Inside the Low-Tech Ballpark of Beep Baseball

From Popular Mechanics

Even at eight years old, the boy had been playing soccer long enough to know something was off. When he tried to track the ball, the object blurred and disappeared while the rest of the field remained clear. It wasn't until he was 10 that he was diagnosed with the degenerative disease retinitis pigmentosa, albeit a "reverse" type.

Eric Mazeriegos was losing his sight.

Most people with RP live with an ever-tightening field of tunnel vision before losing their sight completely. Mazeriegos continued playing soccer another few years, until the loss of sight was too much for him to bear. "It got to the point where I felt I was hurting my team," he said. "When you're playing competitive sports, you don't want to do anything that's going to hurt your team."

And so, he benched himself. In 1988, Mazeriegos moved to Sacramento for college. He tried a few different options to feed his competitive beast before coming across a practice for this thing called "Beep Baseball." Initially, Mazeriegos was ready to write it off as a cheap take on a real sport. "Once I realized it was different, I got into it right away," he said. "It's a high level of sport."

How to Build a Beeping Ball

In 1964, the Colorado School for the Blind and Deaf had a problem. The students wanted something for the playground, but all the available options had been made for sighted children. So, they enlisted the help of Charles Fairbanks, an engineer with Mountain Bell Telephone who went into his workshop with one of the company's Princess telephones and promptly broke it open.

The Princess was a new, sleek, portable design that had been made to fit nicely on a bedside table. It was the first phone designed with a light inside the dialing pad, to assist with nighttime calls. The Princess became an icon of '60s design-Jackie O had one-and inside the phone was something Fairbanks wanted.

The original version of the phone, released in 1959, used an external ringer box that had to be mounted on the wall. But that was an annoyance for owners, and so a subsequent redesign inserted an M-type ringer into the phone itself. This ringer produced a single-gong sound whenever the phone received a call. Fairbanks opened up the phone, removed the ringer, and then hooked up the ringer to battery power. He then gutted the insides of a softball and shoehorned the new mechanism inside, crafting the first quick-and-dirty prototype of what would become the BeepBall, a baseball that would ring like a telephone when you turned it on.

As more people heard about Fairbanks' contraption, more blind athletes saw its promise in recreating America's pastime, and more tinkerers began tinkering. Fairbanks' design was far from perfect. For starters, the surgical work destroyed the softball's structural integrity, so it had a bad habit of breaking apart when struck with a bat. This, for obvious reasons, is not ideal. Luckily, the Telephone Pioneers of America-a non-profit composed primarily of retired telephone company employees-saw the ball's promise and improved upon it. They added two electronic circuit boards, powered it with a trio of nickel-cadmium batteries, and inserted the device into a larger, 16-inch-circumference softball that could withstand the beating.

The first World Series-less end-of-season match-up, more one-big-tournament that any team can enter-took place in 1976, with the hometown St. Paul, Minnesota Gorillas taking home the championship. That event looks an awful lot like the contest you'll see today.

Field of Dreams

Picture a run-of-the-mill baseball diamond. Now plant grass over the infield and remove second base entirely. Replace the classic square bases at first and third with something that looks more like a tackling dummy in football. And draw two lines, one of them 40 feet from home, one of them 170 feet. The ball has to pass the first to be considered a ball in play, and if it passes the second in the air, it's a home run. Move the pitcher's mound until it's only 20 feet away from home, compared to the standard 60 feet, 6 inches in baseball. Trim the defensive players to a mere six. That is the Beep Baseball field.

The scoring rules are even simpler: The batter hits the ball and then runs toward a base. If he or she makes it there before a fielder locates the ball, grabs it, and lifts it off the ground, the batting team gets a run. If the fielder fields it first, it's an out. There are three outs to an inning, six innings to a game, and a tie goes into extra innings. There are a few additional quirks, but the best one is this: The batter doesn't know which of the two bases they have to reach until after they hit the ball, at which point a randomized buzz goes off in one of the bases and the batter aims their body towards the sound. It's an acoustic-based race between batter and fielder. Whoever locates their beep first, wins.

