“Why don’t we pass the time…”

by David Benjamin

“Only the Pontiacs, Nashes and cellar-dwelling La Salles are in financial condition to buy any minor league players to improve their clubs at this time.” 

— Jack Kerouac

MADISON, Wis. — I learned baseball solitaire from Dick Albright, my first best friend in high school. He invented a game played with a deck of Bicycle playing cards and a set of cunningly calibrated hitting and pitching charts (printed in longhand). At the time, Dick wasn’t aware that he was retracing the footsteps of logorrheic memoirist Jack Kerouac — who had squandered his youth, and much of his spare time for the rest of his life, playing a similar game. It turns out that when Jack went On the Road, he took his favorite toy along.

Before computers, the main tool for imaginary baseball was a deck of cards. Kerouac also used, according to Charles McGrath of the New York Times, a “projectile” thrown at the wall. This has never been fully explained. Kerouac developed charts far more intricate than Dick’s, but no more effective. Dick’s simpler system yielded results that eerily reflected real games and statistics. 

Like Kerouac, Dick made up teams, whose names I’ve forgotten. He filled his rosters with imaginary players, played full seasons, kept stats, used a slide rule to calculate ERAs (he later went to MIT) and executed the occasional trade. Kerouac named his squads after cars — the Chevvies, the Fords, the Cadillacs, etc. He even wrote up  “news stories” about each game. 

Dick’s teams consisted mainly of guys on his baseball cards. Mike Fornieles was one of his stars. Kerouac was more fanciful. He coined names like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker. According to McGrath, “Each team had a full roster of players, each with his own personality. He patterned Big Bill Louis after Babe Ruth and once had him come to bat eating a hot dog. He gave Earl Morrison eyeglasses and Joe Boston a broken leg. Burlingame Japes, a little left handed hitter… was once the base-stealing champ.”

It’s possible that Robert Coover’s brilliant novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor, was an offspring of Kerouac’s baseball solitaire game. In Coover’s story, J. Henry Waugh becomes so deeply obsessed with his imaginary players and their non-existent lives that he drifts into a shadow world of perpetual unreality. 

Having been there, I understand.

Of course, because I was as intellectually restless as Dick, I mimicked his creation. At age15, I founded the Columbia Baseball League, with eight teams playing a vague and open-ended season. Unlike Kerouac, whose charts and notes were discovered after his death and eventually enshrined at the New York Public Library, Dick’s game and mine were long ago consigned to the family ashcan and eventually buried somewhere in a Wisconsin landfill, where they belong.

I’m not sure if Dick still shuffles cards and squints at charts to pit the Somerville Red Sox versus the Duxbury Ducks. If he does, he probably doesn’t tell anyone. A few times after high school, I resurrected the CBL, mainly because I can’t sit passively and watch TV. Even if the television’s on and the show is gripping, I need something else. I’ve been reading books during commercials all my life. In high school, I always did my homework in front of the tube — which probably explains why I didn’t make the Honor Roll ’til my senior year. 

Nowadays, finally, baseball solitaire, with all its charts and stats, is too much work for me. However, I still need some diversion during Rachel Maddow’s nightly monolog. My solution, if I’m not studying Dan Parlegreco’s 2020 NFL Draft Guide, is solitaire.

But wait. This isn’t just solitaire. I have a league. 

I use cards, of course, not a computer, and I have a scoring system, I learned it at least sixty years ago from my grandfather Archie, who sat down one day and revealed to me that some people, somewhere, gamble on solitaire. 

Here’s how: You start by “buying” the deck for a dollar a card. This puts you $52 in the hole before you even shuffle. Every card you get “up,” starting with the aces, earns back five dollars. If you can free eleven cards, you’re three bucks to the good. If you “win,” by clearing the whole deck, your net gain is $208 — five dollars for each card minus the $52 ante. Usually, you lose money.

How does this become a league?

You begin with imaginary players. My solitaire league has four teams rooted in my sports-fan history, the Red Sox, the Celtics, the Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers football. Each team has eight players (Carlton Fisk, Cornbread Maxwell, Johnny Blood, Alan “The Horse” Ameche, etc.). Over a 16-week season, the teams play a series of eight-player single-elimination solitaire tournaments. 

I had to solve one technical difficulty. The trouble with solitaire is that you can play through dozens of shuffles, failing every time and escalating from $52 in the hole to thousands of dollars lost. This tedium does not lend itself to crisp tournament play. I needed a cutoff. So, I decided to end a player’s turn when, after a string of shuffles, he goes more than $100 into the hole. But I count his shuffles.

Players advance in one of two ways. One is to completely clear the deck, getting all the cards “up.” I call this a home run.

When fewer than four players homer in the first round, the non-homer players, or players, move into the semifinals based on shuffle count.  

An example: In my current tournament, four players homered into the semis. Kevin Garnett of the Celts and Bob Stanley of the Sox advanced again with home runs and both homered in the finals, forcing overtime. At this moment, Garnett has homered again, putting pressure on the Steamer. Piling up a lot of shuffles won’t help Stanley. He has to match Garnett’s fourth homer or he’s done. If Stanley loses, Garnett’s team, through a formula too idiosyncratic to explain, earns seven points toward the team title.

I keep statistics, too. But never mind. 

Although the creation of a “league” gives ordinary solitaire a certain nerdy complexity, it’s still so simple — needing only a deck of cards and a scorepad (no charts, hardly any math) — that you can follow an “NCIS” re-run while you play. The “team” element lends personality to a game, ironically referred to as “patience,” that’s otherwise lonely and pathetic. Like Dick, Kerouac and J. Henry Waugh, you find yourself liking (or hating) certain players — even though they don’t exist — and pulling for one team over another. God knows why, but this happens.

Why am I explaining all this? Because now, thanks to the coronavirus, the whole world has been consigned to a solitude which, like my CBL season, is vague and open-ended.

For the next two months (at least), the world is homebound. You can re-read Moby Dick or catch up on all those stacked-up back copies of The New Yorker. Or, watch cable, “binge” on Netflix, play video games endlessly, or try talking the kids into forsaking their PlayStation for a game of Monopoly. You can plunge into social media, discovering — once again — that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are luring little girls in pigtails and pinafores into a nail salon in Scranton, forcing them to serve as sex slaves to Viagra-crazed Democrats.

You could also drink a lot, smoke dope or make up your own baseball league.

Me? I’ve started a new novel. 

Or, as Angela Lanbury said to Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (one of Dick’s favorite movies), “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”