The beep ball player
During the summer, Aqil Sajjad found himself lost in Columbus, Ga., and asked a passerby to point him in the direction of the store he was seeking. But Sajjad was closer than he knew. The stranger, no doubt perplexed, asked in a slow Southern burr, “Are you blind?” The man wasn’t being rude, insisted Sajjad, who chuckles when recalling the incident. “He really wanted to know.” Sajjad is indeed blind, and while he has had to make adjustments to cope with the retina detachments that stole his sight — his right eye at age 10, his left at 16 — that hasn’t dampened his lust for life. That trip to Georgia, Sajjad’s first, was to compete in the World Series of Beep Baseball with his team, the Association of Blind Citizens’ Boston Renegades. A modified version of baseball created for blind players, beep ball utilizes a noisemaking ball, delivered by a sighted pitcher to...