If you think this simplicity makes the game sound easy, then consider that on the offensive side, you're trying to hit a moving circular object without seeing it. So the batters are given some affordances to make the act possible. Pitchers, who are sighted, are on the batter's team. For timing purposes, they call out "ready, pitch" and purposefully try to aim at the batter's normal swing path; Mazeriegos estimates batters with "good pitchers" make contact with the ball 85-90 percent of the time. In that capacity, the pitcher-batter tandem is more like a dance than the battle you see in Major League Baseball. Not that the pitchers are rewarded for it. Only 20 feet from the plate, they're at the most at risk of getting struck with the ball. "You just don't have the reaction time," Mazeriegos said.

However, it's the other part of the offensive journey-running to either one of the bases, 100 feet away-that can be terrifying. "You're essentially putting on a blindfold and running as fast as you can," said Mazeriegos. "You're not doing something that's normal. But after three or four times you get over that fear."

Defense is no picnic, either. There are six fielders positioned at various zones in the field. Two sighted spotters, one on either side of the field, call out the number of the defensive zone where the ball has been hit, and the players positioned nearby go after it. Spotters are also tasked with yelling "duck" if a hard-hit line drive is heading towards a player. But, Mazeriegos said, "I will tell you that your human survival instinct takes over. You know when a ball is coming at your face." After the spotter yells the zone, defensive players follow the beep and communicate the teammates, letting them know if the ball has traveled past them, or if it bounced off their body.

For this reason, the spectator experience is more like golf than baseball. As Mazeriegos put it in a 2009 interview, "You cannot cheer during a play. Once the player is completely over, you can cheer."

Tinkering

In the half-century since Fairbanks' tinkering, the people who play and organize this game have tweaked his invention-slightly. One end of the BeepBall now contains a plug for a charger (the battery life lasts for roughly two hours) and a plastic insert with an on/off switch. The other end has an inch-and-a-half circle with speaker holes cut into the leather, making it easier to hear the beep. But that's about it. Today, when a car can drive itself and you can hold the world's knowledge in the palm of your hand, the BeepBall still runs on the same kind of phone parts Fairbanks used in the 1960s.

The Pioneers, now based in Denver, still make the BeepBalls. "They're all volunteers. They get together, cut up softballs, put in the circuitry, do the soldering, and put the ball back together," said Dan Greene, a coach/player who's been with the league since 1978. The great part about this arrangement is that the league gets inexpensive beeping mechanical balls to use. The 2015 Beep Baseball World Series went through roughly 215 balls, which, at the relatively low price of $35 per ball, cost just a tad over $7,500. If costs for the ball were increased, it wouldn't take long until the annual event was financially untenable-for the players or the Pioneers. "Pretty much the cost of the ball only covers their equipment," Greene said.

The downside is that this craft approach leads to sometimes less-than-ideal quality control. "Some years, the balls have a better tone, a strong pitch," said Mazeriegos. "Other years it's more high-pitched, a little weaker." It costs just $25 for a refurbished ball, if you want one for practice. But the gutting and re-fitting of the balls-which weigh about a pound-weakens their structure, meaning the balls have spots that make them more susceptible to breaking. Hit one right on the sweet spot, which is generally the speaker area, the beeps will stop beeping, and the ball will be lobbed into the trash. (Beep Baseball rule: A broken ball is considered dead, the pitch is a do-over.)

Leaving cost aside, the idea of one-pound projectiles flying toward people who cannot see is a fundamentally troubling one. So the league has tried to tinker with the design over the years, always coming up empty.

"A couple of years ago we tried a different material, and the ball got lighter, but it got a lot harder, which caused some pretty severe injuries," said Greene. "We've worked with universities to come up with different ideas." (One example: Designers at Duke University made the ball more durable, gave it a battery that charged faster and lasted longer, and inserted two sets of speakers, in case one was muffled by the ground; unfortunately, it also cost $100 a ball in parts alone.) "The problem is simply supply and demand. There haven't been any real technical breakthroughs because there's no financial engine behind it. There's no profiting."

As far as the league goes, their hands are tied. No one is stepping up to invent more mechanically sound balls, and they're also not going to file complaints towards the group of Colorado telephone company retirees. "You're not going to bitch too much, because they're making balls for us," said Mazeriegos. "They're the lifeblood of the sport."

