The Original Fantasy Baseball Player

Since this summer marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, the original scroll manuscript is going "on tour." This past week the scroll made its first stop in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac's hometown, where it will be on display until mid-September. The scroll will also be available for viewing from November through March 2008 at the Beatific Exhibition at the New York Public Library.

The New York Public Library already contains some excellent Kerouac paraphernalia, including correspondence and book contracts, as well as "two sets of more than one hundred handwritten cards, that allowed Kerouac to play a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, together with hundreds of pages that meticulously document and report on games he played between 1936 and 1965. The baseball game was originally conceived and played by Kerouac at the age of six or seven, when he spent many solitary hours in his room."

Nearly six years ago, when the New York Public Library acquired the archives, the Associated Press published an interesting article on Kerouac's fantasy baseball league, including many details of the league: "So detailed was Kerouac's league that he played each game in virtual real time, not just batter by batter, but pitch by pitch...He also published the newsletter 'Jack Lewis's Baseball Chatter,' and produced a broadsheet called the 'The Daily Ball,' in which he compiled standings and league leaders and offered summaries of the day's games."

Kerouac references his fantasy baseball world in both Dr. Sax and my personal favorite Kerouac novel, Desolation Angels.