My reading it to the class elicited many blank stares and questions asking why I had written about such a stupid game. See, I was at an elite Ivy League-kind of art school, and serious artists weren’t supposed to like sports, let alone write poetry about it.
Later, during a break, I went outside to have a smoke and up comes Joe Cardarelli. He bummed a Camel and began to pepper me with questions about baseball: What team did I follow? Do I go to many games? Did I play? And then he said something I always remembered:
Baseball is the poet’s game.
Joe talked about the beauty of a center fielder racing to catch a fly ball, the quiet moment between a pitcher’s stretch and his throw to the plate. The feeling of indescribable joy walking towards the well-lit stadium before a night game.
Over the course of the semester, Joe would tell me about all the great writers and poets who were fans of the game – Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman wrote about baseball before the Civil War. Stephen Crane played ball in college and on a Jersey Shore semipro team. Marianne Moore kept a Mickey Mantle-signed baseball in her bedroom. Ernest Hemingway followed the White Sox, and Robert Frost was a diehard Red Sox fan.
But there was one literary legend who he believed embraced the spirit of our National Pastime above all others: Jack Kerouac.
Like every other teen outcast in the 1980s, I devoured every Kerouac book I could get my hands on. I was fascinated by how he appreciated life’s little “moments” and captured them in beautiful prose that spoke to me. For instance, in On the Road, he put into words the feeling of anticipation and excitement that I always felt when riding the bus through the Holland Tunnel from my neighborhood in North Jersey to a night out in New York City. In that scene, I could smell the exhaust, see the dim fluorescent lights that lined the tunnel zip by, and get that flurried feeling in my stomach knowing that in a few moments, I would emerge into the greatest city in the world, where anything can happen.
There’s another great scene in On the Road where the novel’s two anti-heroes, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, are trying to watch and listen to a bunch of baseball games simultaneously:
We made a date to meet at my aunt’s house before I left. He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. “Remember, Sal (Dean speaking), Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is coming in for the Phillies we’ll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there DiMaggio has three balls count and the pitcher fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what happened to Bobby Thomson when we left him with a man on third. Yes!
Yeah, for my money, no writer captured the spirit of baseball like Jack Kerouac.
SINCE HE WAS A BOY growing up in blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac’s life revolved around sports. He followed boxing and horse racing through the sports pages of his local paper. He rooted for the Boston Red Sox and played American Legion ball. In high school, he was a track star and earned himself a football scholarship to Columbia University.
An injury in his freshman year, coupled with his combative relationship with Columbia’s head football coach, ended his athletic aspirations. But what his time at Columbia did do was allow Kerouac to indulge his other passion: writing. He began working for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, as their sportswriter, and in 1942, landed a job doing the same for his hometown paper, the Lowell Sun.
During the war, he shipped out on a merchant ship bringing supplies to England through U-Boat-infested seas and, upon returning to New York City, began his writing career in earnest. He palled around with a loose-knit group of bohemian writers and poets who would form the nucleus of the “Beat Generation.” He took to the road, living life to the fullest as he searched for meaning in it all. Then he wrote a book that made him a superstar and counter-culture icon.
And in between all his carousing and be-bopping around the country, Jack Kerouac did something that only his closest friends knew of: he played a fantasy baseball game of his own creation.
SINCE ITS CREATION when he was 10 or 11, Kerouac’s homemade baseball game would go through several formats and revisions over the decades. Its first iteration was played in his backyard, with the action determined by hitting a ball bearing with a long nail. If the ball struck one of the rocks that represented the infielders, Kerouac would then flick the ball bearing towards the first base rock to record an out. If the ball bearing eluded the infielders, circles drawn in the dirt determined a hit, a homer, an out, etc. Kerouac later scaled down his game, using matchsticks to hit a marble at a diagramed board whose marked sections now determined the game’s action.
When Jack Kerouac left home, he took his game with him. He further refined it, with some versions ditching the bat and ball for a more convenient deck of cards.
The batter drew one of the cards, on which were carefully calculated odds that took into consideration four levels of a batter’s skill against four levels (later three) of a pitcher’s prowess. A player’s fielding skill was also rated in three levels, as were his speed on the bases.
