jack kerouac’s fantasy baseball

A short new book details the game he made up for his own amusement.

It’s not “fantasy” baseball the way we think of it now.  He didn’t assign real ball players to made-up teams.  He didn’t tally their real-life stats and use them to calculate a winner.

By 1946, when Kerouac was 24, he had devised a set of cards with precise verbal descriptions of various outcomes (“slow roller to ss,” for example), depending on the skill levels of the pitcher and batter. The game could be played using cards alone, but Mr. 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 now look as mysterious as runes.