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