Reviewed by: Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind by David Wanczyk Sandra Marchetti (bio) David Wanczyk. Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind. Swallow Press, 2018. What is it like to love something that wants no part of you? This is the relationship women, minorities, and people with disabilities have long had with sports, including baseball. It's long been a game reserved for able-bodied white men and we still see the effects of colonialism and racism at the highest levels of the game today. That's where the National Beep Baseball Association (NBBA), or "Beep ball," takes its cue. This sport—modified baseball played with a 16-inch beeping softball, without second base, and with (sighted) pitcher and (blind) batter on the same team, was invented for the blind, by the blind. The NBBA plays a World Series every summer in which 18 teams participate; recent years of the Series are chronicled in this book. David Wanczyk, the author of Beep, expresses the fact that the NBAA's brand of baseball is something that makes these men and women feel fully alive, redeemed back into the culture of sport. But, outside a few tiny connections with Major [End Page 245] League Baseball, such as when a top Beep team, the Austin Blackhawks, travels to the Dominican Republic to introduce the sport on the island and Pedro Martinez shows up for the ceremonies, the league is not much connected to the mainstream game. Despite this, Wanczyk says his aim in the book is to portray the players as ballplayers—nothing more, nothing less. We hear about athletes putting "Twinkies in each others' cleats" and ragging on each other constantly. He also regales us with some politically incorrect, but funny stories that the (mostly male) athletes tell about being blind. One player is mocked when he reveals that his high school football team went 0-38 over the course of his career. His Beep ball teammate mentions, "Really?…You had a blind starting player." At points, these players reveal themselves as racists, misogynists, homophobes, and even bullies. One player feels the need to mention to Wanczyk that "we're not all racist." However, Wanczyk cannot escape portraying these men as heroes: …the challenge was to show them in all theirrough-and-tumble glory. That toughness is what brought beep beyond the canned inspirationalnarrative. Still, these guys were members of a groupthat was not mine, and figuring out how to presentthem was a dilemma. Wanczyk should be applauded for wrestling with these sentiments, and for attempting not to romanticize the players or the game, yet a good portion of the first half of the book does read like inspirational "road to the Olympics" portraits—histories of kids losing their sight in terrible accidents, blind kids taken advantage of, blind adults who still feel that a part of them is missing. Clearly Wanczyk's heart goes out to the players and he is enamored with their courage. It's easy for the reader to empathize with them as well. In Beep, disability does seem to categorize the players as "inspirations," but the fact that they are sports stars, "the best at what they do" in the world, makes them heroes for Wanczyk as well. Another complicated layer to the tale is that the athletes are being worshipped despite their troubling behaviors. The American players repeatedly distrust and degrade the Taiwan Homerun team—one example is calling the team's play a "Chinese fire drill." So many of the athletes we applaud in America are deeply flawed: Aroldis Chapman, Ray Lewis, and Josh Hader to name a recent few. Wanczyk falls victim to what many of us want from sports when he says, "I still wanted my childhood story, revised, and I wanted to give baseball to my daughter the way my parents had given it to me." He is hoping to share in the nostalgia thickly woven through the history of the game—revered old timers, Garden of Eden-like ballparks, and records that will never be broken. Wanczyk speaks to how baseball is ingrained in us when he says, "Summer...
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Oct 13, 2023
Emily Nothnagle 
Open Access
