Kid Kerouac, Fantasy Ace

As I don my fantasy sports writer hat to chart the games of Seamheads’ simulated leagues, I have begun to feel the presence of Jack Kerouac looking over my shoulder.  From childhood to adolescence, Kerouac created with each  new season an amazing array of fantasy baseball characters and teams.  He had his own sports pages that narrated action in his league–well before even the earliest fantasy sports leagues in the sixties.   

Seasons worth of Kerouac’s drawings and simulated sports pages have been illustrated in a new book, Kerouac at Bat, written by curator of the New York City Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, and published by the Library itself.  Kerouac’s love for baseball is woven into season after season of intricate fantasy write ups that relate to nothing other than games that the young Kerouac played with his own complex simulation.

Before Hal Richman’s clever modeling of historic baseball began with Strat-O-Matic, Jack Kerouac, the King of the Beats, had created largely imaginary players who populated fantasy teams all drawn from his fertile imagination.  He used a set of cards to simulate the probabilities for player tendencies and the likelihood of various plays ocurring during the games.   Gewirtz’s illustrations from the Library’s Kerouac archive provide a glimpse of the complicated rules that governed how the cards were used.

In the early years a young Kerouac wrote up the games he created in sports sheets made to look like a home town sports page–perhaps from Lowell, Massachusetts where he grew up.  There was the “Sports News,” replete with carefully prepared drawings and box scores and a diary of league happenings called the “Daily Ball.”

The players and teams were modeled on those of the era.  Gewirtz asserts that Kerouac began the leagues as early as 1933 when he was a child of eleven.  The most intricate write ups occurred in 1937 and ‘38 when Kerouac was fourteen and fifteen.  But some form of his fantasy leagues lasted into the 1950’s, well after Kerouac the young man had begun to work on the novels that won him lasting literary acclaim.

Kerouac wrote himself into his leagues as “Zagg Parker…centerfielder for the New York Chevies.”  The early teams were named after automobiles and later teams were added with color names–like the Pittsburgh Browns.  There were usually six to eight teams during a season and twenty or so players on a team.  At the prime of his imaginary leagues, each player was represented by a distinct card.

Kerouac’s seasons generally consisted of about forty games.  The occurrences within his leagues was modeled on the happenings within major league baseball.  He integrated his leagues with a black player in the late forties.  However, he anticipated expansion of baseball by one year.  A year earlier than the Dodgers and Giants moved to California, Kerouac created his own California fantasy teams, the San Francisco Jaguars and the Los Angeles Thunderbirds.

Writing up imaginary games and trying to give life to a league that exists only in the head of those playing seems all too familiar.  The Near Miss League and the Simulated Historical League use mathematical tools of prediction much the way Strat-O-Matic has done since its inception.  But trying to bring those leagues to life and giving depth to the computer simulations; Seamheads writers know that task too well.

Kerouac’s imaginary characters went on to bigger and better things.  Players named Gavin and Cody populated his fantasy teams and then went on to fame in On the Road.  Players from Seamheads’ simulated leagues must settle for whatever life we can give them.  But, like Kerouac, we can dream.

The book, Kerouac at Bat, can be purchased from the New York Public Library Gift Shop and its own line store at: http://www.thelibraryshop.org/products2.cfm/ID/29981