Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind

BEEP

BEEP

Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind

David Wanczyk

SWALLOW PRESS • OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS • ATHENS

Swallow Press

An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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© 2018 by David Wanczyk

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wanczyk, David, 1982- author.

Title: Beep : inside the unseen world of baseball for the blind / David Wanczyk.

Description: Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, 2017. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017027939| ISBN 9780804011891 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804040822 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Baseball for people with visual disabilities. | Baseball players—Biography. | Blind athletes—Biography. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Baseball / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / People with Disabilities.

Classification: LCC GV880.75 .W36 2017 | DDC 796.357/8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027939

For my parents

Perhaps my sun shines not as yours. The colors that glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less color to me. The sun does not shine for my physical eyes, nor does the lightning flash, nor do the trees turn green in the spring; but they have not therefore ceased to exist, any more than the landscape is annihilated when you turn your back on it.

—Helen Keller

You could be a kid for as long as you want when you play baseball.

—Cal Ripken Jr.

Contents

List of Illustrations

One: The Underdogs

WARMING UP: The Kid

ONE: The Eyes of Texas

TWO: The Rookies

THREE: The Summer of ’64

FOUR: The Soul of Hoosier Beep Ball

FIVE: This Is Our Beeping City

Two: The Whole Beeping World

BETWEEN INNINGS: The Dad

SIX: An Eagle, the Buddha, a Rock, and the Girls

SEVEN: The Blind Boys of Summer

Three: The Green Fields of the Mind

SEVENTH-INNING STRETCH: The Comeback

EIGHT: The Rough Patches

NINE: A Sense of Victory

EXTRA INNINGS: The Return of Homerun

The Champions of Beep Baseball

Acknowledgments

Index

Illustrations

Lupe Perez, Austin Blackhawks

Rock Kuo, Taiwan Homerun

Ethan Johnston, Colorado Storm

Kevin Sibson, Austin Blackhawks

John Ross with Babe Ruth

Joe McCormick, Boston Renegades

Rob Weissman and Darnell Booker, Boston Renegades and Indy Thunder

One

The Underdogs

WARMING UP

The Kid

WHEN I CLOSED my eyes as a kid, I heard baseball.

In the summer, my dad would put me to bed in the fourth inning of Red Sox games, but once he’d left the room I’d flip on my clock radio and friendly Sox announcer Joe Castiglione would tell me about another Wade Boggs double off the Green Monster, another run-scoring blooper to right. It seemed as though the Red Sox were always playing the Minnesota Twins, and they always trailed 4–3. But catching up was the best part. I’d listen to Roger Clemens’s fastball popping into the catcher’s mitt and do a sleepy eight-year-old’s fist pump with every strike. Some people say they dream in color, but I dreamed in baseball chatter, the broadcast sound of a rundown and a staticky seeing-eye single through the left side.

I spent the days announcing my own backyard baseball triumphs—Here’s Wanczyk, riding a 55-game hit streak. I crushed home runs into a rhododendron, rounded the third-base tree stump in slo-mo, and chest-bumped a ghost runner. It should have told me something about my baseball future, though, that even in my pretend world, I pretty often whiffed. When that happened, I’d announce in Castiglione’s affably nasal voice that the ball had been ruled foul, and I’d pick up a clutch single on my fourth strike.

Pretty soon, baseball changed for me. By age ten I’d have tantrums over Little League, thinking I should have been the one pitching instead of whichever coach’s kid was on the mound, but when I got my chance one Saturday morning, I promptly gave up twenty-seven runs in one inning. This is not an exaggeration. The carnage took eighty-five minutes, and my major-league dreams went up in a cloud of infield dust. Here’s Wanczyk, who’s walked twelve and beaned three kids named Josh square in the ass. My dad tousled my hair and did me the favor of withholding any clichéd pitching advice. My lifetime ERA was 243.00.

