some of the 2013 World Series final, the culmination of my second season following the game of beep, I kept my eyes closed, envisioning the dramatic comeback for the tough-luck Blackhawks. The full count, the big swing. I imagined myself at the plate, my big brother pitching. It felt like it did when I was little, when we all turned ourselves into heroes and played tennis-ball-baseball with the rest of the neighborhood, way past dark.
TWO
The Rookies
The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win.The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.
—Michael Lewis, Moneyball
AT 8:40 A.M. on the muggy opening day of the 2013 Series—eons before the intense international final—a pair of guide dogs panted under an oak tree and the Athens Timberwolves couldn’t find their hats. It was their first World Series, and they could be forgiven for feeling flustered. Still, this is the day even the hatless twentieth seed in a twenty-team tournament thinks it has, in the words of Chicago Comet Mike “Hoodlum” McGloshan, “that magic shit to win it.”
I had arranged to fill in as an emergency backup with the long-shot Wolves, and I felt that magic, too. By rule, if a team can’t field a full contingent of six blind players, the coach can substitute two blindfolded sighted folks, so I pitched in $32 for some last-second hats at the merchandise tent, and we all hustled—deliberately—to the field. This was their debut game, mine too, and we found ourselves across the diamond from Taiwan Homerun.
The guys in light blue were at the field an hour before the game, taking batting practice. A group of fans laid out an extensive buffet for them while Rock Kuo and Fernando Chang smacked the ball wherever they wanted it to go. As the Timberwolves caught their breath, Taiwan showed off in the field by catching beep balls on one hop. No one in the league had heard anything yet about Taiwan’s new player, Ching-kai Chen, number 9, but he was the main magic man, squatting while he made the improbable plays, his knees turned in slightly like a hockey goalie covering the five-hole.
Athens, on the other hand, didn’t make contact during their rushed BP. They also had a couple of guys who already looked like they needed a hot soak, including their most seasoned player, sixty-seven-year-old Roger Keeney.
“I’m all for positive thinking, but Taiwan is going to kick our butt,” said Amanda Rush, wearing a blue bandanna and smoking luxuriously. “And then they’ll say, ‘Good game. Oh yes. Next year, you have team?’”
Essentially, Athens was bare-bones: the minimum six players, the minimum contingent of volunteers, and me. I was already languishing in Georgia’s morning heat, and a good half of the T-wolves were faring even worse. Their sweat-and-swoon became a moral problem for me when I found myself wishing for one of them to falter so I could get in a game. Then, as I did some perfunctory stretching, Roger told me that I wasn’t registered with the team and would likely be barred from playing.
One of the things that had sealed the deal for me to head down to Georgia, a sixteen-hour drive from my place in Ohio, was Roger’s suggestion that I might be able to sub for his team. This chance was worth leaving my wife home alone with our six-month-old daughter for more than a week. Because how could I describe the danger and excitement of beep ball, I told myself, if I’d never gotten one hit at my face? As eighteen other teams began their World Series dreams, I sulked. My hat didn’t fit and I wanted my $32 back.
At 9, we heard a reveille of buzzing bases as officials at all the fields tested the equipment. The entire battalion of beep baseball was on the move. Austin advanced on the St. Louis Firing Squad; Boston marched on Tyler, Texas; the Indy Thunder faced off with the New Jersey Lightning. Nine beep balls began their insistent whining, but I was left behind. I’d been so close to the unorthodox sports story—go-getter reporter abandons wife, baby, and most important sense to try bizarrely challenging sport—but now I was just a guy getting a sunburn on a Tuesday morning.
Taiwan got up on Athens 11–0 in as pedestrian a way as possible. Topspin ground balls, misplays in no-man’s-land. Athens didn’t have the aggressiveness to cover the whole field, and Homerun’s speed blew them away. Rock Kuo, a college administrator with seriously blurred vision and a seriously high leg kick as he swings, led off and fouled the first pitch back, bursting out of the box, but when he realized the ball wasn’t in play, he stopped short and a volunteer led him, by the bat, back to the plate. To reorient himself, Rock knelt down, laid his bat against one of the plate’s edges, and touched its points. He easily scored on his next swing.
Then came Ching-kai Chen, making his debut. Chen had garnered great interest at home in Taiwan after appearing in a commercial with a pop star for the Institute for the Blind of Taiwan. In the commercial, Chen serves the singer a cup of coffee and moves so fluidly that an audience might not notice his impairment. Chen promptly poked one to right, reaching first base and scoring. He had a memorable day all around, going 5 for 5 against Athens, eventually scoring on his first nine World Series plate appearances, and registering ten putouts in the field. Veteran athletes across the league, hearing tall tales of his performance, suggested to each other that if he was for real they might as well hang up their blindfolds.
“Man, when you’re playing Taiwan, you cannot take your sweet time,” Athens infielder Jonathan Pichardo said. “We got a long way to go.”
The Taiwan beep baseball program had been in that long-way-to-go place in the late nineties. The Taiwanese-American sponsor of the team, James Gong, told me that he’d heard back then that it takes seven years to get a good beep ball team up and running, and in fact, seven years into their own experiment, in 2004, Taiwan won their first World Series. Gong said Athens should be patient.
“The only difference between people is how serious they are,” Gong said. “‘Oriental’? They’re not smarter. They treat everything much more seriously.”
That seriousness had been clear even at the tournament’s opening ceremonies. For the first time, the series began with a non-baseball event—a blind kayak race with a grand prize of $5,000 put up by a local BBQ joint. On the rapids of the Chattahoochee River, each blind paddler was guided by a sighted coxswain, and just as in the main event there were two teams that stood above the rest: Taiwan and Austin.
With the Foreigner song “Double Vision” playing over the loudspeakers, the Taiwanese team moved on the river like an ambulance through a traffic jam. Other kayaks veered aimlessly, rolling with the tide toward Phenix City, Alabama, on the opposite bank. Boston’s Joe McCormick spilled into the river.
Homerun had been practicing kayaking for weeks. This distinguished them from every other team, and was sort of like a father-and-son pair running daily drills in advance of the county fair sack race.
“Taiwan with a commanding lead now,” the master of ceremonies declared over the PA. “The Athens Timberwolves? I’m trying to get a read on them. They are barely past the start line.”
Meanwhile, Austin showed some kayaking talent of their own, as Mike Finn, a personal trainer, paddled at a steady pace in his opening heat.
“We set the bar right here-ah,” Lupe Perez shouted to the river. “We’re looking for redemption,” he said. But with the kayak money on the line, things weren’t close. Even though some competitions are meant to test what we can do off the cuff, Taiwan Homerun doesn’t do off the cuff, and as their kayak floated toward an easy victory over Austin, the Taiwan fans—expats from Atlanta mostly—sprinted down the riverwalk chanting, “Go, Taiwan, go.”
“The only thing in their head is winning,” James Gong told me.
• • •
The opening-round game between Taiwan and Athens on the first day of the tournament was not actually about seriousness, though. Instead, it featured some major athletic discrepancies that highlighted the fact that beep baseball is played on two different levels: major league and rec league. But Athens did have some bright spots in their opener. Keeney scored the first run in the team’s tournament