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ONE

The Eyes of Texas

Base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen—generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race. We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people: the guts, vile as guts are, divine as guts are!

—Walt Whitman

THE SOUND OF baseball is different on this field. It has to be. There’s less “crack of the bat” and more alarm-clock beeping. Less “I got it” and more “Where is it?” But “Play ball” is always “Play ball,” and after the umpire makes that call, you can close your eyes and listen. You can still imagine your first visit to a major-league park. The mist lifts off the impossibly green infield at Fenway. You can almost see it.

You hear the action differently here, though. There’s the familiar baseball patter—comin’ to you, kid, here we go, kid. But then the pitcher, Kevin Sibson of the Austin Blackhawks, activates the “beep baseball” by pulling a pin out of it. The ball beeps fast like a daredevil’s EKG and Sibson delivers, shouting, “Set, ready, ball.”

Brandon Chesser’s at the plate, blindfolded to cancel out what remains of his vision. With his uppercut swing and outlaw’s intensity, he’s aiming to knock the beep out of the audible ball. He and Sibson, hitter and pitcher, traditional antagonists, are on the same team here. They have to be.

“Set, ready, ball.”

Chesser connects and he chugs down the baseline, breathing heavily while the fielders on the opposing team, the great Taiwan Homerun, fan out like detectives of sound. The beep baseball, a sixteen-incher chock full of spare parts from old pay phones to make it ring, rolls quickly toward and then past the fielders. But how far? A spotter shouts, “Three,” which corresponds to a zone on the field, but Taiwan doesn’t know where the ball is, and if they can’t pick it up in time—they have five seconds, tops—Chesser will tackle a four-foot-tall buzzing base and score the run. He goes at everything headfirst.

On 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 of him, after all. But time is running out, and, finally, he has it. Or he doesn’t. There is no such thing as a routine play, and watching the game hurts.

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 very hard to swallow,” he said about Taiwan’s success in the NBBA. “And I haven’t swallowed that yet.”

The rivalry 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 would be too much to lose to Homerun, the team they’d essentially raised from infancy. Especially since they’d gotten much stronger in the past year, 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 or if they were robbed of their vision because of a disease—we have a couple gunshots, drive-bys, hunting accidents—if they’ve never seen or they have seen. It’s just a marvelous game. It may be a sad story, but the ending’s great.”

The sad story for the Blackhawks was that Fernando Chang, the self-styled “Cockroach,” scored with one out in the bottom of the sixth to win the game for Taiwan, 24–23. The two seconds between my realization that Taiwan had won and the blind players’ realization that Taiwan had won made the walk-off victory surreal, but then the guys in the light-blue uniforms began their “Taiwan Homerun” cheer again. They walked onto the field in a jubilant train, hands on each other’s shoulders. For Taiwan, this was a long way from dancing the bunny hop. For Austin, it was torture.

Each team now had one loss in the tournament, and it all came down to game two. The rain intensified, and both teams took a break on the Taiwan team bus.

“It was hard for us to be on the same bus,” Lupe Perez told me. “That’s like two countries trying to sit together after they’ve gone to war. It took a lot for me to compose myself.”

Lupe’s fond of these kinds of martial metaphors. Take the incident of the Taiwanese tea, for instance. On the bus, Taiwan Homerun had thermoses, and they offered drinks to their rivals. Claire, Taiwan’s interpreter, said to the Blackhawks, “It’s not poison,” but only Richie Flores, the main Austin prankster, took a sip. Lupe Perez wouldn’t touch the thermos.

“You don’t know what that gun’s been through,” he said later. “You don’t know if it’s going to blow up in your face.”

That’s the kind of suspicion that accompanies this rivalry, at least for the most intense players. Afterward, Lupe wondered if the ginger tea had actually given Taiwan an advantage on a soggy day. Maybe it powered them, he thought, to their commanding win in game two and their fourth World Series championship. Compared to the first game, the second was a snoozer. Sibson was off the mark on the mound, and the final score wasn’t close. Taiwan had ended their losing streak; Austin’s had reached thirteen years.

“They’re our nemesis,” Austin coach Jonathan Fleming told me. “We want to keep it in our sights that these guys aren’t our friends right now. We’re determined to beat them. We’re building a team to beat Taiwan.”

That feeling made some of the postgame exchanges pretty awkward, and blind guys don’t always hide their facial expressions very well. As Taiwan’s players came in for hugs in the handshake line, some of the Austin team grimaced and leaned away, giving hasty back taps and moving on.

All of this anguish led into the 2013 Series, with Sibson and Lin back on the mound for a pitchers’ duel in yet another World Series championship matchup; with Foppiano and Rock Kuo playing tight defense, though sore; with the rookie, Ching-kai Chen, at the plate and Lupe Perez in the field.

“When we found out he was going to lose his sight,” Lupe’s mother Mary Ann told me, “we were devastated. He loves sports: basketball, biking. When they presented him with this game, it saved him. From feeling useless.”

“Recharge,” she always shouts at her son.

“This is my love right here,” Lupe says. He comes from a military family, and he makes the “here” sound like “hoo-ah.” “I love this game right here-ah.”

For some of the 2013 World Series final, the culmination of my second season following the game of beep, I kept my eyes closed, envisioning the dramatic comeback for the tough-luck Blackhawks. The full count, the big swing. I imagined myself at the plate, my big brother pitching. It felt like it did when I was little, when we all turned ourselves into heroes and played tennis-ball-baseball with the rest of the neighborhood, way past dark.