Baseball’s Links To The Beat Generation
Jack Kerouac, writer and Beat Generation icon, and Neal Cassidy, madman, were a pair of unlikely best friends. Neal, by the time he met Jack, had lost track of how many cars he’d stolen. He would leave one girl behind in a hotel room to dash across town and meet another. Speed limits were just numbers on road signs. His excesses may have endeared him to the quiet, shy Kerouac, the self-described recording angel who stood in the shadows, remembered everything, and wrote it all down later.
The seemingly mismatched pair shared two favorite pastimes: road trips and baseball.
As the summer of 1949 closed, Jack and Neal – Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, respectively, in Jack’s novel “On The Road” – took off on yet another adventure. In Denver, they picked up a Cadillac limousine whose owner wanted it delivered to Chicago. Neal drove most of the thousand miles, in seventeen hours, trashing the car on the way. They made it to Detroit by bus, and shared a ride the rest of the way to New York City.
When Jack wasn’t traveling, he lived with his parents in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Neal moved into a Manhattan apartment with “Inez,” real name Diane Hansen, whom he had just met, already pregnant. He hadn’t divorced his first wife Carolyn, who lived in California and was expecting baby number two. He also knew that, somewhere out West, a fourth child carried his name.
New York City, in the time of “On The Road,” was baseball – no pun intended – paradise. There were three teams. Each broadcast a full schedule on radio, and televised most home games.
One day, Neal dropped in, with baseball on his mind. In the first draft of “On The Road,” Jack described the scene:
We made a date to meet at my mother’s house before I left. He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. “Remember, Sal (Dean speaking), Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is coming in for the Phillies we’ll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there DiMaggio has three balls count and the pitcher fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what happened to Bob Thomson when we left him with a man on third. Yes!”
Only two words were changed during the revision that produced the version published in 1957. His mother became his aunt, as she did throughout the novel. “Bob” Thomson became Bobby, possibly after he became well-known by that name after the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff.
Baseball Almanac’s day-by-day schedules reveal that, in 1949, all three matchups occurred on Sunday, September 25.
At Braves Field in Boston, the Giants won 3-2. With a 72-78-1 record, they were already out of the race. The Dodgers, at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, lost 5-3. They fell 1 1-2 games behind the Cardinals with two games remaining. The Yankees were in Fenway, playing the first of two important final-week series with the Red Sox. They lost 4-1, and fell into a tie with the Sox for first. With five games left, both teams had identical 93-55-1 records.
Jack and Neal had the Yankees on TV, the Dodgers on radio, and checked on the Giants only during lulls in the other games. Like any serious fans, they knew which games were meaningful.
Here, the pieces stop falling into place. In “On The Road,” it’s early 1950. It happened every spring: Jack got travel fever. He wanted to see Neal once more before he left town. He headed west sometime in April or May. None of the matchups occurred on any Sunday in either month.
Jack did remember that, on a previous visit to Denver, he watched a softball game in a park at 23rd and Welton Streets, played by “strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian . . . performed with heart-breaking seriousness.” The pitcher looked like Dean, he wrote.
On Google’s map of central Denver, the block between 22nd and 23rd, between Welton and California Streets, is still a park, where softball may still be played.
If Jack remembered this detail, it’s possible that he got the specifics of Neal’s baseball visit right, but placed the day in the wrong month and year. As one might do when one writes a three hundred page travelog from memory in two weeks, fueled by coffee and benzedrine.
Neal Cassidy, Maggie huffed. What a creep, she added, ignoring the fact that her first name and his last form the title of another Kerouac novel.
Indeed, I said. But he liked baseball. And that can make you overlook, to a certain extent, someone’s flawed character.
Neal, for whom life was a constant search for kicks, would get a kick out of major league baseball being played at the corner of 20th and Blake in his old downtown Denver haunts. He might even have a Rockies season ticket plan.
In his youth, Jack created a fantasy baseball league populated by the likes of Carlo Marx, Hilary Holladay, and Pictorial Review Jackson. He would no doubt feel that, with the Red Sox having a third baseman whose surname is that of his home town, Lowell (Massachusetts), that life had come full circle. Almost. A haiku would still be needed, to bring David Ortiz out of his slump.
