between these two teams is even more intriguing because it was Austin that taught Taiwan how to play the game back in the nineties. Rusty Reames, Austin’s main fund-raiser and the mother of both pitcher Kevin Sibson and infielder Wayne Sibson, was there from the beginning. The Blackhawks had produced a training tape to teach the game, she remembers, and a Taiwanese woman approached Wayne when he was showing the tape at a conference.
“We send them bases and balls,” Rusty said. “And next thing we know, the Taiwanese government pays our airfare to go to Taipei to teach them how to play beep baseball.”
On that trip, the American guys had a few harsh lessons for their counterparts, crushing them day after day. A good team doesn’t just beat a mediocre one in beep ball—they dominate. But Taiwan was so grateful for the lashing that they treated the Blackhawks like princes. They put them up in the Grand Hotel in Taipei and loaded them with delicacies—cucumber pork, eel noodles, and perhaps the tastiest Taiwanese dish, dàcháng bāo xiǎocháng (aka, small sausage in large sausage). That week in Taiwan, banners flew to commemorate the visit, and government ministers, including Taiwan’s first blind legislator, graced the fields for an opening ceremony.
“They had heard that all Americans liked McDonald’s,” Rusty said. “So they would bring us McDonald’s for breakfast and lunch every day.” Dinners were lavish, McMuffin-free affairs, but Rusty wouldn’t eat what she called the “mystery meat.” She told her players it looked great, a typical blindness gag, but she only sampled the rice.
The Blackhawks are a pranking team, always have been. With rookies, they’ll put toothpaste on hotel telephones and then call the room until the new guy gets a face full of Crest. They’ll move mattresses to the hallway and wait outside the door, hoping the newbies will collapse onto the bed frame after a long day on the field. They’ll put Twinkies in each others’ cleats. I once watched Austin outfielder Mariano Reynoso tap a portion of ranch dressing because he didn’t trust that his teammate, Richie Flores, had passed him something edible. In Taipei, the main shenanigan involved getting the Taiwanese players to put on do-rags. A bunch of guys on Austin wear them, and once they clothed the Taiwanese, they convinced them to try the bunny hop, too. After a day of this diplomatic silliness and a day of demolishing their competition, the Blackhawks would go it alone into the night, language and sight barriers be damned. Braving Taipei’s deafening motorbike traffic, they sneaked out to one of the city’s four-story KFCs and gorged. Nothing was going to stop their fun.
Kevin Sibson, who’s played beep ball with his visually impaired brother Wayne for thirty years, and who’s a legend in the league for his pitching accuracy, told me about the process of mentoring those Taiwanese players.
“When they started in ’97, they were an awful beep ball team,” he said. “It was literally like a Chinese fire drill. All of them running to the ball.”
Sibson might start an international incident calling anything the Taiwanese do “Chinese,” especially in this particular way, but his inartful point is that beep baseball can look out of control without the proper restraint and organization. To excel, players can’t just scatter for the sound of the ball, and they need to communicate constantly. Even when they dive and miss, experienced players call out where they think the sound is so the guy backing up can swoop in for the putout. And they carefully practice so they won’t enter each other’s predetermined lanes and collide. It’s defense in layers, defense by language. You hear the scuffling and a dive, then a bellow: “To my left.” In the nineties, Austin had that organization, Taiwan didn’t.
“We taught them a bunch of stuff,” Sibson told me. “They weren’t applying any of it, so we just beat the dogshit out of ’em.” Then, with a pained look that told me everything I needed to know about how much Taiwan had improved, Sibson said, “They decided to change.”
After the Iowa series in 2012, the year Taiwan really changed, I asked Sibson to reflect on how they’d done it. He said, “C’mon, do you want me to show you some pictures of my dead dog, too?”
The big change in the way Taiwan Homerun performs is the way Taiwan Homerun pitches. In ’97, Sibson worked with their first hurler, James Lin, and Lin passed his knowledge along to the current pitcher, Leo Lin. Leo’s a tea-guzzling insomniac cab driver from Taichung, in central Taiwan, and his job gives him an advantage, I heard, because cab drivers have a strong affinity with the blind, who are among their best customers. Leo Lin, in fact, came to his first practice at the insistence of a blind man he often drove around town. He chose his uniform number, 60, to match his cab number, and in time he became one of the game’s best pitchers.
From Sibson, Leo learned the precision techniques: to place the ball exactly where it needed to be from 21.5 feet away; to consider the small adjustments that tired or discouraged players will make to their swings as games go on.
The pitcher in beep ball essentially wants to hit the bat of the player, who will hopefully swing steady. The Taiwanese knew this; what they learned from Sibson was the nuance. He’s a blind-hitter whisperer, and he knows how to encourage, knows how to take the blame for a swing and miss. He adjusts as his guys get out of their zones, like a wedding DJ reading a tough crowd, knowing instinctively that they’re not feeling early Madonna, sensing when to drop in “My Girl” for the boomers. Sibson picks just the right track for his batters’ moods. They swing, and he hits the all-important top half of their bats. At the higher levels of the game, ground balls are near-automatic outs, fly balls difficult-to-field gold, and it’s pitching control that makes the difference. There are only five known instances of a ball being caught on the fly in beep baseball, and fielders can’t easily track a ball in the air as the beeping sound Dopplers, so the longer it stays aloft, the bigger the head start to the base for the hitter. Sibson had mastered this, and Leo Lin took his pitching advice to heart: the Taiwanese team started hitting more “air balls,” as they call them, and that skill was the most important gift the Americans left in Taiwan.
At the closing banquet for that first exhibition in ’97, back before Taiwan could challenge anyone for blind baseball supremacy, the Taiwanese players gave Austin a return present—a concert of traditional violin music and poetry. It was all beautiful, but the visiting Blackhawks fidgeted. They weren’t used to being feted, weren’t used to the fanciness of it all. Asked to reciprocate with some American music of their own, the “yahoos from Texas,” as Rusty calls them, sang the only song they all knew the words to: “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You.”
In beep baseball, this kind of vision wordplay is common, all the livelong day. When I started covering the game, I wondered if I would mistakenly say, “See you later” to players, or whether I could offend them with colloquial references to vision, do you see what I’m saying, stuff like that. But I couldn’t offend them. Not with involuntary slips and not with actual vision jokes. They’re everywhere in the game, and one old standby is shouting, “Are you blind?” at the umpires.
But whether the particular “Eyes of Texas” joke transcended the language barrier that night in Taipei, I don’t know. In any event, the Blackhawks’ performance won them applause: the audience called for an encore. The ’Hawks shuffled their feet. The crowd quieted down. Someone coughed. And then the ’Hawks had an idea.
“Here’s the story,” Kevin began. “Of a lovely lady,” Wayne answered. And the rest of those fine Blackhawks sang along. That night, the ’Hawks demonstrated for their hosts the strength and steadiness of a man named Brady. And this is the way that Austin and Taiwan became the beep ball bunch.
• • •
Despite their unbreakable off-field bond, when teacher and student met in the 2012 World Series final, some of that fellow feeling was missing. Austin was geared up to take the series for the first time since they ran off their seven straight titles from ’92 to ’98, and it
