ball.” On a recent trip back to his Ethiopian village, he displayed those priorities. As he held hands with his long-lost sister, and as he greeted a large extended family, he wore his Beep Baseball World Series T-shirt.
A year before that reunion, Esubalew “Ethan Johnston” Truneh had listened to the MLB World Series from his apartment in Colorado. That was the series in which David Freese came to the plate in game six, representing the Cardinals’ last chance. When he was down in the count, 1–2, Freese took a 98-mph fastball deep to right for a two-run, game-tying triple. In the eleventh, he homered to win the game, and the Cardinals, Ethan’s Cardinals, came back to take the series in seven. Ethan screamed and jumped around his apartment. He’s since memorized Shannon’s radio call: “Get up, baby, get up. David Freese has done it again!” he says.
“No one gave us a shot,” Ethan said. “But that’s the thing about baseball. You never know what’s going to happen until the last strike, the last out.”
Ethan thinks every new year could be Colorado’s year. He wants that ring. And it could happen, if Colorado gets all the bounces. But as I watched Ethan circling the beep ball and gathering it up, I only thought about the difference between the little boy begging for coins in the big city and this leader of the Storm, lunging for another kind of sound.
Charlie Fairbanks never met Ethan, but he would have liked him. They’re both Colorado guys, both unassuming. And Ethan doesn’t live far from Fairbanks’s old house. In fact, he often eats at an Ethiopian restaurant on Fillmore Street, only six houses down from where Fairbanks created the first ball. Mr. Fairbanks died the year Ethan found beep, but if he could have seen what his invention has done for the younger man, he would have whistled a tune and cracked one more lopsided smile.
“Well,” he would’ve said. “That worked.”
• • •
Ethan Johnston’s biography is singular and devastating, but the pattern of slow, consistent success following a trauma is a familiar one in the beep baseball world.
The man who’s known as the first beep baseball player, a brash Minnesotan named John Ross, had limited sight as a small child and endured multiple surgeries to maintain it, but he was also a rambunctious kid, “as healthy and as active as a curious jack rabbit,” he wrote in his memoir, Feeling Sports. During one period of recovery, in the 1940s, little John Ross, age seven, had his head stabilized so that tissue around his eyes would heal. But John, who would eventually marshal dozens of blind athletes and help create a new sports subculture, couldn’t stay out of a neighborhood football game.
For a few quarters, he did sit dutifully on the steps of the family house, but he just had to break his parents’ rules and carry the ball. Running left to the front corner of his lawn’s end zone, he veered toward some rose bushes that marked the sideline, and after one of his friends gave him a hard two-hand touch, Ross tumbled into the bushes. He felt a thorn pierce his good eye.
Hearing the commotion, Ross’s mother rushed onto the gridiron, into her garden. Ross remembered that “her face was becoming so red,” and as I read his account I imagined a flushed, anxious parent. What the little boy actually saw was much worse. “Her features,” Ross wrote, “began to disappear in an ocean of brilliant crimson.” He was, in fact, bleeding to blindness. He clung to his mother, but just like in the iris shot at the end of an old melodrama, the color closed in on her face and the film ended.
The Rosses were stricken, but instead of placing their son under a cone of protection, his parents made every effort to raise a self-reliant young man. Johnny had a paper route, and he participated in many sports, eventually and improbably playing offensive guard for his high school football team. In an Associated Press article from 1954, his father, Don, remembered the bittersweet feeling of playing catch with his boy: “Finally, my heart became so heavy I couldn’t stand it any longer and I excused myself. I went inside and watched him through the window. John was playing an imaginary game of football with himself, acting as if he were throwing the ball up and catching it. That was a thrill. I knew then my boy had something on the ball.”
“At that time, the blind were put in a corner and expected to make baskets,” Kevin Barrett, historian of the NBBA, told me. “But John Ross did all sorts of things that blind people don’t do.”
Ross did all sorts of things that almost no person does. His life story is a catalogue of uncanny Americana, including the old tale of the blind man driving and the not-so-old tale of the blind man waterskiing professionally. But it’s as a journalist that John Ross first flashed onto the national scene. When he was eleven, the boy who would eventually popularize baseball for the blind was among the very last people to interview Babe Ruth.
At the time, in 1948, the Babe was on a publicity tour through the Upper Midwest, but he was also suffering from the final stages of throat cancer. Because of his limited energy, he’d decided to cancel the slate of interviews he’d previously scheduled in the Twin Cities, but he didn’t cancel on John Ross. So, with the seasoned beat reporters eating their hearts out, Johnny took his place on Babe Ruth’s lap and tossed him some softball questions. The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, writing about the unlikely interview, called Ross “perhaps the city’s No. 1 sports enthusiast” and “a cheerful young fellow who sees all the big sports events here even though illness deprived him of his eyesight a few years ago.”
In the best moment of the interview, John Ross asked, “Would you sooner pitch or play the outfield?” “I’d like to be in there every day,” Ruth replied. “That’s how much I like to play. I think that tells you, Johnny.” Ruth was only fifty-three, but Ross remembered that his voice sounded like it was being dragged over broken glass that night. Nevertheless, everything the baseball legend said was a pearl of wisdom for the aspiring blind athlete and sportswriter. Like the Babe, Ross liked to be in some kind of game every day, and he wouldn’t let his blindness keep him from competition.
“Had I not lost my sight, I would have tried my best to become a professional baseball player,” he once wrote. Little did he know at the time of his high-profile interview that he would become the Blind Bambino, the Sultan of Beep.
• • •
Not long before John Ross’s heart-to-heart with Babe Ruth, baseball for the blind had in fact had one of its first organized test runs. As far back as 1938, only three years after Title X of the Social Security Act buoyed the fortunes of the blind by providing a small income, there was a game of “sound baseball,” and Popular Mechanics ran a story about the inaugural contest. The sport was thought up by Robert V. Chandler and tested at the warm-and-fuzzy-sounding Industrial Home for the Adult Blind in Oakland, where Chandler was superintendent. In that game, nine fielders knelt on a pad beyond the infield, and the ball had a “jingler” inside (Charlie Fairbanks would not have been impressed). It’s not entirely clear what this jingler was—bells, metal balls?—but a 1916 story out of South Carolina told of “a game of baseball, played with two tin cans, one placed within the other so as to produce a rattling sound.” Blind ballplayers were nothing if not resourceful.
The hitters in sound baseball used a kind of field hockey stick to slap at the ball that a sighted pitcher rolled toward them. The bases buzzed, so there were some similarities to beep ball, but fielders actually had to throw the ball toward the base in front of the path of the runner in order to record an out, adding a dimension of zaniness that was probably much less fun than it sounds. Recreation magazine reported that “the scores have been quite large,” and it’s hard to imagine anyone making an out in sound baseball.
There were two teams at the Industrial Home for the Adult Blind, the Bears and the Tigers, and in April 1938, wearing uniforms donated by C. S. Howard, owner of the racehorse Seabiscuit, they met