To go along with my on-field struggles, I had freak-outs over the Red Sox, too. In 1995, I dropped a fly ball in the finals of my Babe Ruth League, and I decompensated when the Sox lost to the Cleveland Indians in the playoffs; in ’98, a pickoff throw broke my nose, and the Sox lost to the Indians in the playoffs; in ’99, at sixteen, I was the co-MVP of JV ball—like being salutatorian of summer school—and the Sox lost to the Yankees in the playoffs. After that elimination, I grabbed a wooden rocking horse my family still kept in our basement, spiked it to the carpet, and spent a few bleak hours thinking about spring training as I tried to Scotch-tape its tail back on.

In college, with the help of some daydream-inspiring Latin and Greek classes, I continued to believe that the epic tribulations of the Red Sox were part of my personal mythos. That’s the kind of thinking a twenty-one-year-old steeped in Homer and a hatred of the Blue Jays gets himself into when he’s not having much luck with the ladies. So, when the Red Sox lost game seven of the American League Championship Series to the Yankees in 2003, it made perfect sense that I’d also get dumped, as though the universe (or Zeus) had constructed a diorama of coincidental suffering in which I was fated to reside—a tiny paper doll of a man left holding his drooping pennant.

That school year, I got into experimental theater and Irish literature, the balms of the despondent. I stayed up late writing Yeatsian ballads about collarbones, the wind, and the way collarbones look in the wind. While I sometimes let myself read rumors about a new relief pitcher the Red Sox were courting, it was mostly a long, lonely off-season.

Then, when I was twenty-two, the Red Sox finally won the World Series. Can you believe it? shouted Castiglione. I couldn’t. I’d just moved to Ohio to start a teaching job, but I’d flown into Boston for the clinching game, and after the last out I ran around Kenmore Square hugging anonymous Murphs. This was it. I’d graduated college, I had employment, and, most importantly, I had a new girlfriend whose over-the-shoulder glance felt like a late-inning rally. All this coinciding with the Red Sox winning it all, right when I’d stopped being a kid.

As I got older and got married to the over-the-shoulder glancer, I grew out of my Red Sox obsession (and away from overwrought baseball metaphors). I couldn’t stomach the five-hour games or the talk radio bluster that accompanied early-season fiascos. The life-and-death attitude that had seemed necessary as a pre-2004 Red Sox fan felt a little ridiculous, especially after my daughter Natalie was born. We bought her the obligatory Born to Be a Red Sox Fan onesie, I pointed out David Ortiz on TV as she spat up strained beets, and the Red Sox won the series again that year. But my wee-hours heart wasn’t in it.

As whole seasons passed me by, I missed my baseball obsession, the impracticality of memorizing on-base percentages, and I missed listening to the games on the radio as I had as a dreamy kid, when it was all right to be kept up nights by a thing that was supposed to be fun. But I found that feeling again where almost no one else was looking: on a field in Iowa where the players heard baseball, too, and imagined the game, and hoped like hell it would give them something beautiful.

In 2012, I traveled to the Beep Baseball World Series to write a clever magazine story on something peculiar—blind guys playing sports. But as Lupe Perez of Austin, Texas, dove in the mud for a beeping baseball he couldn’t see, and as Rock Kuo of Taipei, Taiwan, worked with his team’s pitcher to make solid contact at the plate, this game became more than a novelty. By the late innings I felt the old childhood single-mindedness again. The Austin Blackhawks trailed their rivals from Asia, but that seemed right; coming back was the best part, after all. And as I watched guys who’d mostly grown up without baseball, I saw that they could still approach the game as a kid could.

Maybe they had retinoblastoma, or Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy. Maybe they’d lost their sight in a botched operation or a hunting accident. But whatever the circumstances, when they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and lined up to take the field together, they were baseball players: trash-talking, backslapping, and loving the fight. So I decided to go with them. What follows is the story of beep baseball as I heard them tell it.

ONE

The Eyes of Texas

Base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen—generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race. We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people: the guts, vile as guts are, divine as guts are!

—Walt Whitman

THE SOUND OF baseball is different on this field. It has to be. There’s less crack of the bat and more alarm-clock beeping. Less I got it and more Where is it? But Play ball is always Play ball, and after the umpire makes that call, you can close your eyes and listen. You can still imagine your first visit to a major-league park. The mist lifts off the impossibly green infield at Fenway. You can almost see it.

