the 2012 Series proceeded, Sibson was heated as well. Taiwan, some of his teammates thought, had his number. They’re so good on defense that he’ll overcompensate. He overthinks the rain and gets angry.
As intense as Sibson is, though, he’s a good-natured dork, too. At tournaments he often wears a “Keep Calm and Join the Dark Side” T-shirt, and the Dark Side here might refer to his own brand of onfield fire, to his bad-boy Blackhawks’ team, or to blindness itself.
Clever clothing aside, Sibson and Austin made that diamond in Ames, Iowa, feel like Colorado’s Coors Field, where home runs fly out at an alarming rate, and as I watched my inaugural beep baseball slugfest, I figured playing defense was about as frustrating as trying to kill a cricket in the middle of the night. The players couldn’t get a bead on the beeping ball at all, and that’s the challenge elite beep ballers face on every bit of contact. Defense takes tactics, and patience, and guts. It also takes risking collision. On the best plays, you’ll see a third baseman dive to his left, a shortstop dive to his right, and a left fielder dive forward in a wild attempt to kick, slide on, or smother the ball. Foppiano, Perez, Benney, and Taiwan’s Chen and Kuo are some of the best at this. They give new meaning to “getting in front of it,” using their faces, crotches, or whatever else they’ve got to make the play. There’s an old saying in the game: either you’ve been hit in the balls, or you’re going to be hit in the balls, so no one’s crying when it happens.
When a fielder does find the beep, he struggles to gather it up in time to record the putout. These are the tensest moments. The batter barrels, the fielder grasps. Few of their teammates actually know the result, and everyone has to be quiet during each play so the guys can hear the ball. But when the umpire makes a call, whichever team has won the moment breaks the tennis-match silence with a collective roar.
Some days the defense is clicking, some days the offense is clicking, and even though Austin was driving an offensive Porsche in the 2012 championship, Taiwan had a limited-edition Ferrari. They scored twenty-three times with their pitcher, Leo Lin, in the first five innings. They consistently raked the ball to right center, the weakest spot in most defenses, way out toward a couple of off-duty seeing-eye dogs getting romantic in the distance. The rain continued and I got envious of the highly organized Taiwanese wearing their poncho tarps. To add to their happy dryness, they were especially jubilant because a Taiwanese player, Vincent Chiu, had just proposed to one of the sighted volunteers. She would say yes if Homerun won the World Series. Adjacent to all their joy, I tried to keep my notepad unsoaked by wedging it farther down my pants.
But the players kept going in that relatively quiet deluge, and though Austin had fallen behind, they continued to guide each other to rousing, muddy putouts. Batters tackled the bases as though they were linebackers drilling a wrong-footed Brett Favre. Fielders sprawled. Taiwan’s faithful chanted, “Taiwan . . . Homerun.” And the Austin Blackhawks, named for a speedy bird that can see eight times better than humans, circled the beep ball with ears peeled.
In the top of the sixth and last inning, Austin found themselves down by five runs, 23–18. But Mike Finn scored on a dink, Lupe Perez scored on a hard grounder, local phenom Zach Arambula scored with his legs, and Danny Foppiano scored on pure will. Each beep baseball lineup has only six hitters, so the Blackhawks batted around, and then Finn, tall and loping, scored again on a flare with two outs, tying the game at 23. Huge collective shout! The ’Hawks had done it, just about.
Momentum, an invention of commentators in most sports, is a big deal in beep baseball because no one on the field can see what’s happening and the imagination runs wild. Even disciplined players begin to believe that their teammates are blundering, that the offense they’re facing has become unstoppable, that someone—an umpire, or God—must be screwing them. Taiwan, whose players are usually levelheaded, got antsy on the field, and one outfielder nursed a shaky ankle. But they stopped the bleeding with the game tied 23–23.
Before the bottom half of the sixth, Lupe Perez’s mom, Mary Ann, implored him to “recharge, Perez, recharge.”
“Sighted people say you can tell a lot through eye contact,” Lupe told me. “Well, I could feel my teammates’ energy through their bodies.”
Locked in a 23–23 tie, Austin harnessed that energy, huddling by the third-base line. When a blind man lays his hand on his teammate’s arm to get himself back in position, or when high fives help the players make their physical way from play to play, the familiar camaraderie of baseball takes on a new dimension, and with everything on the line, the Blackhawks had become a tight-knit network of six defensive nodes. They took the field together. From his position in left, Perez shouted to his teammates, “Take it to Taiwan.” Collectively, they talked their way to the first out of the inning.
That unity is what Jan Traphagen, vice president of the league, loves about beep baseball: “It doesn’t make any difference if the players were born blind or if they were robbed of their vision because of a disease—we have a couple gunshots, drive-bys, hunting accidents—if they’ve never seen or they have seen. It’s just a marvelous game. It may be a sad story, but the ending’s great.”
The sad story for the Blackhawks was that Fernando Chang, the self-styled “Cockroach,” scored with one out in the bottom of the sixth to win the game for Taiwan, 24–23. The two seconds between my realization that Taiwan had won and the blind players’ realization that Taiwan had won made the walk-off victory surreal, but then the guys in the light-blue uniforms began their “Taiwan Homerun” cheer again. They walked onto the field in a jubilant train, hands on each other’s shoulders. For Taiwan, this was a long way from dancing the bunny hop. For Austin, it was torture.
Each team now had one loss in the tournament, and it all came down to game two. The rain intensified, and both teams took a break on the Taiwan team bus.
“It was hard for us to be on the same bus,” Lupe Perez told me. “That’s like two countries trying to sit together after they’ve gone to war. It took a lot for me to compose myself.”
Lupe’s fond of these kinds of martial metaphors. Take the incident of the Taiwanese tea, for instance. On the bus, Taiwan Homerun had thermoses, and they offered drinks to their rivals. Claire, Taiwan’s interpreter, said to the Blackhawks, “It’s not poison,” but only Richie Flores, the main Austin prankster, took a sip. Lupe Perez wouldn’t touch the thermos.
“You don’t know what that gun’s been through,” he said later. “You don’t know if it’s going to blow up in your face.”
That’s the kind of suspicion that accompanies this rivalry, at least for the most intense players. Afterward, Lupe wondered if the ginger tea had actually given Taiwan an advantage on a soggy day. Maybe it powered them, he thought, to their commanding win in game two and their fourth World Series championship. Compared to the first game, the second was a snoozer. Sibson was off the mark on the mound, and the final score wasn’t close. Taiwan had ended their losing streak; Austin’s had reached thirteen years.
“They’re our nemesis,” Austin coach Jonathan Fleming told me. “We want to keep it in our sights that these guys aren’t our friends right now. We’re determined to beat them. We’re building a team to beat Taiwan.”
That feeling made some of the postgame exchanges pretty awkward, and blind guys don’t always hide their facial expressions very well. As Taiwan’s players came in for hugs in the handshake line, some of the Austin team grimaced and leaned away, giving hasty back taps and moving on.
All of this anguish led into the 2013 Series, with Sibson and Lin back on the mound for a pitchers’ duel in yet another World Series championship matchup; with Foppiano and Rock Kuo playing tight defense, though sore; with the rookie, Ching-kai Chen, at the plate and Lupe Perez in the field.
“When we found out he was going to lose his sight,” Lupe’s mother Mary Ann told me, “we were devastated. He loves sports: basketball, biking. When they presented him with this game, it saved him. From feeling useless.”
“Recharge,” she always shouts at her son.
“This is my love right here,”