🔒Sign of the times: Portland Sea Dogs aim to improve ballpark access for all fans

From the opening notes of “Oh say can you see…” to the “home of the brave” finale at the home of the Portland Sea Dogs, American Sign Language interpreter Roxanne Baker did her utmost to bring the national anthem to life for deaf baseball fans like herself. While Baker couldn’t hear Aretha Franklin’s soulful recording playing over the public address system, she was taking visual cues from another interpreter to nail the pacing.

“I was not signing word for word,” Baker explains later. “In ASL, you often need to reorganize the language to convey the meaning, emotion and spirit of the story rather than provide a literal translation.”

Infusing her performance with grand gestures, Baker pointed to the billowing flag while soaking in the pre-game atmosphere, cheered on by her partner, family members, college friends from out of town and fellow deaf community members watching from the stands.

“It was a very intimate, deeply connected and meaningful experience,” she says.

Baker took the stage at this year’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Awareness Night as the Sea Dogs carried on a tradition that started in 2024, months after the state’s deadliest mass shooting, in Lewiston. Four deaf friends who gathered to play cornhole that fateful Wednesday night were among the 18 people killed.

At home in the ballpark

Beyond the annual Deaf and Hard of Hearing Awareness Night, the Double-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox has made physical modifications at its 32-year-old ballpark to ensure that “every fan that wants to be here can get here,” says Sea Dogs General Manager Jesse Scaglion. That includes reserved handicapped parking in front of the ballpark’s main entrance and the installation of two accessible elevators in 2023.

More recently, the team rolled out two mobile apps for use at all home games – one for hearing-impaired spectators, the other for users with low or no vision — as part of a broader goal to open the game experience to everyone.

“The whole motto of Minor League Baseball,” Scaglion says, “is accessibility.”

Season ticket holders Randy and Sarah Bellavance can attest to that firsthand. The married couple, both of whom are visually impaired, walk to ballgames from their home a few blocks away. Seated in their favorite spot behind the first base dugout, they take turns listening to Sea Dogs broadcaster Emma Tiedemann’s live play-by-play via an earpiece attached to a portable radio that Randy bought on eBay for $50 and relaying the plays to each other.

While they could just as easily follow the game from home, without the constant announcements and music during the game, Randy says one reason they keep coming back is the staff who make them feel at home.

“The more you get to know these people, the more they feel like family rather than employees,” he says as an organ chord rings in the background. “Absolutely,” says his wife, before the duo turn their attention back to the game as they look forward to a bus trip with other season ticket holders to the home of the Worcester (Mass.) Red Sox, a Triple-A team nicknamed the WooSox. Both volunteer with the National Federation for the Blind and are users of Aira, a California-based app introduced by the Sea Dogs in 2024.

The team provides the app for free at all home games. Blind and low-vision fans can use it to connect through a live video call with a trained visual interpreter who can see and hear what’s happening around them. The interpreter can also use maps, location tracking, search tools, text messaging, and rideshare services to guide users to their seats as well as concession stands and restrooms when ushers aren’t available.

“It’s very task-driven,” explains Kevin Phelan, Aira’s Maine-based chief revenue officer.

For example, “even if someone knows the number of steps to get to the food line, the interpreter can help direct them to a shorter line.” He says the app gets multiple calls per game and the company aims to continue its partnership with the Sea Dogs amid strong demand.

“There’s this really strong baseball connection for the blind community,” Phelan says. “They want to be there just like everybody else.”

The same is true for hearing impaired fans like his son, Gavin, a student at Cape Elizabeth High School who developed an emergency alerts app offered at Sea Dogs home games.

Gavin says the app was inspired in part by the Lewiston tragedy, when an active shooter entered a restaurant hosting a local deaf and hard-of-hearing cornhole tournament. When someone yelled “Get down,” many lives were saved — except for those who couldn’t hear the warning. The following year, a nationally known deaf couple and their dog died of carbon monoxide poisoning in their home in Sioux Falls, S.D., prompting widespread calls from advocacy groups for greater use of multisensory detectors.

Aiming to prevent future tragedies, Gavin— who wears hearing aids in both ears — used AI to create ALRM to alert users to emergency sounds and announcements through vibrations on their phones and reached out to the Sea Dogs to conduct a pilot that started this year.

“It’s not that it enhances the experience – this is more about safety,” Gavin says. “Ultimately, this is designed in a life or death situation to help save someone’s life.”

Honored to have thrown out a ceremonial first pitch at this year’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Awareness Night, Gavin describes the experience as “awesome.”

“In fact the pitch after me was a survivor of the Lewiston shooting, which made it feel even more personal,” he says.

The team auctioned off a special jersey — in the team’s retro teal and autographed by players— with S-E-A-D-O-G-S spelled in sign language across the front — to raise $400 for Pine Tree Camp Dirigo Experience for hearing-impaired youngsters.

Baseball cards and Backstreet Boys

For this year’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Awareness Night, the first 1,000 fans to walk through the gates received a vintage baseball card in sepia tones.

While the solemn-looking ballplayer on the front of the card was unfamiliar to many, a trio of nonprofit board members were well-versed in William Ellsworth Hoy’s contributions to America’s favorite pastime.

“He was one of the first deaf baseball players and he came up with a lot of the signs that you see in baseball today,” Alicia Pieper, a retired teacher of the deaf, says on her way in. Hoy, a center fielder from Ohio who played with several Major League teams in the late 1800s, is credited with developing the hand signals for “out” and “safe” still used by umpires today.

Umpires on the picture-perfect summer night were seeing far more action than many players on the field until the sixth inning, when Sea Dogs infielder Ronald Rosario hit his first triple of the season on two outs to break up a no-hitter and drive in two runs. Though the game ended in a 10-inning loss, the defeat didn’t dampen the lively atmosphere in the stands.

The sections above the third-base dugout were filled with sign-language interpreters from the Pine Tree Society helping deaf fans and boogying to the beat in their seats. ASL interpreter Amy Richardson danced to “Y.M.C.A.” with Sea Dogs mascot Slugger and signed to 1999 pop song “I Want It That Way” in a spirited performance worthy of even the most devoted Backstreet Boys fans.

Though this was her first time on the Sea Dogs’ stage, Richardson says through an interpreter that she’s been a fan of the Double-A team as long as they’ve been around. Her favorite part of the evening, she says, was “connecting with fans and providing access for them.”

Fellow interpreter Regan Thibodeau, who became somewhat of a Maine celebrity during daily televised briefings from Augusta during the pandemic, was also at the ballpark that night, though as a spectator soaking up the atmosphere.

“I think it’s wonderful because we are out in the public field,” she says through an interpreter. “We are here together for two hours and you can’t miss us. We’re able to make more people aware that we enjoy the same things that they do. We have the same hobbies. We have the same kind of interest in nightlife and daytime, whether we go to the beach or baseball games.”