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.