Some cool local history I didn’t know about.
Houston’s blind athletes continue to impress our community with expanding participation in numerous sporting events. Long-time Oak Forest resident and native Houstonian Ronnie Bruns reflects on his time as one of the original members of the Bayou City Bombers, a Beep Baseball team that competes nationally with other blind athletes. The team first began playing in 1976 and Bruns joined the team two years later in 1978. The team has since changed its name to the Bayou City Heat and is still going strong today, competing on a national level with other teams as far away as Taiwan.
Beep Baseball is a form of baseball that is a competitive sport for the blind and visually impaired that utilizes a ball that beeps. The game was originally created as a non-competitive activity for blind children. In 1973 a Pacific Bell employee named Ralph Rock adapted the rules of baseball to avoid collisions, making the game a safe competitive sport. When the new “Ralph Rock” rules became officially established, the first game of competitive Beep Baseball was played in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
In 1976, as interest spread amongst the adult blind community nationwide, the National Beep Baseball Association (NBBA) was formed. Today, the NBBA organizes local, state and regional tournaments annually, culminating in a world series game every August. Every year a different hosting city is chosen, and Houston hosted its first world series game back in 2005.
As an original member of the Houston team that started back in 1978, Bruns is no longer a player but is still involved, serving on a committee working to gather information about former players and teams for the Beep Baseball Hall of Fame.
Remembering that year in 1978 Bruns said, “We won our first game but lost the next two. It was an eight-team double-elimination tournament so we did not place, but we were the first new team to win its first game in the world series.”
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In 2002, the Bayou City Heat won the world series competing with teams from all over the world. Houston’s team has always had a successful run, finishing mostly in second or third place throughout the years, competing against some of the best of the 27 teams that make up the NBBA. Houston now has two teams with the addition of the Houston Hurricanes. There are no geographic restrictions limiting where a player can play, so it is not uncommon for teams in other cities to recruit a player from another city or even state.
Spring training starts at the end of March and tournaments run late April to early June. The teams practice at the field that was constructed at the West Gray Community Center, a hub for disability athletes of all kinds. Many of the people associated with Beep Baseball have been with the sport for many years. Some current coaches started out as sighted players in their youth and loved the camaraderie of the athletes, and supporting friends and families, that they felt it hard to not be involved.
Bruns reflected on the human factor of the sport, saying when he first started his dad was a pitcher for the team while his mom served the team in a supporting role as a spotter in the outfield. The athletes have a tremendous support system from family and friends with varying levels of involvement. There have even been Beep Baseball weddings for athletes who met each other while playing the sport.
Bruns said, “At one point in the early days we actually had three couples who had met playing on our team and got married.”
I blogged about Beep Baseball in 2019 – that post and this Effectively Wild episode will tell you more about how the game is played – but I didn’t know about the local connection to the sport. I just happened to see the headline about it in that week’s edition of the Leader News, and here we are. The Bayou City Heat have a webpage that didn’t render for me in Edge and a Facebook group you might join if this is of interest to you. The National Beep Baseball Association webpage is here, and in addition to the Bayou City Heat and the aforementioned Houston Hurricanes, there are other Beep Baseball teams in Austin, College Station, Fort Worth, and Tyler.