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,” Lupe says. He comes from a military family, and he makes the “here” sound like “hoo-ah.” “I love this game right here-ah.”
For 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
