The baseball side of Kerouac

Author obsessively wrote fantasy games

Jack Kerouac created team cards for a fantasy baseball game he invented and a broadsheet for his fantasy horse-racing circuit. (New York Times News Service)
<strong> Jack Kerouac </strong>

NEW YORK – Almost all his life, Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about.

He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players such as Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).



All of these “publications,” some typed, some handwritten and often pasted into old-fashioned composition notebooks, are part of the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The curator, Isaac Gewirtz, has written a 75-page book about them, “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats,” to be published next week by the library and available, at least for now, only in its gift shop.

Gewirtz said he had included much of the fantasy material in a 2007 Kerouac exhibition he mounted at the library, and had planned to add a chapter about the fantasy sports in the catalog but ran out of space. “I'm glad I waited,” he said, “because it forced me to go into it all in much more depth.”


The game could be played using cards alone, but Gewirtz thinks that more often Kerouac determined the result of a pitch by tossing some sort of projectile at a diagramed chart on the wall. In 1956, he switched to a new set of cards, which used hieroglyphic symbols instead of descriptions. Carefully preserved inside plastic folders at the library, they look as mysterious as runes.

The horse-racing game was played by rolling marbles and a silver ball bearing down a tilted Parcheesi board, using a starting gate made of toothpicks.

Apparently, the ball bearing traveled faster than the marbles, some of which were intentionally nicked to indicate equine fragility and mortality. So the ball bearing became the nearly invincible horse Repulsion, “King of the Turf,” whose legendary speed and stamina are celebrated in Kerouac's racing sheets.

A byline that frequently appears in the racing sheets and the baseball newsletters is “Jack Lewis,” an Anglicization of Kerouac's French first name, Jean-Louis.


