Beep. David WanczykЧитать онлайн книгу.
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