this Saturday afternoon in Columbus, Georgia, Chesser, whose eyesight deteriorated when he was a teenager, plows forward on a couple of tight hammies. He’s a brash guy, goateed, thick in the middle. The dog tags he wears to honor each of his kids tangle under his uniform as he runs, but he doesn’t let up. All that’s left in his campaign to stick it to those who underestimate him is to add “World Champion” to the end of his name. He’s a warehouse worker for the Marines, a father of four, a husband, a run-scorer. He just needs that last title.
“Everyone has always told me you can’t do this because you’re blind,” Chesser says. “But I went out and proved everyone wrong.”
He’s halfway to the bag and the beeping ball rolls beyond the edge of the infield arc. It needs to go at least forty feet or it’ll be ruled foul—there’s no bunting in blind baseball. As it crosses the line, Ching-kai Chen in a pale blue uniform, number 9, runs toward it. His nose points at the sky like he’s a sprinter breasting the tape.
Chen is blind from a motorcycle accident, this is his first World Series tournament, and his superior play has been the talk of the league. In the mind’s eye, he is Brooks Robinson diving toward the third-base line, an apparition of Luis Aparicio ranging to his left, and once the umpire makes the call that Chen has the ball cleanly, you hear the Mandarin cheer from his team. Chesser, who’s on the ground after tackling the pylon-base a split second too late, is out. He and Sibson are pissed—Sibson smacks his glove—and the Austin Blackhawks, just like last year, are running out of chances.
“Beat Taiwan!” Chesser’s teammate Lupe Perez shouts in a chest-thumping bass. “Yay-eh. Take it to Taiwan.” Chesser agrees. He’s a former bull-rider—a mount named Headhunter broke three vertebrae in his back once—and he doesn’t want to get thrown today. Not by Taiwan.
He flips up his blindfold and runs toward Chen, who’s standing about where second base would be in a conventional baseball game. He bumps him, seems to reach for his blindfold, and both guys lose their balance.
Is this a hug or a hazing, a rough recognition of another good play by the storied number 9 or an attempt to throw off the rhythm of a new guy? An umpire separates the two combatants but a question hangs in the air.
Is Chen somehow too good at beep ball? That’s the whisper from Austin, that he might be tipping his head backward so he can sneak a peek out the bottom of his blindfold. His vision is kaleidoscopic at best, but maybe he’s gotten some sense of the motion of the ball?
Chesser’s teammate Danny Foppiano will later make that argument: “Their number 9—my wife’s telling me not to say anything. Look, I can’t see, but from what I’m told from other people, number 9 jumped over one person, sidestepped another person, and picked the ball up cleanly. I’ve been playing since 1985, and it’s impossible. He’s only newly blind, and this is his first year playing.”
That’s one of the stories circulating on the bench, in the crowd, but these kinds of charges are common in beep ball when the stakes are high, when an opponent makes a string of defensive plays that sound incredible.
Another story is that Chen is one of the nimblest guys ever to play the game, a national handball star before his accident. He’s so good because of that history and because the thick grass of the infield has been stopping the ball dead, allowing him to isolate the beep and swoop in aggressively.
“I am a firm believer that there are some people who are just good players,” says Dan Greene, president of the National Beep Baseball Association (NBBA). “We’ve had this argument since the league began.”
The umpires say Chen checks out. Still, the telephone-game rumor of an advantage for Taiwan has some of the feistier Blackhawks fuming.
Meanwhile, when I asked Chen how he felt about the 2013 National Beep Baseball Association World Series—the premier event in the uncanny world of baseball for the blind—he told me through an interpreter, “Everyone’s happy, everyone’s friendly.” He has a toothy smile and stands at attention like he’s not quite comfortable with his surroundings yet. Everything about his appearance screams “rookie.” Rookie at blindness, rookie at baseball.
His play tells a different story.
• • •
Back in Ames, Iowa, in 2012, Austin had a chance to knock off Taiwan in the final, too. Chen wasn’t with Homerun then, but the powerhouse from the Pacific was already the favorite. Austin kept them close for all six innings, though.
Both teams had outlasted fifteen other squads over a week of play, and the Blackhawks had crushed Taiwan the day before in a battle of unbeatens, so they needed just one more victory to clinch the double-elimination World Series.
On a road trip through Iowa, I’d stopped off to check out this crazy blind baseball I’d read about in a Harper’s Magazine item that listed the rules: “A team is composed of a minimum of six blind or visually impaired players and two to four sighted people: a pitcher, a catcher, and two defensive spotters. There is no second base. First and third bases are four-foot padded cylinders with speakers that buzz when activated.”
My very first game turned out to be a classic, and the sport turned out to deserve more than two inches of print.
During warm-ups, I met Foppiano. He was walking with his arm on a teammate, and he loudly predicted a win for the Blackhawks. At age eight, he’d been struck by an errant baseball bat that hastened his blindness (he already had deformed retinas), and now he sounded off about being a defensive specialist. When I asked about his hitting, he brushed that off as a know-nothing question. Defense is where the game’s won and lost, he said, and I immediately saw that I would need to try hard to mix it up with blind ballplayers, to listen for their language of braggadocio and mythmaking. This was a whole new ballgame, and I had to learn.
In beep ball, pitcher and hitter are on the same team and the timing rituals make every pitch a held breath. Sibson taps his glove and shouts, “Set, ready, ball.” From 21.5 feet away, he throws to a predetermined spot in Brandon Chesser’s wheelhouse, and Chesser swings a beat after he hears the word “ball.” (For a hitter, there’s no use chasing the beep. That’s like swatting at a bee in a windstorm, and you can’t hit that way with any regularity.)
Six fielders on the defensive side patiently imagine what they’ll do when the ball comes for them. If Chesser makes contact, he hauls ass toward that padded blue base a hundred feet from the plate (think tackling dummy). But here’s a catch. An umpire can flip a switch and activate the buzzing mechanism of either first or third base, so after the hitters make contact, they have to pick out the sound before they run. Because of this rule, one of the more common nicknames for beep ballers is “Wrong Way.”
While the ball beeps—three shrill notes per second—and the hitter listens for his direction, a sighted spotter can yell out only one number, a number that indicates an area on the field. Usually, “one” means the ball is headed to right field, “five” means left. “Two” and “four” are the gaps, and “three” is up the middle. “Six” is an S.O.S., and it means everyone had better run hard toward the outfield.
After the call, the search for the beep begins. Most fielders move well, and they sometimes pick up the ball quickly, but on at least half the plays there are cringe-inducing scrambles. They dive, one after another, and can’t quite stop the sound. The poet Wilfred Owen, writing about reaching for a gas mask during World War I, described this kind of urgency as “an ecstasy of fumbling.” When you’re watching a blind man try to pick up a beeping baseball, the stakes are lower but some of that suspense is there: the ball is right in front
