Ed Lucas, blind baseball chronicler, is dead at 82
The New York Giants had just won the 1951 pennant on Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds when 12-yearold Ed Lucas raced out of his apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, in the late afternoon to play baseball with his friends.
Rarely asked to pitch because of his poor vision — he was legally blind — he took the mound when some of the other boys went home. He laid down his thick glasses — none of his favorite major league pitchers wore glasses, so why should he? — and uncorked a pitch with all his might.
The batter swung. The ball struck Eddie between the eyes.
“The twilight of an October afternoon on a makeshift baseball diamond as a white horsehide sphere shattered my fragile vision was the last clear thing I ever saw,” he wrote in “Seeing Home: The Ed Lucas Story: A Blind Broadcaster’s Story of Overcoming Life’s Obstacles” (2015, with his son Christopher). “The pain was overwhelming. Bright flashes obscured my sight.”
His retinas were detached, and his vision deteriorated even further. He became fully blind on a day he would always remember: Dec. 11, 1951, when Joe DiMaggio retired.
Although unable to see the diamond or the players on it, Lucas’ love of the game remained undiminished, displayed in a long career as a baseball writer for newspapers in New Jersey; as a radio broadcaster; and as a contributor to the website of the New York Yankees’ YES Network, for which he received a New York Emmy Award in 2009.
He died, on Nov. 10, in a hospital in Livingston, New Jersey. He was 82 and lived in nearby Union. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, Christopher Lucas said.