What Do Jack Kerouac And My Dad And Uncle Have In Common?

They both created their own dice baseball games in their youth! The article in Saturday's Times detailing Kerouac's adolescent invention and meticulously chronicled games and stats was, by far, the greatest thing I've read in a paper in weeks. Kerouac even wrote "news stories" about league happenings. He also had his own fantasy race-horsing circuit, both of which are the subject of a new collection and book at the New York Public Library.

Even one of 20th century's coolest Americans and most lauded authors, a founder of the Beats, loved baseball so genuinely that he went to the extremely sweet, dorky lengths of creating his own dice baseball games. As an adult, he was driving around the country, living where and as he chose, as part of an iconic group of writers, whose cultural effect will resonate for decades and decades. But at the age of 16, he was huddled over his notebooks and playing cards, just like I, my dad and uncle were at 16! I doubt there is a more convincing argument that baseball truly is America's pasttime and one of the few things that can be defined as quintessentially American. (The other things on my list are corn, apple pie, jazz, rock and perhaps, at least in the postwar era, speculation and/or entrepreneurship. Please add your own items in the comments section.)

Speaking from experience, playing dice baseball automatically qualifies you for teasing about it by your friends. The Times' story notes that Kerouac hid his hobby from nearly all his fellow writers. (I just can't picture Allen Ginsberg getting into it.) When I told my dad about this over the weekend, he sounded excited, especially about the part that Kerouac wrotes his own stories. He told me for the first that he and his brother did the same. They would mock the Sporting News' way of writing, he said. Apparently, Kerouac's did the same to United Press International.

I was always partial to Strat-o-Matic's game, but, for my 12th or so birthday, my uncle actually re-created their original game, created in Sheepshead Bay, in 1960s Brooklyn. If I ever have more free time in my life and/or a mid-life crisis, I'm going to play another season of dice baseball.