“In time, I will be known as a luminary” by Norm Brooks
At least I use real players…
When I lost my job because of “decreased productivity” last year, my wife kicked me out of the house. When my friend Greg saw me panhandling to get a few minutes of Internet time, he told me I was nuts. And these days, when people see me approaching on the street, they tend to look the other way.
But despite my obsessive behavior, I may not be as crazy as you think. According to the New York Times, Jack Kerouac shared my passion.
Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like 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 like 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).
He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides.
There’s more to me than a scruffy beard and the horrific body odor. Sure, picking Juan Pierre in the third round may have seemed silly back in August. But people also told Jack Kerouac On The Road was chock full of grammatical errors.
Category: Baseball
Kerouac definitely knew the real meaning of ‘fantasy league’…did Neal have a league, too?