And one didn’t record a simple hit or out; Kerouac’s fantasy cards established minute details, such as whether it was a line drive off the right field wall, blooper that fell in front of the center fielder, or a Texas Leaguer down the third base line. The early game used about fifty cards, but later the number grew to almost 300.
Kerouac created an entire universe around his fantasy game. Each of the six (sometimes eight) teams in his league played a fixed schedule, usually of 40 games. The league also had its own mid-season All-Star Game, and a World Series played between the first- and second-place clubs.
Teams were usually named after automobiles, such as the Philadelphia Pontiacs, New York Chevvies, Chicago Nashes, Boston Fords, St. Louis La Salles, and the Pittsburgh Plymouths. Occasionally, he would change their nicknames to colors, such as the Chicago Reds and New York Greens.
Each club carried a full roster of ballplayers, usually 18, but expanding to as many as 26 at times. Kerouac not only named each player, but also created colorful backstories for them all. Sportswriter Stan Isaacs paid a visit to Jack Kerouac at his mother’s house on Long Island in the winter of 1961. In his February 7th New York Newsday column, Isaacs described the running commentary Kerouac provided as they spent the afternoon playing a round of the poet’s fantasy game.
When Issacs selected Ron Melaney as his pitcher, Kerouac gave him the full rundown on his choice: “Melaney has a blazing fast ball,” Kerouac said. “I created him the same night I unveiled Bob Gold of the league-leading Cincinnati Blacks. Gold is the fastest pitcher in the league with an 11-4 record, with a 2.36 earned-run average.”
Just as a baseball color man would during a radio or TV broadcast, Kerouac brought the players to life for Isaacs. “There’s Wino Love of the Detroit Reds, the league’s leading hitter with a .344 average. (“He’s called Wino because he drinks, but he’s still a great hitter.”) Big Bill Louis is everybody’s favorite. (“I patterned him after Babe Ruth; one day I had him coming to bat chewing on a frankfurter.”) Pic Jackson, the league’s best hitting pitcher, “likes to read the Sunday supplements; his name ‘Pic’ is short for ‘Pictorial Review.’”
Later in the game, Kerouac introduced shortstop Francis X. Cudley (“an Irishman from Boston who stood up at the plate very erect, like a Jesuit,”); Burlingame Japes (“40 years old now, a little left-handed hitter who in his younger days was the league base-stealing champ,”) and Sonny Simms (“the center fielder, is like Willie Mays. His younger brother, Sugar Ray, was just brought up from the minors.”)
And after a game was finished, Kerouac’s baseball fantasy world did not end. Not only did he record the outcome of each game, but he also created his own publication called The Sportsman (later The Daily Ball), in which a complete game account accompanied the box score. A “Hero” and “Goat” were chosen for each game, beside which Kerouac drew a comic portrait of the player. The future prospects of teams were speculated, salary disputes reported, and minor league transactions recorded. There was even a recurring column in which different veteran players gave their opinion on which team would win the pennant. Besides the newspaper, Kerouac penned mythical correspondence between team owners discussing trades.
Although Kerouac’s baseball game was its own distinct universe, some aspects did reflect real life. A Cuban shortstop named “El Negro” integrated the Philadelphia Pontiacs shortly after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his league expanded to include teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco a full year before MLB did.
Through his fantasy game and its imaginary world, the young Jack Kerouac was developing his storytelling by creating backstories for each ballplayer and honing his unique writing voice by penning game recaps.
JACK KEROUAC continued to write about and follow the real-life game throughout his life. After spending 63 days alone as a fire lookout in Washington’s Cascade Mountains in 1956, one of the first things he did was pick up the latest issue of The Sporting News to catch up on baseball. In his novel Desolation Angels, based on his solitary two months in the mountains, the author’s alter ego, Jack Duluoz, recounts,
For after an hour and a half in my room sipping that wine (sitting with stockinged feet on the bed, pillow back), reading about Mickey Mantle and the Three-I League and the Southern Association and the West Texas League and the latest trades and stars and kids upcoming and even reading the Little League news to see the names of the 10-year-old prodigy pitchers …
In a haiku written in the late 1950s, Kerouac used baseball to evoke a specific time and place,
Empty baseball field –
A robin,
Hops along the benchHow cold!