You hear the action differently here, though. There’s the familiar baseball patter—comin’ to you, kid, here we go, kid. But then the pitcher, Kevin Sibson of the Austin Blackhawks, activates the beep baseball by pulling a pin out of it. The ball beeps fast like a daredevil’s EKG and Sibson delivers, shouting, Set, ready, ball.

Brandon Chesser’s at the plate, blindfolded to cancel out what remains of his vision. With his uppercut swing and outlaw’s intensity, he’s aiming to knock the beep out of the audible ball. He and Sibson, hitter and pitcher, traditional antagonists, are on the same team here. They have to be.

Set, ready, ball.

Chesser connects and he chugs down the baseline, breathing heavily while the fielders on the opposing team, the great Taiwan Homerun, fan out like detectives of sound. The beep baseball, a sixteen-incher chock full of spare parts from old pay phones to make it ring, rolls quickly toward and then past the fielders. But how far? A spotter shouts, Three, which corresponds to a zone on the field, but Taiwan doesn’t know where the ball is, and if they can’t pick it up in time—they have five seconds, tops—Chesser will tackle a four-foot-tall buzzing base and score the run. He goes at everything headfirst.

On this Saturday afternoon in Columbus, Georgia, Chesser, whose eyesight deteriorated when he was a teenager, plows forward on a couple of tight hammies. He’s a brash guy, goateed, thick in the middle. The dog tags he wears to honor each of his kids tangle under his uniform as he runs, but he doesn’t let up. All that’s left in his campaign to stick it to those who underestimate him is to add World Champion to the end of his name. He’s a warehouse worker for the Marines, a father of four, a husband, a run-scorer. He just needs that last title.

Everyone has always told me you can’t do this because you’re blind, Chesser says. But I went out and proved everyone wrong.

He’s halfway to the bag and the beeping ball rolls beyond the edge of the infield arc. It needs to go at least forty feet or it’ll be ruled foul—there’s no bunting in blind baseball. As it crosses the line, Ching-kai Chen in a pale blue uniform, number 9, runs toward it. His nose points at the sky like he’s a sprinter breasting the tape.

Chen is blind from a motorcycle accident, this is his first World Series tournament, and his superior play has been the talk of the league. In the mind’s eye, he is Brooks Robinson diving toward the third-base line, an apparition of Luis Aparicio ranging to his left, and once the umpire makes the call that Chen has the ball cleanly, you hear the Mandarin cheer from his team. Chesser, who’s on the ground after tackling the pylon-base a split second too late, is out. He and Sibson are pissed—Sibson smacks his glove—and the Austin Blackhawks, just like last year, are running out of chances.

Beat Taiwan! Chesser’s teammate Lupe Perez shouts in a chest-thumping bass. Yay-eh. Take it to Taiwan. Chesser agrees. He’s a former bull-rider—a mount named Headhunter broke three vertebrae in his back once—and he doesn’t want to get thrown today. Not by Taiwan.

He flips up his blindfold and runs toward Chen, who’s standing about where second base would be in a conventional baseball game. He bumps him, seems to reach for his blindfold, and both guys lose their balance.

Is this a hug or a hazing, a rough recognition of another good play by the storied number 9 or an attempt to throw off the rhythm of a new guy? An umpire separates the two combatants but a question hangs in the air.

Is Chen somehow too good at beep ball? That’s the whisper from Austin, that he might be tipping his head backward so he can sneak a peek out the bottom of his blindfold. His vision is kaleidoscopic at best, but maybe he’s gotten some sense of the motion of the ball?

Chesser’s teammate Danny Foppiano will later make that argument: Their number 9—my wife’s telling me not to say anything. Look, I can’t see, but from what I’m told from other people, number 9 jumped over one person, sidestepped another person, and picked the ball up cleanly. I’ve been playing since 1985, and it’s impossible. He’s only newly blind, and this is his first year playing.

That’s one of the stories circulating on the bench, in the crowd, but these kinds of charges are common in beep ball when the stakes are high, when an opponent makes a string of defensive plays that sound incredible.

