bat, I knelt down to align myself, touched the plate four times like I’d seen Rock Kuo do, pointed to the pitcher’s voice, and swung hard at the void. I struck out. In my next plate appearance, Ben, Ron’s son and the Athens pitcher, set me up well and I dribbled one to the infield somewhere. Third base buzzed, so I was supposed to run, unnaturally, toward the sound on my left. Except that’s the way the beep ball rolled too. Confused by the dueling noises, I hopped twice and ran in the opposite direction before realizing my mistake and booking for third. My wife tells me I have the sense of direction of a squirrel crossing the street, and it was certainly true during that at-bat. My arms were everywhere as I crossed close to the pitcher’s mound, nearly trampling the Bombers’ charging third baseman, who was unaware that I was barreling toward him like a disoriented Pete Rose at a defenseless Ray Fosse. The umpire yelled “Stop!,” preventing our head-on collision, and my main athletic feat of the game was the restraint I showed in not breaking an opponent’s nose with my knee.
I was out. I went 0 for 4 in the game, with three strikeouts.
In the field, I fared a little better. Out of generosity or out of respect for my noteworthy wingspan, the Athens coaches put me at third base, the busiest beep ball position. Once there, I entered into an ongoing call-and-response with Scean and Ron.
“Scean, not sure if I’m right.”
“You’re good.”
“Ron?” I said pleadingly, as if I’d begun to fear he’d somehow disappeared in the middle of the inning.
“Yep.”
Ron was my on-field compass, and by the fourth I felt more comfortable, but he’d just had a shock himself and needed some grounding. During our at-bat, he’d laced a ball right up the middle and struck his son, the pitcher, in the temple. Upon contact, Ron raced for the first-base bag, finding out moments later that Ben was crumpled on the ground. Pitchers are a brave lot, and Ben is no exception. They stand close to the plate and serve up meatballs to some pretty burly folks. Kevin Sibson of Austin gets pegged every practice, and Tim Hibner, a journeyman pitcher from Oklahoma City, actually likes getting hit because it means he’s timing his pitch correctly.
Usually, a beep ball to the crotch is the worst-case scenario, but some have been knocked out by frozen ropes to the heart, and at least one pitcher has spat teeth.
Ben got up after three minutes, we all gave the requisite applause for a sports injury, and Ron, who’d been retired on the play, had to run out to the field again. When he came back to the bench after that half inning, Ron whispered to me, “Where’s Ben? Let me get to Ben.” I stood up and Ron slid over to his woozy son. He threw an arm around him, called him “boy,” and felt for his bruise.
• • •
With concussion fears behind us, Ron dispensed more of his wisdom. He’d recognized from the distance of my voice that I was a step, or six steps, out of place. Scean, too, directed me toward the baseline or away from it as I called out, “Ron, Scean, am I good?”
“That beep,” Scean said. “You chase that beep and when you find it, you feel like you achieve something.” He roamed the field. He had some of his swagger back after recording a putout; I didn’t. I still felt like a three-year-old asking for the hall light to be left on.
We called out our positions in the field, around the horn. “Where are you, Timberwolves?” Keeney shouted, adding his “one” from first base. “Two,” said Jonathan, at second. Scean yelled “three,” and I put everything I had into my “four.” Ron and Amanda chimed in with five and six. It was a simple sound-off to let each other know we were still together.
Swelling with team pride and thigh sweat, I tried hard to act natural. Wearing the blindfold made me feel languid, though, and I noticed that sightlessness, even if it’s just an experiment, gets a guy to limit his unnecessary movements. I imagine I resembled an upright corpse, but I also tilted my head to the left, maybe to hear better out of my right ear and maybe from darkness-induced exhaustion, so I probably looked more like an upright zombie.
“Ron, Scean. Am I undead?”
From there, I crouched into a third baseman’s posture: knees bent, head tilted, totally ready to get in front of something I’d never see coming. It occurred to me—things occurred to me a lot while I couldn’t see—that there was something metaphorical about being a blind third baseman. Stuff can pass by without you knowing it, or surprise you and hit you in the throat. But if I acted ready, hands in front, maybe I’d be ready.
During the game against Long Island, I had six hit my way, and I fielded three of them before the batter scored. Once I stopped bobbling a ball, I’d hold it away from my body and shout “up,” but regardless of the result, I was always both relieved and frustrated at the end of a play (finding a beep ball feels like finally unsticking a pants zipper).
Having a successful impact on a game you can’t see, meanwhile, an impact which none of the other competitors can see either, leads to storytelling, and blind men congratulated me on great plays that definitely weren’t. Sometimes, because of the speed of the beep or the sound of the scuffling, they did know that one of their teammates had achieved something special. On the flipside, as an inexperienced player, it was hard for me to figure when I’d made a huge blunder. A ball through the legs or agonizingly out of reach isn’t necessarily an error, but high-level players and coaches will tell you that snafus are certainly avoidable. So while some of the pressure’s off, any old unplayable poke down the line can sprout into a myth about so-and-so’s lack of mobility, lack of effort, lack of hearing prowess, lack of human goodness. Blame explodes, and everyone’s potentially right about his interpretation of a play.
“Put twelve blind guys in a room,” Ron told me, “and everyone’s a king. No one can tell them any different.”
One of my few triumphs during the Long Island game was also a humbling failure of agility. In the field, I heard “four,” and the beep came closer. I moved one step to my left and got the ball off my nose. I felt a little moistness like I was about to bleed. This is what I’d been waiting for. Suffering! Authenticity! Beep Ball Passion! (But also Helplessness! And Nostril Pain!). I could take one off the schnozz and live to tell about it, even if I hadn’t made the cleanest play in the world.
Beep ball always includes this mix of impressive athletic straining and comic relief. As exciting as it is to watch three or four guys dive, one after another, the game can also be a blooper video. Missed dives can seem awesome or goofy, but because the fielders don’t know how close they are to collision or to collecting the ball, there’s added urgency. Alfred Hitchcock once said that “surprise” is a sudden explosion and “suspense” is a bomb under a table that the characters don’t know is there. Beep ball’s characters hear the ticking and know the bomb’s close, and every play is a rush to defuse it.
Scratched up, I finished the inning, and the other players said “Where you at?” to the bench as we ran off. The volunteers yelled, “Keep coming, keep coming.” They clapped their teammates in, but April McKaig, the Athens coach, grabbed me.
“C’mon, sweetie,” she said as she took me by the elbow, and I felt, for one split second, the comfort and terror of total reliance. As far as she was concerned, I was blind, and until out number three of inning number six, I was going to stay that way.
• • •
At the World Series, people often treated me as though I couldn’t see. When I bought a Dr. Pepper from a concession girl who guided my hand to the can, it seemed rude to correct her. Others would
