Of signing and softball

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The slow-pitch softball loops toward the plate and Randy Danes hits a line drive that clears the shortstop's outstretched arm and sinks.

The left fielder, playing shallow, breaks on the ball, dives, misses, curses. The ball bounds underneath his glove toward the fence.

By the time the left fielder relays the ball to the shortstop, Danes is rounding third base. Good baseball says he should stop, but it's a rare opportunity for a singles hitter to touch all four bases without stopping.

The relay throw hits the backstop. Danes scores, the bench erupts.

Using a language Danes understands, his teammates fling their hands straight up, fingers outstretched and fluttering, the American Sign Language equivalent of boisterous clapping.

Only a few rules are in place for joining Anchorage's only deaf softball team, the IRL of ARC, which stands for Interpreter Referral Line of the Arctic Resource Center.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing players get first crack at filling openings. And anyone who joins must speak their language.

The play in Coed D League can be ragged but the conversation is first-rate. For the deaf and hard-of-hearing who live on morsels of language in the hearing world, the Wednesday night games are a smorgasbord of stories, word pictures and descriptions.

Players come early and stay late. Games draw fans. Sometimes they don't pay attention to what's happening on the field as they revel in words.

Deaf athletes who grew up playing on hearing teams often relied on teammates with rudimentary signing skills, spelling out words letter by letter. The effect was to encase their conversation in concrete boots.

Concrete conversation

"There's total communication out there. It's fun," said 25-year-old Tiffany Logsdon, who joined the softball team this year after leaving a southern Illinois town with a half-dozen deaf people to move to Anchorage, which has an estimated 300 who know ASL.

Logsdon patrols right field, her hair in a ponytail, her eyes hidden by sunglasses, a stud piercing her tongue. As a kid playing baseball, Logsdon focused on the body language of other players to keep up with the game. Now, there are no mysteries.

"I can even daydream," she said.

Courtney Westberg, 22, plays center on Galludet University's basketball team and first base for its fast-pitch softball team. Batting in the beer league, she brings a supersonic swing to a crop-duster game.

She won a basketball scholarship to Western Oregon University but left in the middle of her third year.

Poor communication played a role. The first year, an interpreter who understood basketball accompanied her to practice. In her second season, the school provided an interpreter who didn't know a pick and roll from a jelly roll.

"They didn't know the vocabulary for basketball," she said. "It just wasn't there for me."

She went from a team where no one signed to Galludet where everyone did, and for the first time, she could talk to a coach without a middleman who left the minute practice ended.

Frustrated by fast pace

"Having a coach who knows signing, you can have a friend. You can hang out after practice and talk," she said through an interpreter.

Logsdon and Westberg, deaf since they were infants, learned American Sign Language as their first language. Dean Gates, 32, began losing his hearing when he was 8.

One-on-one, with $2,000 hearing aids in both ears, and his eyes watching your lips, you'd forget his hearing is impaired. Sit him down at a restaurant table with three other hearing people and he'll soon be reading the menu out of boredom. In the flow of conversation, it is hard to know whose lips to watch and frustrating to interrupt and ask for sentences to be repeated, he said.

"Bit by bit I get further behind," Gates said.

Gates, who learned in May that he passed the Alaska bar exam, loves Wednesday nights because it gives him a chance to sign. The difference in the languages? English, he says, is dry as a law school textbook. A conversation in ASL is comic book color.

The team is in its sixth year, long enough for members to develop into a fraternity that supports each other through divorces, deaths and the challenge of navigating in a hearing world.

When Gates began to lose his hearing, his entire family signed up for ASL classes.

"Not everybody gets that," Gates says in one of the deaf community's great understatements. Team members speak matter-of-factly about one or more parents who never learned to sign, or splitting from their families to develop oral skills.

Building teamwork

Danes, the home-run hitter, left Anchorage at 12 for Washington, D.C., to attend a deaf school. A year later, he returned to Anchorage, walked into his house and found another family.

"My parents had moved," he said. "They didn't let me know."

He learned they were in Washington state but he chose to stay in Anchorage. "They were into alcohol and they had a lot of problems of their own," Danes said.

For three years, he lived on the street and the Brother Francis Shelter. His hair was long and he convinced people he was 18, not 13. Being deaf made it more convenient for hearing people to buy the story.

He learned to speak by watching mouths and feeling the vibrations from their throats.

Dave Robertson, 36, who is proficient in ASL and works as an interpreter, took over as coach of the softball team in 1999 as the team emphasis shifted from winning at all costs to showcasing what deaf and hard-of-hearing athletes can do. He dearly loves to win, but is likely to bench himself out of loyalty to his players.

"This might be their only chance to ever play," he said.

Robertson plans to turn over the coaching next year to Tommy Le, 31, the team's 266-pound left-handed relief pitcher. Le, who was 4 when he moved to the United States from Vietnam to live with his grandparents, will be the team's first deaf coach. He plans to keep the team inclusive, rather than cutthroat.

"No one sits anymore," he said. "My goal is to have fun -- and teamwork. Of course, we want to win, but we have to have that commitment and teamwork to win."