More on Beep Baseball

I blogged about Beep Baseball here. Just recently I came across a website for Villa Park, IL. Villa Park was one town over from Elmhurst, where John and I lived in the Chicago area. The website has some pictures of the game. Check it out: http://www.invillapark.com/beep.htm

This is a link to one of the teams and gives information on the tournaments: http://www.chicagocomets.org/

When John was playing baseball we went to most of the tournaments. We went to tournaments throughout the midwest, places like Kalamazoo, Michigan and Marion, Indiana. The biggest tournament was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where teams all over the midwest and west coast participated. The various teams had definate characteristics and personalities. The teams from Oklahoma City and some place in Kansas had huge players with no fear. The team from San Francisco was very diverse and they were small and oddball.

There were times when we would pull up at a motel, and these were the same places where all the various teams were playing and staying, to find a paddywagon and the police and a fight that had broken out. Alot of these blind players had multiple problems, and were on various types of medication; so mix that with alcohol and women and you would have a fight. When we went to the tournament in Minnesota everyone was staying at a very nice hotel in Bloomington. What a riot for the hotel staff. Blind people tend to run in packs. The guy with the cane or some sighted person was out front with a cluster of visually impaired persons clumped behind. Movement was awkward and they knocked stuff down. This hotel had upright ashtrays with sand in them and everyone of these had a pile of sand on either side of it so you know that they were being continually tipped over. My favorite memory was of the mezzanine, where there was a balcony that had a rail at waist height. There were these upright ashtrays with sand in them against the rail at twenty feet intervals. Blind people walk next to walls or use rails. As with everywhere else in the hotel, there were piles of sand on the floor on either side of these ashtrays. I watched this blind person navigate down the mezzanine. He hadn't reached an ashtray yet, but you could just tell that he was going to knock over each and every one of them.