By the time Jack Kerouac was 11 years old, he had invented a fantasy baseball game involving a toothpick and a marble. His invention evolved to a card-based game that he played for his entire life, inventing teams and rosters, keeping play-by-play box scores and seasonal statistics in a series of notebooks.
The teams were named after cars (St. Louis Cadillacs, Pittsburgh Plymouths, Washington Chryslers) or colors (Boston Grays, Chicago Blues, New York Greens). Kerouac wrote descriptions of games, trades, and contract disputes in league newsletters. He described one player, Buck Barbara of the Philadelphia Pontiacs as
big, stocky .