Another story is that Chen is one of the nimblest guys ever to play the game, a national handball star before his accident. He’s so good because of that history and because the thick grass of the infield has been stopping the ball dead, allowing him to isolate the beep and swoop in aggressively.

I am a firm believer that there are some people who are just good players, says Dan Greene, president of the National Beep Baseball Association (NBBA). We’ve had this argument since the league began.

The umpires say Chen checks out. Still, the telephone-game rumor of an advantage for Taiwan has some of the feistier Blackhawks fuming.

Meanwhile, when I asked Chen how he felt about the 2013 National Beep Baseball Association World Series—the premier event in the uncanny world of baseball for the blind—he told me through an interpreter, Everyone’s happy, everyone’s friendly. He has a toothy smile and stands at attention like he’s not quite comfortable with his surroundings yet. Everything about his appearance screams rookie. Rookie at blindness, rookie at baseball.

His play tells a different story.

•   •   •

Back in Ames, Iowa, in 2012, Austin had a chance to knock off Taiwan in the final, too. Chen wasn’t with Homerun then, but the powerhouse from the Pacific was already the favorite. Austin kept them close for all six innings, though.

Both teams had outlasted fifteen other squads over a week of play, and the Blackhawks had crushed Taiwan the day before in a battle of unbeatens, so they needed just one more victory to clinch the double-elimination World Series.

On a road trip through Iowa, I’d stopped off to check out this crazy blind baseball I’d read about in a Harper’s Magazine item that listed the rules: A team is composed of a minimum of six blind or visually impaired players and two to four sighted people: a pitcher, a catcher, and two defensive spotters. There is no second base. First and third bases are four-foot padded cylinders with speakers that buzz when activated.

My very first game turned out to be a classic, and the sport turned out to deserve more than two inches of print.

During warm-ups, I met Foppiano. He was walking with his arm on a teammate, and he loudly predicted a win for the Blackhawks. At age eight, he’d been struck by an errant baseball bat that hastened his blindness (he already had deformed retinas), and now he sounded off about being a defensive specialist. When I asked about his hitting, he brushed that off as a know-nothing question. Defense is where the game’s won and lost, he said, and I immediately saw that I would need to try hard to mix it up with blind ballplayers, to listen for their language of braggadocio and mythmaking. This was a whole new ballgame, and I had to learn.

In beep ball, pitcher and hitter are on the same team and the timing rituals make every pitch a held breath. Sibson taps his glove and shouts, Set, ready, ball. From 21.5 feet away, he throws to a predetermined spot in Brandon Chesser’s wheelhouse, and Chesser swings a beat after he hears the word ball. (For a hitter, there’s no use chasing the beep. That’s like swatting at a bee in a windstorm, and you can’t hit that way with any regularity.)

Six fielders on the defensive side patiently imagine what they’ll do when the ball comes for them. If Chesser makes contact, he hauls ass toward that padded blue base a hundred feet from the plate (think tackling dummy). But here’s a catch. An umpire can flip a switch and activate the buzzing mechanism of either first or third base, so after the hitters make contact, they have to pick out the sound before they run. Because of this rule, one of the more common nicknames for beep ballers is Wrong Way.

While the ball beeps—three shrill notes per second—and the hitter listens for his direction, a sighted spotter can yell out only one number, a number that indicates an area on the field. Usually, one means the ball is headed to right field, five means left. Two and four are the gaps, and three is up the middle. Six is an S.O.S., and it means everyone had better run hard toward the outfield.

After the call, the search for the beep begins. Most fielders move well, and they sometimes pick up the ball quickly, but on at least half the plays there are cringe-inducing scrambles. They dive, one after another, and can’t quite stop the sound. The poet Wilfred Owen, writing about reaching for a gas mask during World War I, described this kind of urgency as an ecstasy of fumbling. When you’re watching a blind man try to pick up a beeping baseball, the stakes are lower but some of that suspense is there: the ball is right in front of him, after all. But time is running out, and, finally, he has it. Or he doesn’t. There is no such thing as a routine play, and watching the game hurts.

