said, “I can’t help noticing your visual impairment.”
The thing is, I don’t have one, not really. But I do have a pretty severe strabismus—the dreaded wandering eye. When I’m tired, I look like I’m trying to scope out my own left sideburn, and as for actual vision trouble, doctors have told me that my brain fuses images to make up for the fact that I’m not apprehending the thing that’s directly in front of my nose. This leads to some weird moments of near–double vision. While I’m reading, I can see a wall hanging to my left and the right side of the book, but not the left side of the book. On top of that, I’m color blind to a certain degree, and I don’t always see in 3-D (the movies with the protruding fireballs never do much for me). Rembrandt reportedly had this stereoblindness: the eyes don’t work well together and the scene flattens.
I actually don’t know for sure whether my sight is different from the average Joe’s, though. I’m officially 20/20, or thereabouts, and the only troublesome impairment—beyond sensitivity to light—is cosmetic. A doctor warned me once that my adapted brain might not know how to deal with a surgically realigned left eye, so I’ve stuck with the one God gave me, not wanting vanity to rob me of any of my sight. Plus, there’s nothing more unappealing to me than the idea of a scalpel slicing my eye flesh.
Mostly I get along, but I am self-conscious about looking straight at other people. In high school, things were worse, as is the case with most unconventionalities. I got called “Lazy Eye,” and one comedic genius would squint at me for a full minute at baseball practice, chasing me around as he impersonated the way I looked in bright sunlight. My eye, I’ve figured, was probably the way some sophomore girls described me in the concise cruelty of adolescence. I wasn’t the tall guy, or the silly one, or the dude tooling around in the sweet Mercury Topaz.
“Oh, him,” the sophomore hotty might have said to her hotty compatriot, their eyes peering out in perfect, devastating alignment.
As I read—slowly—I’ll always underline descriptions of characters’ eyes, and no line ever got to me as much as this one from Jane Eyre: “His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly.”
I’ve wondered if my eye has sometimes given people a hard-to-put-a-finger-on-it feeling that I’m unusual to be around. And more importantly, I’ve worried that there’s serious degeneration of my vision on the horizon. Maybe the brain will give up ten years from now, tired of holding together panel one and panel three of the herky-jerky animation in which panel two is missing. Or maybe, in a few months, I’ll see a world of peripheries with no center.
Many people at the tournament asked me what I was really looking for as I reported on beep ball. What was my goal? I’d tell them how fascinating I found the sport and the stories of the people involved, that’s all. I figure they asked me because they wondered if I had a personal connection to blindness. Thankfully I don’t. But I do sometimes catch it glancing at me out of the corner of my eye.
• • •
As I led Athens to a 13–1 loss against Long Island, Ching-kai Chen and Taiwan Homerun battled the formidable Rehab Hospital of Indiana X-Treme, and as we rounded noon on the first day of the series, the sun and the tempers heated up.
Chen lost most of his vision in the instant his motorcycle collided with the car of an elementary school teacher back in 2009. He’d been a star handball player, and in pictures from before the accident he leaps diagonally toward the goal, holding the ball in his left hand high above his head. With his shock of black hair, he cuts a reckless figure as he flies.
In the motorcycle accident, which occurred during his sophomore year in physical education courses at Changhua Normal University, Chen suffered fractures to his right cheekbone and a traumatic brain injury, as well as some temporary damage to his hearing. He was found to have severely deteriorated vision.
Chen had always been athletic growing up—flexible, fast—and because of his handball experience, he has a talent for leaping around converging bodies. But he did this over and over again during the first day of the 2013 tournament, alarmingly. While I saw Chen avoiding collision like a stuntman, his teammate, Rock Kuo, says that’s not always the case: “He has good physical conditions; however, sometimes he bumps into others like a bull in order to catch a ball. This has made other players afraid of being hurt by him.” He wasn’t bumping into anyone in the series, though, and that drew attention his way. Chen routinely treated the beep ball field like his own personal china shop on opening day, romping to the baselines to snag the ball with two hands, and RHI X-Treme pitcher Jared Woodard was the first to question whether Chen was playing fair.
“I saw the guy, first play, up the middle,” Woodard told me later. “He slides over like a normal baseball player would, but as he slides, the ball takes one hop and he catches it at his chest. I’ve seen the best defenders. Heck, my dad’s one of them.” (Jared’s father, Clint, who’s never seen his son’s face, led RHI in putouts in ’13, and no one, Jared thought, could outperform his dad as easily as Chen seemed to.)
“I had the umpire check his blindfold twenty times,” Woodard said. “I could have sworn he was peeking at the plate. And then I could have sworn he was peeking at the base.”
For safety, Chen wore an extra, virtual-reality type facemask over his blindfold that raised questions, too, but the umpires kept ruling that he was legal. I didn’t think much of it. I’d already gotten used to seeing unbelievable stuff on the beep ball field. Woodard wasn’t so trusting.
“They told me he was a pro handball player,” he said. “But that’s eye-hand coordination. Beep ball is ear-hand coordination.”
That night I loitered around a hospitality room in the Columbus Holiday Inn—the host hotel for the tournament—searching for free beers and gossip. Head umpire Kenny Bailey had an open tab. I couldn’t get him to directly address alleged cheating, but later I overheard a meeting he had with the Taiwanese contingent. They were alarmed that their man Chen was under such intense scrutiny, but Bailey told them Chen should take the “looking” accusations as a compliment. He personally promised that their new star wouldn’t be badgered anymore. “Tell him to sleep like a baby,” Bailey said.
Chen wasn’t the first in league history to be suspected of sneaking a peek, and rumors about unfair play are perennial in beep ball, part of the lore of the game. In the eighties, officials stopped a tournament to have an emergency meeting about a particularly successful fielder, but everyone decided to just keep going. A few years later, one star had his head wrapped like a mummy after some highlight-reel plays, but even with the tape and ace bandages he could still pick up the ball quickly. The reason? He practiced year-round in the heat of New Mexico. Third basemen who block line drives with their forearms can become the subjects of florid descriptions and inflated concern, but most of those fables fade with the years.
Taiwan Homerun has heard their fair share of complaints because they’re so good defensively, but also because many in the league don’t know those guys very well. It’s easier to question someone when you can only identify him by his number. Plus, rivalry-thinking can spin out of control. From the ’80s until 2004, I thought every person wearing a Yankees hat was at least a little bit nefarious, and for some of the American players who’ve lost to them repeatedly, Taiwan is the Yankees.
The chatter about peeking seems like one of the stories these guys tell in order to battle. But the hearsay can change the mood of a tournament, with players asking their sighted volunteers to stay vigilant.
The history of suspected “looking” in the sport has had its lighter, outlandish moments, though. In one incident,