– late September
baseball –
the crickets
After Bobby Thompson hit his pennant-winning home run against the Dodgers in 1951, Kerouac experienced that feeling of euphoric joy that only a true baseball fan knows, writing in his journal,
There was . . . the sudden realization that winning is possible on earth.
In the summer of 1965, Kerouac penned a series of sports columns for the St. Petersburg Evening Independent, including one in which he gave his predictions for the pennant race (the Tigers in the American League, the Braves in the National).
BY THE EARLY 1960s, Jack Kerouac was well on his way to succumbing to the alcoholism that would take his life in 1969. Although he always denied that he was the inspiration for the crazy, holy con-man hero of On the Road, Dean Moriarty (in fact based on Neal Cassady), Kerouac spent the rest of his life trying to live up to the wild character he created.
As the beatniks of the 1950s morphed into the hippies of the 1960s, Jack Kerouac became an outsider to the very society his books helped create. There’s a great vignette I read years ago about Kerouac attending one of Ken Kesey’s infamous “Acid Test” parties. Wandering among the much-younger crowd who were zonked on Kesey’s LSD, Kerouac came upon an American flag being used as a couch cover on which several people sat. After getting the occupants to stand, Kerouac lovingly folded the flag in its correct triangle pattern and, much to the amusement of the drug-addled partygoers, carried it away to safety.
Jack Kerouac’s feeling of alienation in this strange new world surely exacerbated his drinking and depression. He spent the last years of his life living with his third wife in his mother’s house. The writing tapered off as he concentrated full-time on his Johnnie Walker Red and Schlitz beer. Though not even fifty, Kerouac seemed like he was waiting for it all to end. “I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.” he told his biographer Ann Charters.
On the morning of October 20, 1969, Jack Kerouac suffered an esophageal hemorrhage. His alcohol-damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. Emergency surgery failed, and he passed away the following morning, aged 47.
Back when New York Newsday sportswriter Stan Isaacs visited Kerouac on that winter day back in 1961, the poet expressed an interest in marketing his fantasy baseball game. Two of today’s most popular fantasy baseball games were getting traction back in ’61: APBA, started in 1951, and Strat-O-Matic, which debuted the same year as Isaacs’ visit.
Wouldn’t it have been something if Kerouac did indeed market his game? I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if his baseball game had been successful. Would Jack Kerouac have found a whole new group of friends and fans? Fantasy baseball gamers are a galaxy away from thrill-seeking beatniks and acid-tripping hippies. Could the aging poet have found peace playing his baseball game with like-minded people whose idea of a good time was fretting over whether to pencil in Gus Texas or Homer Landry in the clean-up spot for that night’s game against the World Champion St. Louis LaSalles?
* * *
I wrote and illustrated the original version of this piece back in 2010, and over the years, it has become one of my most popular stories. As a long-time admirer of Jack Kerouac’s writing, I was honored when my piece was translated into French and reprinted in the Spring 2020 Trésor-des Kirouac, the official journal of Kirouac family descendants. Talk about cool – I wonder what Joe Cardarelli would have thought of that!
If you really want a deep dive into Jack Kerouac and his fantasy baseball game, try to find a copy of Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats by Isaac Gewirtz. It’s an illustrated companion piece to the major 2007-2008 New York Public Library exhibit “Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road.” It’s hard to find, and expensive when you do, but well worth it.
My pal Dan Cichalski wrote an excellent 2022 piece for MLB.com called “Kerouac’s lifelong love of baseball” that I highly recommend (and you’ll see my Kerouac card used to illustrate it).
Jim Reisler’s article “Jack Kerouac: The Beat of Fantasy Baseball” in the 2008 volume of The National Pastime is another well-researched piece on Kerouac’s baseball game.
But by far the most helpful source was Stan Isaacs’ article about his afternoon playing a game with Jack Kerouac, published in the February 17, 1961, New York Newsday.
* * *