This sport is not a vehicle for vague sentimental uplift, either, not a consolation prize. When these guys show up to the field, it’s as athletes, and when they hit the ground diving, they want to win. Almost all of the players scoff at the idea that beep ball is some kind of isn’t-that-nice inspiration, and they sometimes mock sighties for noting their bravery. They’ll even congratulate us for being able to tie our shoes, many players told me. Screw sentimental uplift, they think. But potential warmhearted sentimentality is everywhere you look at a blind baseball World Series, especially in the early rounds, when every team’s still in it and just hearing the biographies of the players is hard to bear.

On field 4, there’s Joe McCormick of the Boston Renegades, whose Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy caused him to lose sight in one eye before his prom and the other eye after it. His girlfriend, Ashley, wore a wild strawberry pink dress at the dance, Joe remembers. She looked good. And he looks sharp on the field, often hitting over .600 in regional tournaments and the World Series.

On field 6, there’s Mike Hoodlum McGloshan, who began playing for the Chicago Comets on the advice of his parole officer. When the officer described the game, he didn’t quite understand. Blind baseball? I told her she was high and I wanted some, McGloshan said. He’s been known to hitchhike to practices from downstate, where he’s studying for a law degree.

On field 10, there’s Ethan Johnston taking ground balls at third. Ethan, or Esubalew, is part MVP of the Colorado Storm, part intentionally blinded Ethiopian street kid. After he was kidnapped from his home when he was a little boy, his captors wanted to make Ethan a more pitiable, profitable beggar, and so they poured chemicals in his eyes. He lived an itinerant life in Addis Ababa for two years before he was rescued and adopted by an American family. He loves the St. Louis Cardinals. He plays basketball by squinting at the white square above the rim. He wants to announce sports on the radio.

These are touching stories, but everywhere you look there’s competitiveness. Visually impaired? Yes, but that’s quickly forgotten during the course of an exciting inning. And then quickly remembered as coaches, volunteers, and other players vacillate between balls-to-the-wall effort and compassion for their teammates. The game, made necessary by disability, can almost eliminate the experience of that disability for a few hours.

It makes you feel normal, I heard. The players feel free as they do something as simple as running to a base with their arms spread wide.

An infielder, say Dave Benney of the Indy Thunder, can make a diving play on the field. Normal. But then he needs a hand to find his Gatorade on the bench. He can be an old-fashioned ball-playing loudmouth, so sometimes his volunteers give him a little grief with his drink. But back on the field, fully hydrated, he’s hurtling after the ball to make another improbable play.

These guys get into the game with intensity, too, because many of them haven’t had much chance to play organized sports before this. Benney, blind at birth, fights for the opportunity. He’s had some clashes over the game, and his team’s rivalry with crosstown foes Rehab Hospital of Indiana X-Treme (RHI) remained hot a couple of years after on- and off-field rancor caused them to split in two (more on that later).

For these players—potential figures of pity for those who don’t know any better—sports-as-diversion becomes sports-as-obsession in a quick blink. But that makes them just like anyone else, they say. They want to win. And they’ll run through anything, or anyone, standing in their way.

•   •   •

That competition raged at the Austin-Taiwan tussle in Iowa in 2012, my first game. On a day that saw the hardest rain of a drought-stricken summer, the contest was the first of what became annual winner-take-all meetings between the two rivals. It all began with a sweet, octave-down Star-Spangled Banner—Oh say, can you see?—and a rousing version of Zhōnghuá Míngúo gúogē. One of the Taiwanese players, Jack Lai, was led to a microphone by his team’s interpreter, Claire Wang. As Jack sang his anthem, joined by Taiwan’s three dozen traveling fans, the team seemed jazzed about the possibility of taking their first World Series title since 2006.

A visually impaired piano tuner, Lai was one of ten all-star players Taiwan brought to the U.S. to contest the World Series. Jack Lai and Rock Kuo and Vincent Chiu and Fernando the Cockroach Chang. (Chang nicknamed himself not for his defensive-scurrying ability, or his knack for withstanding Austin’s nuclear-powered offense, but because his Chinese name sounds like the word for the bug.)

Taiwan Homerun draws from a land of twenty-eight million, with hundreds of thousands of visually impaired people, and they have four teams back home.