Beverly's Joe McCormick A Big Hit In The Beep Baseball World

BEVERLY, MA — Joe McCormick was a 19-year-old Harvard University student dealing with the sudden loss of his central vision in his final months at Malden Catholic, looking for a way to connect with the athlete he'd been throughout most of his life as a baseball, basketball and varsity soccer player, when he first stepped up to the plate at a beep baseball practice in 2012.

"I was still craving that athletic ability," the Melrose native who has lived in Beverly since 2015 told Patch. "I had tried playing intramural soccer but I quickly realized with my sight I wasn’t where I could be on the same playing field with my friends anymore. I was still in that process.

"Then I went to my first beep baseball practice indoors at this school in Brighton. I realized that this is what I want to do from the first time I put the bat on the ball and remembered what that felt like again.

"It immediately clicked that I wanted to be doing this for a long time."

Ten years later, McCormick is still a member of the Association of Blind Citizen's Boston Renegades team that routinely competes for a national title each year. The team of players from throughout Massachusetts and southern New England recently traveled to Beaumont, Texas where it finished in the top five at the Beep Ball World Series for the fifth straight event.

McCormick, who batted .700 during the 14-game season overall, was named Co-Offensive Most Valuable Player of the World Series with a .800 batting average, scoring 28 times in 35 plate appearances.

"It's pretty impressive since we have had a team since 2002 and only three times in history has a player hit over .700 on the season," Renegades coach Rob Weissman said. "Not only is he a great hitter, but he is a leader on this team on both sides of the ball on and off the field."

Beep baseball is a version of the sport in which everyone is blindfolded — to offset variations of the level of sight for each player — and the batter works with a sighted pitcher and catcher to connect with the ball, which beeps for location purposes. Once the ball is batted in play, the hitter must run 100 feet to a beeping base — which randomly alternates between first and third each hit — before a fielder gains control of the ball to safely score a run.

"I did very well and as a team we did fairly well," McCormick said of the World Series. "It certainly was a little hotter than we expected. But it was a lot of fun in the process.

"The competition is important to me but that team connection is really huge. When I joined the team my beep ball teammates were the first blind community I had met."

McCormick has a rare condition called Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy in which central vision quickly deteriorates at a young age and generally leaves those affected with some peripheral vision, but not enough to drive, read or play competitive sports.

It is a hereditary condition that affects about one in 50,000 males. McCormick said he first noticed the condition in one eye during a robotics class during the second semester of his senior year at MC. Within months, the remaining vision in the second eye affected was lost during the week of his high school graduation.

"It was a big awakening," he said. "A real shock."

McCormick went on to attend and graduate from Harvard, get married and move to a house in Beverly — on the commuter rail line so he could commute to Boston — where he and his wife had two children.

He said he enjoyed watching the Renegades improve with more and more athletic, younger blind men and women players each year until the onset of the COVID-19 health crisis when he considered that his playing days might be over.

"I was thinking that I am a parent now and maybe this isn't for me anymore," he said. "Then the minute I stepped back onto the field it hit me that I couldn't believe not doing this."

As they look toward a hopeful run toward another World Series next summer, the Renegades will spend part of this fall fundraising for their trips. They have a charity game against the Salisbury Firefighters on Aug. 20, the Woburn Lions Club on Sept. 11 and the Tewksbury Firefighters on Sept. 24 where the sighted teams find out just how challenging it is to hit and run the 100 feet to the base with a blindfold on and with only the sound of the beeps guiding your way.

As much as he said he took pride in his own performance in Texas, McCormick took just as much pride in the strides the younger players took as they embraced this new athletic experience just as he had a decade earlier.

"It's definitely more than just a sport to me now," he said. "People I've met on the team were parts of my wedding. I have been to their weddings. Each season you look forward to the competitive side of things, but it's also re-sparking those friendships.

"It's more than just seeing each other at practice on a Sunday. It's really hard to find athletic blind folks. Obviously, they are out in the world but it's really hard to connect with them.

"This lets us all do that."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)