Now batting, Jack Kerouac

From boyhood on, Lowell author Jack Kerouac loved to create fantasy baseball games. In “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats’’ (New York Public Library, $25), author Isaac Gewirtz, a curator of American literature at the library, suggests that Kerouac’s hobby may have been instrumental in his development as a writer. Throughout his life, Kerouac produced elaborate fantasy baseball newsletters. Initially, he selected names for his ballplayers from the Lowell phone book. Later he made up names, such as Wino Love and Go-Go Golia, so they would, as he said, “fit better the particular sorrowful flair I wanted.’’