whether Chen was playing fair.
“I saw the guy, first play, up the middle,” Woodard told me later. “He slides over like a normal baseball player would, but as he slides, the ball takes one hop and he catches it at his chest. I’ve seen the best defenders. Heck, my dad’s one of them.” (Jared’s father, Clint, who’s never seen his son’s face, led RHI in putouts in ’13, and no one, Jared thought, could outperform his dad as easily as Chen seemed to.)
“I had the umpire check his blindfold twenty times,” Woodard said. “I could have sworn he was peeking at the plate. And then I could have sworn he was peeking at the base.”
For safety, Chen wore an extra, virtual-reality type facemask over his blindfold that raised questions, too, but the umpires kept ruling that he was legal. I didn’t think much of it. I’d already gotten used to seeing unbelievable stuff on the beep ball field. Woodard wasn’t so trusting.
“They told me he was a pro handball player,” he said. “But that’s eye-hand coordination. Beep ball is ear-hand coordination.”
That night I loitered around a hospitality room in the Columbus Holiday Inn—the host hotel for the tournament—searching for free beers and gossip. Head umpire Kenny Bailey had an open tab. I couldn’t get him to directly address alleged cheating, but later I overheard a meeting he had with the Taiwanese contingent. They were alarmed that their man Chen was under such intense scrutiny, but Bailey told them Chen should take the “looking” accusations as a compliment. He personally promised that their new star wouldn’t be badgered anymore. “Tell him to sleep like a baby,” Bailey said.
Chen wasn’t the first in league history to be suspected of sneaking a peek, and rumors about unfair play are perennial in beep ball, part of the lore of the game. In the eighties, officials stopped a tournament to have an emergency meeting about a particularly successful fielder, but everyone decided to just keep going. A few years later, one star had his head wrapped like a mummy after some highlight-reel plays, but even with the tape and ace bandages he could still pick up the ball quickly. The reason? He practiced year-round in the heat of New Mexico. Third basemen who block line drives with their forearms can become the subjects of florid descriptions and inflated concern, but most of those fables fade with the years.
Taiwan Homerun has heard their fair share of complaints because they’re so good defensively, but also because many in the league don’t know those guys very well. It’s easier to question someone when you can only identify him by his number. Plus, rivalry-thinking can spin out of control. From the ’80s until 2004, I thought every person wearing a Yankees hat was at least a little bit nefarious, and for some of the American players who’ve lost to them repeatedly, Taiwan is the Yankees.
The chatter about peeking seems like one of the stories these guys tell in order to battle. But the hearsay can change the mood of a tournament, with players asking their sighted volunteers to stay vigilant.
The history of suspected “looking” in the sport has had its lighter, outlandish moments, though. In one incident, Bob DeYoung of the Chicago Cobras went to extremes to exonerate himself during a game. When an umpire insisted that he readjust his uneven blindfold, thinking that he might have an advantage, DeYoung removed his prosthetic eyes and handed them over. Dan Greene, league president, was an earwitness.
“We heard Bob’s father say, ‘Robert!,’ and we said, ‘What did he do?’ And his father said, ‘He just gave her his eyes.’”
In a 1521 Domenico Beccafumi painting, St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind, is depicted holding her eyes out on a platter, and I like to imagine that DeYoung had her satisfied look on his face when he eyed the ump. After all, he’d won that rules dispute more decisively than anyone has ever won any argument in the history of man. Still, “looking” is a heavy topic in this sport. Since playing beep baseball at the very highest level can seem like magic, many think there must be some trick to it, and sometimes the Houdinis of beep are handcuffed by that reputation.
• • •
My Athens team was barely a speed bump for Chen and Taiwan on the first day, but the Timberwolves ultimately snatched two victories in their inaugural tournament, finishing fifteenth out of twenty. After their series ended with a victory over the St. Louis Firing Squad in the losers bracket, they shouted about going to Disney World like they’d started a new dynasty. For my part, I played in two Athens losses against Long Island, but the Wolves still thanked me vigorously for my contributions. It’s possible that “The Author,” as they called me, had made them think of themselves as part of a bigger story, and maybe that motivated Scean and the rest to outlast St. Louis. I allowed the praise, naturally. We shared a few carefully arranged high fives, and an hour after their last game I drove Scean back to the team’s Howard Johnson’s. We talked about a clutch run he’d scored and his chances for a restaurant job back in Athens. We took some wrong turns, but we found the place eventually, the blind ballplayer and the squirrel. He didn’t have his hotel key and wasn’t sure of his room number anyway, so we walked around the pool knocking on doors, searching for our team.
• • •
While the preliminary games took place at a sprawling soccer complex, Austin and Taiwan played the 2013 final in the outfield of Golden Park, a five-thousand-seat baseball stadium that had hosted the 3–1 U.S. victory over China in the gold medal game of the 1996 Olympic softball competition. Taiwan Homerun, undefeated for the week, needed only one win to secure their second consecutive title, while Austin, who’d lost to Taiwan, 7–6, in the previous day’s qualifying round, needed to sweep a doubleheader. Brandon Chesser, Lupe Perez, and Danny Foppiano were rested up, and the game started well for the Blackhawks. Perez, who’d quit high school when he realized during a football tryout for quarterback that he couldn’t see a blitzing linebacker, retired Chen on the second at-bat of the game, chasing one deep in left past the 170-foot home-run line.
“Take it to Taiwan!”
Vincent Chiu, whose engagement to a volunteer had been made final after 2012’s victory, scored on the next play to make it 1–0, though. Then, in the bottom of the first, Austin’s Zach Arambula, a CrossFit fiend who’d scored twenty-four runs in seven games, grounded out to Chen, starting a pattern.
“Ching-kai Chen with the play, again,” said Scott Miller, announcing the game for AM 540 WDAK in Columbus. “This is a guy defensively that Austin has to keep it away from when they put the ball in play,” his color man added.
“Three up, three down. Again, you must keep the ball away from that man up the middle.”
“That is an astounding play. I’ve done baseball for years and years and you won’t see a better play from a sighted player than we just saw right there.”
Taiwan got two runs in the fourth and led 4–0 entering the fifth inning. That’s when things got dire for Austin. Chen raced toward another ball hit by Mike Finn, but instead of colliding with a teammate, he whirlygigged away with a kind of pop-up slide after he grabbed it, and his evasive maneuver was the freeze-frame image of the tournament—an emblem of the athleticism of blind ballplayers, of the near misses that make beep ball thrilling, and of the mystery that surrounds the game’s best plays. The umpires conferred to see if there was anything they should do about the Magician of Changhua. There wasn’t. His blindfold was in place and no one was about to toss a ball at him to see if he reacted.
After another Chen base hit, Austin trailed by five going into the final inning, just as they had in 2012. But in the sixth, Sibson broke through. The ’Hawks were about to make a run. It had been forty-nine years since the advent of the sport, and in this final of the ’13 Series we could finally see it nearly perfected, by a foreign rookie and by a guy who’d been pitching to his blind brother for most of his life. That level of competition had barely been a gleam in the eye of those who first imagined baseball for the blind, but now here it was: international, unnerving, and full of pissed-off players chasing their joy. Baseball by the blind.
Austin was on their way back.
Wayne Sibson’s guide dog, Pacifico, paced the third-base line. Kevin Sibson smacked his glove. Then players