Hitting the Note : Ojai: Blind and partially sighted players teach students in blindfolds to use sound and touch in modified softball game.

The blindfolded batter gives the ball a lopsided smack. She jogs tentatively across the grassy field toward a distant beeping, like the warning of a truck backing up, somewhere off to the left. The fear of a twisted ankle sets in, and she slows to a walk.

When the beeper is five or six feet off--it is hard to judge distances using only sound--the player stoops down and gropes about at knee level. She has to touch the beeping orange cone set up as a base. But once the noise is only a foot or two away, it is more difficult to pinpoint, and spectators laugh as her hands swing at their target.

A dozen students from Ojai’s Thacher School, a boarding school for ninth- through 12th-grade students, fumbled around Saturday, learning to play beep ball from five blind and partially sighted students from Santa Barbara’s Braille Institute.

The modified version of softball, aside from providing a fun, physical activity, allows the blind students to teach the sighted students.

“It puts our students in a leadership situation,” institute spokesman Wayne Galler said.

A beep-ball field is arranged like two baseball diamonds sharing a home plate. The bases, three orange cones with beepers, are arranged on one diamond. On the other, outfielders stand in a half circle. The batter tries to reach a beeping cone in one diamond before the fielders find the beeping ball in the other. This way, the fielders and the batter don’t run into each other.

All the players--even the blind ones--are blindfolded, because a mask against the face is distracting, explained Braille Institute activities coordinator Vicki Fitzpatrick.

Players use a big softball with a battery-operated beeper buried inside “like a rubber burrito with springs and coils,” said Jesse Encinas, 29, a blind Braille Institute student who lives in Camarillo with his wife, Teresa, 28. Teresa, also a student at the institute, is partially sighted.

The ball is placed on a tee at home base, the beeper is activated, and with any luck, the batter hits the ball toward the outfielders.

After the ball is hit, the umpire, who can see, holds up one, two, or three fingers as a signal to the sighted person at that base to push a buzzer. The batter does not know which base he must run to until after he has hit the ball.

The fielders have to find the ball. During Saturday’s game at Soule Park in Ojai, one sighted fielder experimented with her balance as a batter racked up strike after strike. It was easier to stand still with her eyes open than closed, she decided.

Then the batter smacked the ball, and it was the fielder’s turn to track it down. In the blackness, the sound wavered as the ball rolled. She faltered until the ball stopped, then broke into a reluctant jog, stumbling into the ball and kicking it a few feet farther. When she reached down to pick it up, the batter had reached his base.

Saturday’s game lasted until everyone had a turn at bat. Nobody kept score.

Batters continued to search for their beeping targets even after they were called out, and outfielders hunted for the ball, sometimes on their hands and knees, long after batters were declared safe.

The object was not to score points, but to run and bat and figure out which way was which by sound and touch.

The Braille Institute, along with its academic curriculum, uses the games to teach motor and social skills. Fitzpatrick also teaches an independent living class that covers practical things, like how to fold money so that bills of different denominations can be distinguished from one another.

“I really focus on their independence,” she said.

Fitzpatrick “never runs out of patience, that’s one thing I can say about her,” said 33-year-old Oxnard resident and Braille Institute student Rusty Mickiewicz.

The institute students have gone bowling, roller-skating, horseback riding, camping and surfing, Fitzpatrick said.