adding new players from the defunct powerhouse the West Coast Dawgs, most notably Lupe Perez, who says he wants to die on the beep ball field. In the early 2000s, Lupe had left the Blackhawks over a disagreement about what position he was going to play, storming off the field and onto the Dawgs’ roster. Now the Dawgs were no more, but Lupe wanted to keep the American win streak going. To get a spot back on his original team, he’d told his former teammates he’d grown as a man, left some of his temper behind. They believed him, voted to bring him back into the fold, and the ’Hawks became a supergroup.
In the first five innings that championship day in Iowa, they were indeed super, scoring eighteen runs. Sibson was grooving. He laid the ball over the plate like a machine. Swing hard and he’ll hit your bat. Never, ever change the swing. That’s what the ’Hawks tell each other, but there’s more to it than that. In beep ball, the hitters rarely know how close they are to solid contact, or if they look off-kilter as they thrash away. Their confidence can falter quickly, and if they don’t trust the pitcher they’ll make detrimental adjustments. When I visited Leo Lin in Taichung, he told me that his players will whisper to each other that he’s throwing a lower ball that day. They’ll change. They’ll swing and miss. Sibson’s players sometimes do the same.
Hitting is all about knowing your pitcher is going to deliver, though, and with Kevin Sibson, who resembles the actor Martin Freeman, you feel like you’re in the hands of an experienced personal trainer. I got that treatment when I hit off Sibson at “Midnight Beep,” the traditional tournament-closing exhibition game. In a hotel parking lot filled with rental cars that were about to be damaged by boozing blind baseball players, I learned how good Sibson really is. After I put on my blindfold and grabbed a bat, he set me up nicely and I missed, but he told me how close I was, how strong I looked at the plate. He didn’t scold me for my flailings. He set me up again. A little higher, he said. You’re looking good. Finally I grounded one hard up the middle and knew what beep ballers mean when they say Sibson’s the best. He can sense your anxiety at the plate, or an injury that might affect a swing. In real games, he and his catcher give silent hand signals to adjust the height of his pitches if the hitters have altered their agreed-upon swing level. He’s in control.
“He can paint a picture out on a beep ball field,” former West Coast Dawgs player Neal McDonald told me. “If you stack up your defense on the right side, he’s going to the left. If you have someone who’s not making plays up the middle, he’s going to force the ball up the middle. He dictates all of that.”
Of course, this pitching obsession can turn Sibson into a momentary hothead. In the 2013 Series, he got into a shouting match with “Downtown” Ron Brown of the Indy Thunder about a disputed call, and he chucked his glove in a preliminary contest because someone on his bench called an inconvenient timeout (pitching rhythm is important). During that parking lot pickup game where he coached me through my first blind at-bat, he told me this book was going to suck while he took a shot of tequila out of a giant gun-shaped glass.
As the 2012 Series proceeded, Sibson was heated as well. Taiwan, some of his teammates thought, had his number. They’re so good on defense that he’ll overcompensate. He overthinks the rain and gets angry.
As intense as Sibson is, though, he’s a good-natured dork, too. At tournaments he often wears a “Keep Calm and Join the Dark Side” T-shirt, and the Dark Side here might refer to his own brand of onfield fire, to his bad-boy Blackhawks’ team, or to blindness itself.
Clever clothing aside, Sibson and Austin made that diamond in Ames, Iowa, feel like Colorado’s Coors Field, where home runs fly out at an alarming rate, and as I watched my inaugural beep baseball slugfest, I figured playing defense was about as frustrating as trying to kill a cricket in the middle of the night. The players couldn’t get a bead on the beeping ball at all, and that’s the challenge elite beep ballers face on every bit of contact. Defense takes tactics, and patience, and guts. It also takes risking collision. On the best plays, you’ll see a third baseman dive to his left, a shortstop dive to his right, and a left fielder dive forward in a wild attempt to kick, slide on, or smother the ball. Foppiano, Perez, Benney, and Taiwan’s Chen and Kuo are some of the best at this. They give new meaning to “getting in front of it,” using their faces, crotches, or whatever else they’ve got to make the play. There’s an old saying in the game: either you’ve been hit in the balls, or you’re going to be hit in the balls, so no one’s crying when it happens.
When a fielder does find the beep, he struggles to gather it up in time to record the putout. These are the tensest moments. The batter barrels, the fielder grasps. Few of their teammates actually know the result, and everyone has to be quiet during each play so the guys can hear the ball. But when the umpire makes a call, whichever team has won the moment breaks the tennis-match silence with a collective roar.
Some days the defense is clicking, some days the offense is clicking, and even though Austin was driving an offensive Porsche in the 2012 championship, Taiwan had a limited-edition Ferrari. They scored twenty-three times with their pitcher, Leo Lin, in the first five innings. They consistently raked the ball to right center, the weakest spot in most defenses, way out toward a couple of off-duty seeing-eye dogs getting romantic in the distance. The rain continued and I got envious of the highly organized Taiwanese wearing their poncho tarps. To add to their happy dryness, they were especially jubilant because a Taiwanese player, Vincent Chiu, had just proposed to one of the sighted volunteers. She would say yes if Homerun won the World Series. Adjacent to all their joy, I tried to keep my notepad unsoaked by wedging it farther down my pants.
But the players kept going in that relatively quiet deluge, and though Austin had fallen behind, they continued to guide each other to rousing, muddy putouts. Batters tackled the bases as though they were linebackers drilling a wrong-footed Brett Favre. Fielders sprawled. Taiwan’s faithful chanted, “Taiwan . . . Homerun.” And the Austin Blackhawks, named for a speedy bird that can see eight times better than humans, circled the beep ball with ears peeled.
In the top of the sixth and last inning, Austin found themselves down by five runs, 23–18. But Mike Finn scored on a dink, Lupe Perez scored on a hard grounder, local phenom Zach Arambula scored with his legs, and Danny Foppiano scored on pure will. Each beep baseball lineup has only six hitters, so the Blackhawks batted around, and then Finn, tall and loping, scored again on a flare with two outs, tying the game at 23. Huge collective shout! The ’Hawks had done it, just about.
Momentum, an invention of commentators in most sports, is a big deal in beep baseball because no one on the field can see what’s happening and the imagination runs wild. Even disciplined players begin to believe that their teammates are blundering, that the offense they’re facing has become unstoppable, that someone—an umpire, or God—must be screwing them. Taiwan, whose players are usually levelheaded, got antsy on the field, and one outfielder nursed a shaky ankle. But they stopped the bleeding with the game tied 23–23.
Before the bottom half of the sixth, Lupe Perez’s mom, Mary Ann, implored him to “recharge, Perez, recharge.”
“Sighted people say you can tell a lot through eye contact,” Lupe told me. “Well, I could feel my teammates’ energy through their bodies.”
Locked in a 23–23 tie, Austin harnessed that energy, huddling by the third-base line. When a blind man lays his hand on his teammate’s arm to get himself back in position, or when high fives help the players make their physical way from play to play, the familiar camaraderie of baseball takes on a new dimension, and with everything on the line, the Blackhawks had become a tight-knit network of six defensive nodes. They took the field together. From his position in left, Perez shouted to his teammates, “Take it to Taiwan.” Collectively, they talked their way to the first out of the inning.
That unity is what Jan Traphagen, vice president of the league, loves about beep baseball: “It doesn’t make any difference if the players were born blind
