Beep. David Wanczyk

was thought up by Robert V. Chandler and tested at the warm-and-fuzzy-sounding Industrial Home for the Adult Blind in Oakland, where Chandler was superintendent. In that game, nine fielders knelt on a pad beyond the infield, and the ball had a “jingler” inside (Charlie Fairbanks would not have been impressed). It’s not entirely clear what this jingler was—bells, metal balls?—but a 1916 story out of South Carolina told of “a game of baseball, played with two tin cans, one placed within the other so as to produce a rattling sound.” Blind ballplayers were nothing if not resourceful.

      The hitters in sound baseball used a kind of field hockey stick to slap at the ball that a sighted pitcher rolled toward them. The bases buzzed, so there were some similarities to beep ball, but fielders actually had to throw the ball toward the base in front of the path of the runner in order to record an out, adding a dimension of zaniness that was probably much less fun than it sounds. Recreation magazine reported that “the scores have been quite large,” and it’s hard to imagine anyone making an out in sound baseball.

      There were two teams at the Industrial Home for the Adult Blind, the Bears and the Tigers, and in April 1938, wearing uniforms donated by C. S. Howard, owner of the racehorse Seabiscuit, they met in an intramural contest dubbed “the blind world series.” Charlie Berta led the Bears, and “slugging John Bogman” seems to have captained the Tigers. A rare picture displays the cramped nature of the sport (the picture also shows a dozen men in three-piece suits and top hats acting as umpires). All of the players (and all of the dapper gentlemen) were packed into an area the size of one side of a tennis court, and the fielders had only six feet of space between them.

      “The batter cocks an ear as the ball jingles toward him. Wham! He takes a mighty swing,” wrote Don Caswell, United Press correspondent. And Slugging John Bogman, though “flustered” by the attendance of California’s governor, smacked a triple over the head of the shortstop.

      “The big weakness now is that the ball travels with such speed that the players are unable to locate it fast enough,” wrote J. P. Lang, supervisor of athletics for the San Francisco Recreation Department. “However, the players feel that within a short time, with practice, they will be able to play a much better game.”

      On May 23, 1939, at League Park in Cleveland, the Ohio School for the Blind Reds played the Ohio School for the Blind Blues in what was a slightly better, slightly less offensively minded game.

      “For three exciting innings they battled each other, every player in dead earnest, yet obviously having a swell time,” wrote Ray Dorsey after watching the earnest Reds defeat the swell Blues, 7–2; the Lions Club, a sponsor of the game, passed out twenty-two hundred canes at the event before a group of their own volunteers got shut out by the triumphant Reds, 3–0.

      For months, I assumed these exhibitions were the first attempts at organized, non-tin-can blind baseball. Some New Deal spirit of progressivity, I was sure, had brought about a confidence in the capabilities of the blind that hadn’t existed before. But while I dug for more information about Chandler and the boys, I found that the earliest known precursor of beep baseball emerged not during FDR’s day, but during the second administration of Grover Cleveland, in 1894.

      At the American Association of Instructors of the Blind conference that year, a Floridian named H. N. Felkel declared, “There is no game for the blind that will so enlist the emotions, quicken the perception, call forth determination and excite emulation as does baseball for its votaries.”

      Mr. Felkel, however, had not yet heard what was going on in Louisville, Kentucky. After delivering his speech, he entered into a conversation with a music teacher from the Kentucky Institute for the Blind, Charles Frederick, about the exercises Frederick’s students were engaged in. Off the record, Frederick must have mentioned something to Felkel about baseball, and so we get the following conversation, captured in the riveting book Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Meeting of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind (1895):

      MR. FELKEL: You mention baseball.

      MR. FREDERICK: I do not know whether baseball for the blind has reached as far as Florida. The boys have modified it somewhat, so that they have a right good game. The pitcher stands about eight feet from the batter and counts one, two, three. At three he lets the ball go, and I think that twice out of five times he will hit it. When [the batter hits] the ball he runs. We had four trees that were marked very nicely for the bases. They learn these bases so that they can make them very well.

      MR. FELKEL: Would it not be a good suggestion to have ropes to the bases to guide them?

      MR. FREDERICK: Yes, sir; it would.