Okay, Prove To Us You Can't See

From little kids playing Pop Warner football on up to the NFL, a key parts of having a successful sports league is defining who gets to participate. Nobody likes that huge kid who's been held back a few grades and now destroys younger kids on the field.

Beep Baseball is no different. There's no barrier to entry based on age or gender, but you must be technically visually impaired to play as a batter or fielder. (Pitchers, remember, can see perfectly.) This is where things get murky, since that's a pretty wide definition. "There are some guys who can drive," Greene said. "There was a team out of Indiana years ago, they'd get out of the cars, and you couldn't tell who was pitching and who wasn't."

To avoid making players prove they can't see, and to stymie cheating by fakers, Beep Baseball mandated blindfolds on all players. Yes, blindfolds on blind or visually impaired people. Put one on every non-pitching player and, bam, you've made an even playing field. For the most part, this worked. But, as anyone who just couldn't wait any longer for the piñata to spill its delicious guts knows, it's easy to get around a low-tech barrier like a blindfold.

"A team from Taiwan had a player, and pretty much everyone had been highly suspicious of him cheating," Mazeriegos said. "At that time, if you suspected someone is not playing fairly, you could request they wear a specific blindfold. We thought that would address the problem, but he'd shift it around between innings." As you can imagine, the ramification of having a sighted player on the field is pretty huge. "I honestly can't even think of an equivalent in another sport of how big an advantage using your eyes to see the ball would be. It's ginormous." The results bear this out, too. After second-place finishes in 2009, '10, and '11, the team from Taiwan-named "Home Run"-won championships in 2012 and '13.

Then came the implementation of the "patch" rule. It piggy-backs on an idea used by the United States Association of Blind Athletes. If a team suspects an opponent of cheating, they can request that player be "patched up." The player is taken aside and given two eye patches, one to be placed over each eye (think of an unfortunate-looking pirate). They wear an oversized blindfold called The Mindfold over that, and medical tape seals the whole apparatus to the player's face. It's not a particularly pleasant experience, especially during World Series tournament play, when players could be on the field up to nine hours a day. "Patching" is also a cumbersome process, which is why teams don't always request every opponent be patched up-and why they don't request that every player be patched, even though there's technically no limit. "None of us have the interest to slow the game down," Mazeriegos said.

This method works, at least anecdotally. The Taiwanese team missed the 2014 World Series, but came back for the 2015 event, held in Rochester, New York. Immediately, teams called on the aforementioned player to get patched up, and the tactic had an immediate effect. "He looked ridiculous out there," Mazeriegos said. The next game, the opposition didn't request the patch, "and he begins making amazing plays again." From then on out, every team had him patched up. "And again, he's terrible on defense. So, they put him at designated hitter."

When it came time for the championship, Taiwan faced Mazeriegos' own Austin Blackhawks team, and the Taiwanese team called for Mazeriegos himself to be patched. "It was their ploy to get inside of my head. It's kind of bush league." But when he ripped off the tape-job at competition's end on August 1, the Austin team had won the championship, their second in a row. Mazeriegos, despite playing patched up, took home the hardware for Defensive MVP.

The award is simply his latest. In 1999, Mazeriegos won both Offensive and Defensive MVP on a team that won the championship. "It was great to be recognized," he said of the awards, "but it meant something that time." Despite not yet officially hanging up his cleats, he was inducted into NBBA's Hall of Fame back in 2009. The only thing he has left to accomplish in the league is catching a fly ball, an act that's only occurred five times in league history.

"The closest I came was a soft line drive," he said. "I put my arm out, and it hit my bicep. The ball bounced up, on top of my head, and I reached to grab it, but it shot out the back. It's not something you try to do."

Mazeriegos spends his off-the-field time as a counselor for an orientation center for the blind. "We train them in independence," he said. "I'm there to support them with their studies, as someone who's been there and knows the ropes." While he lived in Concord, California-quite the distance from his team down in Austin-Mazeriegos still practices year-round by having his friends hit balls towards him, getting ready for next year's championship.

And he'll be out there, year in and year out, as long as he can move. "[Beep Baseball] gave me the chance to play competitive sports again," he said. "Other than losing my vision, being unable to compete was the most devastating thing to happen. For me, it was huge."

Credit a simple contraption made by a retired telephone operator in the 1960s.