Baseball From a Different Perspective : Blind Father of Kennedy Ballplayer Sees the Game Through His Mind’s Eye

Roy Cizek missed bits and pieces of his son’s pitching performance in the City Section championship game at Dodger Stadium last Thursday. Sure, he enjoyed the ambiance--the sound of vendors hawking their wares, the catcalls of fans, the smell of peanuts and hot dogs, the electricity of the game--but overall, he was left somewhat underwhelmed.

“Dodger Stadium was a letdown for me,” Cizek said.

Disappointing?

After Cizek’s son, Mitch, pitched a complete-game six-hitter? After his son’s team, Kennedy High, won the game, 4-3, over Palisades to win the 4-A Division title? After Mitch was named the game’s most valuable player for his effort, which included rebounding from what was believed to be a season-ending laceration on his pitching arm?

A letdown?

“The catcher was too far away from me to understand what was happening to Mitch’s ball,” Roy said. “It was one of the first times he’d pitched that I couldn’t really see what was going on.”

See , you see, is the operative verb here. Roy Cizek’s sentences are sprinkled with the word, sometimes intentionally, as though he is trying to assuage the uneasiness of anyone who might intentionally avoid using the word.

In Roy’s case, he uses it in its figurative sense, because every game is a night game--Cizek lost his sight in a fire at age 3. Yet, his baseball vision hasn’t been clouded much at all.

What is all-consuming for Cizek is missed by even the most devout members of baseball’s congregation. He hears the game, he senses the action. The sizzle of a good fastball slicing through the air. The thud of the ball in the catcher’s glove. The hesitancy in the plate umpire’s voice. The ringing of the bat distinguishes the big boppers from the banjo hitters, the woofers from the tweeters.

“I can hear if the ball is off the handle, the end of the bat, or off the sweet part,” Roy says.

Indeed, the game is sweet music to his ears, and his ears can distinguish much, much more than the average fan: Cizek is an acoustical engineer who did graduate work at Massachusettes Institute of Technology after studying music and physics at Indiana for three years in the early 1960s. For several years, he owned his own audio company, then worked for two Los Angeles-area stereo speaker manufacturers. He now works as a consultant and lives in Torrance.

The elder Cizek not only recognizes the snap, crackle and pop of a good fastball, but he can tell you whether it was a fastball at all. His explanations are almost professorial.

“You can’t always go by the pop of the ball, because if it hits right in the cup (of the glove), it makes a lot of noise,” he says, gesturing with his hands. “When the ball hits the glove at a different velocity, there’s a different harmonic structure to it, almost a crack. I can hear the stitches, I can tell if he has good rotation on the ball.”

When his son was pitching in high school, the elder Cizek typically could be found sitting near the Kennedy dugout, as close to the action as possible.

“He gets right up close to the fence and can practically call every pitch,” said Dick Whitney, the Kennedy athletic director. “He knows what Mitch is going to throw.”

His baseball savvy, however, was not necessarily learned in the stands. For years, in fact, before the family relocated to Southern California, Cizek was a youth baseball coach in Yukon, Okla.

“I didn’t think Mitch was getting much instruction, so I got with a friend from work and said, ‘Why not put together a team this year?’ ” Roy said. “I was kind of scared. I didn’t know what people would think about me.”

Not much, as it turned out. Mitch, who was 12 at the time, remembers the reaction of the kids who showed up for the first day of practice.

“The first day, they walked up and said, ‘A blind coach? No way,’ ” said Mitch, who lives with his stepmother in Panorama City. “They turned right around and walked off. Even myself, I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Roy’s co-coach left the team a few weeks later, leaving Cizek to handle the team. Despite more than a few doubters, he eventually won over the players, parents and fans and became a cause celebre of sorts. Roy was featured on a segment of NBC’s “Real People,” and was the subject of several newspaper articles. The Cizeks led the team to a city championship and finished second the following year.

“I think the initial back pressure from parents and everybody really made me want to do it even more,” Roy said.

To effectively coach--in light of the dark, so to speak--Cizek had to make several personal modifications. He used a pitching machine to shoot fly balls to his outfielders, who were asked to turn their back to home plate, then pick the ball up in flight to help develop quickness. To hit infield grounders, Cizek held the ball in his left hand, a bat in his right, and threw the ball into the swinging bat. Infielders were not informed who Cizek would be hitting the ball to, which helped keep players alert, he says.

Roy became so adept at handling the coaching rudiments that some of Cizek’s Kennedy teammates were, at first, convinced that this blindness business was all a sham.

“A bunch of us were walking out to the field one time, and Mitch’s dad was standing there hitting him ground balls,” Kennedy infielder Pat DeBoer recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, your dad’s blind. Riiiight. ‘ When I knew for sure that he really was, it freaked me out.”

And like any former coach, Roy has his own ideas about how things should be done. Take Kennedy slugger Gino Tagliaferri, for instance. Roy Cizek insists that Tagliaferri--Kennedy’s career and single-season home run record-holder who was drafted in the third round Monday by Detroit--has room for improvement.

“I did my share of grandstand coaching,” Roy says, chuckling. “My thing with (Tagliaferri) was to tell him to be very patient and to stay back on the ball. He probably got sick of hearing it from me. He actually dives into the ball. If I was a coach I’d probably have him bunting to the right side of the infield just to make sure he stays back on the ball.”

Tagliaferri bunting?

“He’s got a quick bat, but there’s an aggressive mind there, and that sometimes can be a problem,” Roy says.

Dad was once known to be aggressive with umpires. While coaching in Yukon, in fact, Cizek had a run-in or two with plate umpires. Well, actually, a walk-in.

“I had a real good argument with this one ump,” he said. “It was a game in the seventh inning in Oklahoma, and their guy threw the ball in the dirt on 0-and-2, and the ump called it a strike.

“I got right out on the field--I heard it hit the dirt. The guy says, ‘What do you know, you can’t see?’ And I said, ‘I heard it, gimme a break.’ ”

The irony of this scenario is not lost on Cizek. When reminded what it must have been like for the umpire to be publicly dressed down by a blind man, Cizek beams.

“Yeah, but I was right,” he said.

His relationship with his son was strengthened by the game. There were times, both said, when players in Oklahoma would try to take advantage of Roy’s handicap. Or worse, make fun of it.

“There were times when a kid would flip me the bird,” Roy says. “They knew I couldn’t see it.”

Mitch had standing orders from his father, however, not to intervene.

“I was always told that it wasn’t worth it to stand up for my dad,” Mitch said. “He said that if anyone had a problem with his blindness, that it was really their problem.”

There have been occasional problems of an auditory nature, too. Even though Mitch struck out six in Kennedy’s win over Palisades last Thursday, he did it rather anonymously. Kennedy used a designated-hitter for Cizek, so once team introductions were concluded before the game, dad had to rely on friends in the stands for game details. Vin Scully was not around to provide play by play.

In fact, once the game started, Mitch’s name was not announced over the public-address system until he was handed the game MVP trophy by City Section Commissioner Hal Harkness.

Harkness, before hundreds of Kennedy fans, called him, “Mitch Sleaz-ick.”

“Happens all the time,” Roy said.

Actually, it’s pronounced SEE-zack.

As in see.