that he might have an advantage, DeYoung removed his prosthetic eyes and handed them over. Dan Greene, league president, was an earwitness.
“We heard Bob’s father say, ‘Robert!,’ and we said, ‘What did he do?’ And his father said, ‘He just gave her his eyes.’”
In a 1521 Domenico Beccafumi painting, St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind, is depicted holding her eyes out on a platter, and I like to imagine that DeYoung had her satisfied look on his face when he eyed the ump. After all, he’d won that rules dispute more decisively than anyone has ever won any argument in the history of man. Still, “looking” is a heavy topic in this sport. Since playing beep baseball at the very highest level can seem like magic, many think there must be some trick to it, and sometimes the Houdinis of beep are handcuffed by that reputation.
• • •
My Athens team was barely a speed bump for Chen and Taiwan on the first day, but the Timberwolves ultimately snatched two victories in their inaugural tournament, finishing fifteenth out of twenty. After their series ended with a victory over the St. Louis Firing Squad in the losers bracket, they shouted about going to Disney World like they’d started a new dynasty. For my part, I played in two Athens losses against Long Island, but the Wolves still thanked me vigorously for my contributions. It’s possible that “The Author,” as they called me, had made them think of themselves as part of a bigger story, and maybe that motivated Scean and the rest to outlast St. Louis. I allowed the praise, naturally. We shared a few carefully arranged high fives, and an hour after their last game I drove Scean back to the team’s Howard Johnson’s. We talked about a clutch run he’d scored and his chances for a restaurant job back in Athens. We took some wrong turns, but we found the place eventually, the blind ballplayer and the squirrel. He didn’t have his hotel key and wasn’t sure of his room number anyway, so we walked around the pool knocking on doors, searching for our team.
• • •
While the preliminary games took place at a sprawling soccer complex, Austin and Taiwan played the 2013 final in the outfield of Golden Park, a five-thousand-seat baseball stadium that had hosted the 3–1 U.S. victory over China in the gold medal game of the 1996 Olympic softball competition. Taiwan Homerun, undefeated for the week, needed only one win to secure their second consecutive title, while Austin, who’d lost to Taiwan, 7–6, in the previous day’s qualifying round, needed to sweep a doubleheader. Brandon Chesser, Lupe Perez, and Danny Foppiano were rested up, and the game started well for the Blackhawks. Perez, who’d quit high school when he realized during a football tryout for quarterback that he couldn’t see a blitzing linebacker, retired Chen on the second at-bat of the game, chasing one deep in left past the 170-foot home-run line.
“Take it to Taiwan!”
Vincent Chiu, whose engagement to a volunteer had been made final after 2012’s victory, scored on the next play to make it 1–0, though. Then, in the bottom of the first, Austin’s Zach Arambula, a CrossFit fiend who’d scored twenty-four runs in seven games, grounded out to Chen, starting a pattern.
“Ching-kai Chen with the play, again,” said Scott Miller, announcing the game for AM 540 WDAK in Columbus. “This is a guy defensively that Austin has to keep it away from when they put the ball in play,” his color man added.
“Three up, three down. Again, you must keep the ball away from that man up the middle.”
“That is an astounding play. I’ve done baseball for years and years and you won’t see a better play from a sighted player than we just saw right there.”
Taiwan got two runs in the fourth and led 4–0 entering the fifth inning. That’s when things got dire for Austin. Chen raced toward another ball hit by Mike Finn, but instead of colliding with a teammate, he whirlygigged away with a kind of pop-up slide after he grabbed it, and his evasive maneuver was the freeze-frame image of the tournament—an emblem of the athleticism of blind ballplayers, of the near misses that make beep ball thrilling, and of the mystery that surrounds the game’s best plays. The umpires conferred to see if there was anything they should do about the Magician of Changhua. There wasn’t. His blindfold was in place and no one was about to toss a ball at him to see if he reacted.
After another Chen base hit, Austin trailed by five going into the final inning, just as they had in 2012. But in the sixth, Sibson broke through. The ’Hawks were about to make a run. It had been forty-nine years since the advent of the sport, and in this final of the ’13 Series we could finally see it nearly perfected, by a foreign rookie and by a guy who’d been pitching to his blind brother for most of his life. That level of competition had barely been a gleam in the eye of those who first imagined baseball for the blind, but now here it was: international, unnerving, and full of pissed-off players chasing their joy. Baseball by the blind.
Austin was on their way back.
Wayne Sibson’s guide dog, Pacifico, paced the third-base line. Kevin Sibson smacked his glove. Then players and fans stood by for three minutes as Columbus’s emergency alert system performed a beep-nullifying tornado test, the sun shining sharp on all the blackout blindfolds.
THREE
The Summer of ’64
I swing big with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big.
I like to live as big as I can.
—Babe Ruth
WHAT CHARLIE FAIRBANKS really liked to do was sing. He wasn’t a big sports guy, the grandfather of beep baseball, but when he saw a problem, he acted.
It was 1964, and Mr. Fairbanks had heard that teachers at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind couldn’t get their youngest visually impaired students to play ball. Tossing and chasing were important developmental steps, stuff the school encouraged as they taught students how to be independent, but they’d tried everything, up to and including a football with a bell attached. The ringing pigskin worked fine for handoffs, but it got a lot less fun when it hit the ground and stopped making noise. So Fairbanks, an engineer with the Mountain Bell Telephone Company by day, headed to his basement workshop to become Edison-for-the-blind by night. He repeated one of his favorite sayings to himself, “If I can’t make it, you don’t need it,” and since the school needed an audible ball, he was going to make an audible ball, period.
A former military Mr. Fixit who was known around Mountain Bell for belting the songs from The King and I, Fairbanks suddenly had a new mission, and a shrill tune stuck in his head.
For his first models, Fairbanks tried Frankensteining a Wiffle Ball, then a tennis ball, then a golf ball. He opened them up and inserted telephone parts that he’d hoarded down in his workshop: Radio Shack oscillators, speakers from old Princess model rotary telephones. Next to one of the partially made cuckoo clocks he liked to build, and the doll hospital he ran for his daughters, he pieced together the first audio ball. Legend has it that for this particular model, a crude cardboard cube, Fairbanks pilfered a part from his family’s own phone to make the sound, and there are conflicting reports on whether or not this brilliant stroke of sports innovation annoyed his wife, Vi. Mrs. Fairbanks came onboard with the project soon enough, though. After her husband tore apart the regulation softballs he’d decided were the best carriers for the beep, she would hand-stitch each one of them back together, putting the finishing touches on what would become a new sport.
The rest of Fairbanks’s family helped too. “Durability was a big issue with the early balls,” Charlie’s daughter Deb told me, and she and her sister, Cheryl, little kids at the time of the construction, were the testers (read:
