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 history—“The old man still has it,” he yelled. It was a run that had him aching for the rest of the day. In the field, Ron Whorley was a standout. He’d been blinded a long time ago in an accident involving nails, his sons told me, a fact that seemed too painful for a follow-up question. We watched him, impressed, as he recorded a bunch of acrobatic putouts in left field.
But Athens limped to the finish against Taiwan, putting only five balls in play. Scean Atkinson, an infielder who usually has the confidence and voice of a shock jock, struck out three times, chopping down awkwardly at the ball. And while it’s easier to have an “it’s just a game” feeling when you lose in beep ball, most of the players don’t want that feeling. Athens (0–3 on the first day of round-robin play), Boston (2–1), Indy (also 2–1), and Austin (3–0, easily) weren’t looking for moral victories. Blind people have mostly had their fill of that sort of thing, of being told how courageous they are just to be out there. Instead, they all took the field knowing that they had the emancipating opportunity to simply compete, and Athens got a faceful of that freedom on day one. The final score against Taiwan was 19–2.
My personal solace came when one of the Athens volunteers penciled in my name on the T-wolves’ roster while some official-seeming officials—clipboards, lanyards—weren’t looking. Due to that deft bit of corruption, I became an eligible emergency replacement, a kindly vulture circling my new blind buddies and half hoping that one of them—maybe the shortstop nicknamed Cupcake, the old man?—would fake a hip flexor and give me a chance to play.
After the Taiwan drubbing, I wandered away from the Athens bench to catch some other games. The Minnesota Millers and the Iowa Reapers had a fraternal rivalry, Steve Guerra vs. Frank Guerra, that I wanted to check out. The twins, both of whom had congenital cataracts and lost their sight in the early seventies after bungled operations, are the Click and Clack of the NBBA. During their game, Steve jokingly threatened an ump who’d ruled against his team. “You can’t run,” he shouted to the ump, and Frank retorted, “But you can’t find him.”
Both Guerra brothers used to play for the Long Island Bombers—Frank sported a Bombers tattoo on his chest—but their jobs took them to the Midwest. All of this—sight loss, the heartland, brotherhood—including the detail that Frank was born two minutes earlier and therefore believes his brother to be “overcooked”—seemed like it had the makings of a good-natured Reader’s Digest story to me, but before I could come up with any of my own “Humor in Uniform” jokes, I got the call-up.
Athens infielder Tamara Hale (Cupcake!) had tweaked her leg—wink?—and my team needed me against the Long Island Bombers. I hadn’t played baseball in years, but I thought I might be an improvement over an injured young blind lady. I sprinted from field to field. Maybe if I made some good plays they’d nickname me “Sheetcake.” In my fantasy, I became crack third baseman and clutch hitter:
I gallop into the gap and dive for the beep ball, tipping it expertly to Ron Whorley in an act of athleticism unmatched in the annals of sighted–blind cooperation. At the plate, I call my shot, Babe Ruth style, even though I’m not entirely sure where I’m pointing. This is understood by teammate and opponent alike as an act of great gumption, and I rocket the first pitch deep to center, hitting it with such force that the ball emits, instead of its normal beeping, an instrumental version of Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best.”
Cries of “Sheetcake, Sheetcake” reverberate across the Peach State. The art of Braille, I find, isn’t hard to master, and the gathered guide dogs consider me a most firm alpha male. My facial hair becomes a league-wide style, and later, against Taiwan in the final, I scoop up the series clincher while declaring in Mandarin, “Fine effort, fellows, but all for naught.”
When an Athens volunteer covered my eyes with a spare piece of ripped cloth the Timberwolves had in their bat bag, though, my Walter Mittyish bravado disappeared. The anticipation to rush out on the field was replaced by a deep desire to find a fence, get my back up against it, and stay put until someone handed me a sandwich. Whorley, the Athens left fielder, informed me that while I was blindfolded I would feel like I’d moved forty feet while only moving four, but knowing that in advance
