They play on a baseball field, but there are only two bases: first and third, positioned slightly in foul territory so that blind runners don’t collide with blind fielders, and they aren’t actually bases, but things that look like padded tackling dummies. The blind players must all wear blindfolds, both at bat and in the field, lest those who are legally blind by Social Security Administration standards, but can still distinguish light, have an advantage over the completely blind. The ball is a little bigger than a softball (and it beeps). (In blind baseball the pitcher with the highest ERA is the Cy Young of the league.) The pitcher’s mound is only about 10 yards from home plate, which brings a whole new meaning to, "They’re hitting him hard." It’s not unusual for a pitcher to be felled by a ball hit by his own guy – the guy’s he’s trying to help get a hit. If the blind batter swings and misses, it’s not his fault the sighted pitcher hasn’t put the ball in his batter/teammate’s wheelhouse. The underhand pitch isn’t fast-pitch, but it’s quick, and delivered with advance verbal preparation ("Set, ready, ball"). The pitcher – he’s sighted – is pitching to his own blind team. The sport is baseball, with a few twists. Thirty-seven years later, the rules are pretty much the same. So in 1964, Charles Fairbanks, an engineer with Mountain Bell Telephone invented a baseball that beeped, and bases that emitted a sound, and after a decade of tooling the mechanisms, and hashing out the rules, the first World Series took place in St. In the ’60s, when baseball really was a pastime – unlike now, when it’s past its time – lots of blind guys wanted to play the game. He’s a big man, and other than a little pockmark on each of his temples, and a few extra pounds, he still looks like a baseball player. The bullet missed his brain but severed his optic nerves. from the late shift at the Tyson Chicken packing plant in Chicago. The Heat had been eliminated by the Chicago Comets, led by Gilberto Ramos, a 37-year-old who played a little Single A in the Royals’ system 14 years ago before a random bullet passed through one side of his head and out the other as he was driving home at 1 a.m. Seth’s dissertation will examine the origins of slavery. I haven’t cared a whole lot about the professional game ever since I asked Seth "Bam Bam" Clark of the Bayou City Heat – big, bald and blind since the shooting accident at 13 – what it was like to play this game, and he smiled and said, "It’s allowed me to see another side of the world."Īfter that, I had no more questions, except what he was doing when he wasn’t playing, which is currently pursuing a Ph.D in American History at UC-Davis. I can’t get last year’s Series out of my mind, even though it ended in the last week of July, when Taiwan took two from Austin on a rainy Saturday in Ames, Iowa, to win the title in the 37th annual world series of blind baseball. Tweet Share on Twitter Share Share on Facebook Pin Pinterest 16
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