TAKE ME OUT TO THE POETRY READING

You'd think that the first American writer to have his own bobble-head doll included in the official Baseball Hall of Fame bobble-head doll collection at Cooperstown would have been someone on the order of Roger Kahn, or Roger Angel, or even Ernest Lawrence Thayer ("Casey at the Bat"), but no. That honor went, on Wednesday, to Jack Kerouac. The Kerouac bobble-head was commissioned by the minor league Lowell (Mass.) Spinners in 2001 as part of a promotional event. Other than the fact that Jack was a Lowell native, I don't know that he had any connection with the team or, for that matter, the sport. The Spinners cranked out 1,500 of them before destroying the mold, and given the sheer uniqueness, rarity and oddness of the concept, I'm guessing that each one is now probably worth its weight in Reggie Jackson rookie cards. The Cooperstown folks offered some vague blurbish "treasured American literary figure" blather by way of explanation for Kerouac's totemic induction, but I'm still unclear on why they bestowed this honor on him. One could kill a lot of time at this point making insipid wordplays -- On The Road Trip, Dharma / Brooklyn Bums, and so forth, but one suspects that he's already exhausted the average person's interest in this item.