Written by Troy Guidone, with support from the DAC Team
In the summer of 2023, I had the pleasure to meet Brenda Brueggemann and the opportunity to take her class Disability Narratives at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. An ongoing part of the class was an assignment Brenda was trying for the first time where we annotated class reading with outside sources to enrich a primary text. I had an affinity for ‘pop culture’ artifacts like trailers for films, magazine articles and tweets! Several of my annotations involved baseball and Brenda let me know that there is a big connection between baseball and the deaf community. The link above is one of my favorite annotations; it is a trailer for a documentary about the origin of hand signals in America’s pastime.
As the story goes, there was a deaf player named William Hoy who people nicknamed “Dummy” (he played for Brenda’s favorite team, The Reds!). In those days, people who were deaf were described as deaf and dumb (Hoy is reported to have embraced his nickname, however, “Dummy” Hoy). When he was up to bat, he turned to read the umpire’s lips and sometimes missed a call; so, an umpire began using hand signals to accommodate his disability. And this is the origin story of hand signals in baseball.
One of my favorite quotes from this clip is that Hoy “left a legacy that allows everybody to really enjoy the game.” Nowadays, it’s not just balls and strikes that have hand signals, but ‘safe’ and ‘out,’ ‘foul’ and ‘fair,’ ‘homerun,’ and if a coach has been ‘tossed.’ It is an example of how an accommodation for someone with a disability can help the whole community, as everyone watching from stands, TV, or in the field, benefits from these signals—they have a way of bringing the action and drama to life as well as communicating the action as it unfolds. This annotation was written to connect with three of the class texts: Cry of the Gull, Show Me A Sign and Deaf Republic. It highlights how instrumental the deaf community was in shaping America’s pastime and how accommodations for the disabled benefit the larger community.
Despite the deaf community’s profound mark on baseball, ballparks today still lack accommodations. Here is a link to a video of the deaf actress Marlee Matlin at a Cubs game posted to twitter:
She is at her hometown ballpark: Wrigley Field. She is excited and happy, but she notes that there are no captions for the “National Anthem,” “America the Beautiful,” or any public announcements. I remember Judy Heumann (in Crip Camp) saying that laws can change, but they aren’t effective unless attitudes change. Despite baseball being a tool for social progress, it hasn’t fully embraced and accommodated the deaf community.
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