This sport is not a vehicle for vague sentimental uplift, either, not a consolation prize. When these guys show up to the field, it’s as athletes, and when they hit the ground diving, they want to win. Almost all of the players scoff at the idea that beep ball is some kind of isn’t-that-nice inspiration, and they sometimes mock “sighties” for noting their bravery. They’ll even congratulate us for being able to tie our shoes, many players told me. Screw sentimental uplift, they think. But potential warmhearted sentimentality is everywhere you look at a blind baseball World Series, especially in the early rounds, when every team’s still in it and just hearing the biographies of the players is hard to bear.
On field 4, there’s Joe McCormick of the Boston Renegades, whose Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy caused him to lose sight in one eye before his prom and the other eye after it. His girlfriend, Ashley, wore a wild strawberry pink dress at the dance, Joe remembers. She looked good. And he looks sharp on the field, often hitting over .600 in regional tournaments and the World Series.
On field 6, there’s Mike “Hoodlum” McGloshan, who began playing for the Chicago Comets on the advice of his parole officer. When the officer described the game, he didn’t quite understand. Blind baseball? “I told her she was high and I wanted some,” McGloshan said. He’s been known to hitchhike to practices from downstate, where he’s studying for a law degree.
On field 10, there’s Ethan Johnston taking ground balls at third. Ethan, or Esubalew, is part MVP of the Colorado Storm, part intentionally blinded Ethiopian street kid. After he was kidnapped from his home when he was a little boy, his captors wanted to make Ethan a more pitiable, profitable beggar, and so they poured chemicals in his eyes. He lived an itinerant life in Addis Ababa for two years before he was rescued and adopted by an American family. He loves the St. Louis Cardinals. He plays basketball by squinting at the white square above the rim. He wants to announce sports on the radio.
These are touching stories, but everywhere you look there’s competitiveness. Visually impaired? Yes, but that’s quickly forgotten during the course of an exciting inning. And then quickly remembered as coaches, volunteers, and other players vacillate between balls-to-the-wall effort and compassion for their teammates. The game, made necessary by disability, can almost eliminate the experience of that disability for a few hours.
It makes you feel normal, I heard. The players feel free as they do something as simple as running to a base with their arms spread wide.
An infielder, say Dave Benney of the Indy Thunder, can make a diving play on the field. Normal. But then he needs a hand to find his Gatorade on the bench. He can be an old-fashioned ball-playing loudmouth, so sometimes his volunteers give him a little grief with his drink. But back on the field, fully hydrated, he’s hurtling after the ball to make another improbable play.
These guys get into the game with intensity, too, because many of them haven’t had much chance to play organized sports before this. Benney, blind at birth, fights for the opportunity. He’s had some clashes over the game, and his team’s rivalry with crosstown foes Rehab Hospital of Indiana X-Treme (RHI) remained hot a couple of years after on- and off-field rancor caused them to split in two (more on that later).
For these players—potential figures of pity for those who don’t know any better—sports-as-diversion becomes sports-as-obsession in a quick blink. But that makes them just like anyone else, they say. They want to win. And they’ll run through anything, or anyone, standing in their way.
• • •
That competition raged at the Austin-Taiwan tussle in Iowa in 2012, my first game. On a day that saw the hardest rain of a drought-stricken summer, the contest was the first of what became annual winner-take-all meetings between the two rivals. It all began with a sweet, octave-down “Star-Spangled Banner”—“Oh say, can you see?”—and a rousing version of “Zhōnghuá Míngúo gúogē.” One of the Taiwanese players, Jack Lai, was led to a microphone by his team’s interpreter, Claire Wang. As Jack sang his anthem, joined by Taiwan’s three dozen traveling fans, the team seemed jazzed about the possibility of taking their first World Series title since 2006.
A visually impaired piano tuner, Lai was one of ten all-star players Taiwan brought to the U.S. to contest the World Series. Jack Lai and Rock Kuo and Vincent Chiu and Fernando “the Cockroach” Chang. (Chang nicknamed himself not for his defensive-scurrying ability, or his knack for withstanding Austin’s nuclear-powered offense, but because his Chinese name sounds like the word for the bug.)
Taiwan Homerun draws from a land of twenty-eight million, with hundreds of thousands of visually impaired people, and they have four teams back home. They load up for the series, choosing the most agile guys from those farm teams.
“I was not very strong as a boy,” Rock Kuo told me. “But I wanted to hit the ball high and far away. I could run very fast. If the ball went far, I could get more points.” That, simply put, is the Taiwanese strategy. Fly balls and fitness. They practice for months before the World Series, sometimes on the banks of the Dahan River, sometimes on a cramped field at a Taipei blind school. They spend big kuài to play, too—$45,000 for airfare to the U.S.—and there’s pressure to win from their donors. Anything the country can be the best in the world at brings a great deal of pride (the Taiwanese 500-yuan note features a picture of the boys who won the Little League World Series in the 1970s). But since baseball is a way Taiwan distinguishes itself culturally from its estranged big brother, China, the game comes with pressure, too. By the time 2012 rolled around, they’d had a long dry spell, losing in four consecutive championship games, and Austin was looking to extend their drought.
During the Taiwanese anthem, heavy on string instruments and expressions of unity, I almost decided to root for the visitors. But then I remembered I was on a great American road trip with my friend Matt. I remembered that I was watching the great American game in Iowa, the Field of Dreams state, and that I wanted my own country to win the whole shebang. Because if the Olympics has taught me one thing, it’s that when it comes to sports I’ve never watched before, forget that other country and God bless our precious soil. I wanted to be able to call my wife, Megan, who at that time was four months pregnant with our daughter, and tell her that I had found an under-the-radar game I could report on, and that the U.S. of A. was still number one. I would be bringing home a little bacon in exchange for my writing toils, and our daughter’s country was not in decline after all, at least not in this sport.
The rain continued in Ames and delayed the game. The guys would have played soaked, but it’s hard to hear the beep ball during a downpour, so a dripping Lupe Perez could only blow off steam in front of his tent-dugout. He bounced on the third-base line, preparing to claim his twelfth championship. As a journeyman, he has the all-time record: seven World Series rings with Austin in the nineties, four with a team called the West Coast Dawgs later on.
Those Dawgs were the conglomerate of star players that had beaten Taiwan in previous years before disbanding after the 2011 season; their sighted pitcher was going through a divorce and couldn’t commit to the team anymore. Lupe pumped himself up that Taiwan was about to feel the wrath of his new squad, the resurgent Blackhawks. When he said, “Let’s take it to Taiwan,” it sounded like, “Let’s take it outside.”
“I get psyched out sometimes in real life,” Lupe told me. “But on the field I don’t feel that. It’s the only place I feel dominant, invincible. I love that feeling.”
Lupe, whose friends call him a freak of nature for his energy level, likes listening to Tupac while he works out, so we know he digs rivalry. When he played for the Dawgs out in California, he had a West Coast–East Asian Coast feud with Taiwan Homerun. Now that he’s back with Austin, that feud’s still going.
“It’s
