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We spend the first inning with the LoRussos, looking at their blind devotion to a game they love.</p> </section>    <div class="row"> <div class="large-7 large-push-2 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p class="lead">He feels the whipping wind, which delivers the roaming aroma of a fried dough delicacy to his seat in left field.</p> </div> </div>  <div class="row">  <div class="large-2 large-push-1 medium-2 small-10 columns editornote"> <h4 class="subheading">Editor’s Note</h4> <p>This summer, The Denver Post will share nine stories that capture our state’s love of baseball. We spend the first inning with the LoRussos, looking at their blind devotion to a game they love.</p> </div>  <div class="large-6 large-pull-3 medium-8 medium-pull-2 small-12 columns"> <p>His wife, wearing a matching jacket on this cold May day, gleefully hoots toward a Philadelphia Phillie shagging batting practice balls in front of her.</p> <p>The crack of the bat takes Mark LoRusso back home — nestled near a radio in 1965 — as well as to home plate at Coors Field, 50 years later, the sound stimulating his senses.</p> <p>“Baseball,” Mark said, “I just can’t seem to get enough of it.”</p> <p>Mark and Peggy LoRusso, married 30 years, sit in the front row and can鈥檛 see a thing. And there鈥檚 no other place they鈥檇 rather be.</p> <p>“We have no idea what they think a baseball looks like, or a rainbow,” said the blind couple’s close friend, Dan Sauvageau. “It’s something we take for granted every day. It makes you realize how lucky you are, when we take them to a game. It puts everything in perspective.”</p> <p>“We’re just like anybody else,” Peggy said. “We don’t see it all, but we can hear it.... I always say — somebody has it worse than we have it. That’s how I look at it.”</p> <p>The tale begins in 1998, when Sauvageau’s buddy Randy Milliken worked at Big Brothers Big Sisters. Milliken said his new co-worker, a blind man, yearned to attend a Rockies game.</p> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-9 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <div class="centerphoto"> <img src="./img/inning-one-lorussos-001.jpg" alt="Peggy and Mark LoRusso listen to the radio" /> <p class="caption"><span class="photog">Brent Lewis, The Denver Post</span>Peggy and Mark LoRusso “see” baseball games through listening to the radio call of KOA announcers Jerry Schemmel and Jack Corrigan. Peggy enjoys yelling at the broadcasters during games.</p> </div> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-6 large-push-3 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p>“I’m like, ‘What the (heck) does he want to go to a game for?’ “ Dan recalled. “And Randy didn’t know either. But Mark got to the game, and he had a blast. Just being at the ballpark.”</p> <p>Mark’s wife moved to Colorado the next year. She loved baseball, too, the way Dan did. This red-stitched bond connected the three.</p> <p>Dan isn’t related to the LoRussos. He doesn’t have a family connection to them. But he has taken them to nearly 300 Rockies games since that first meeting.</p> <p>“You get to be good friends, and you do things for people,” Dan said. “Life’s too short not to do the things you like to do, just because you don’t have the money to do it.”</p> <h3 class="subheading">Memories of Brooks Robinson</h3> <p>Mark’s eyes do work in one regard. They have the capacity to cry.</p> <p>Now 61, he grew up near Baltimore, soaking up the descriptions of Orioles games from radio broadcasts at home, seated alongside his dad. Young Mark could sometimes be found swinging a bat at a large stone near their house because the sound replicated the crack of a big-leaguer’s smack.</p> <p>The first major-league game he attended was in 1967, when Baltimore played Minnesota. He remembers crying in ‘69, when his O’s lost the World Series to the “Miracle Mets.”</p> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-9 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <div class="centerphoto"> <img src="./img/inning-one-lorussos-006.jpg" alt="Mark LoRusso holds the family cat" /> <p class="caption"><span class="photog">Brent Lewis, The Denver Post</span>Mark and Peggy LoRusso, at their home in Northglenn, have been married for 30 years. “He was 31 when we got married,” Peggy says. “I’m seven years older. I robbed the cradle!”</p> </div> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-6 large-push-3 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p>One of Mark’s heroes was Baltimore third baseman Brooks Robinson, the Hall of Famer who once visited Mark and classmates at a school for the blind.</p> <p>“I remember playing ‘beeper ball,’ “ said Robinson, 78, by phone. “The ball had the beeping sound so they could hear it, and I remember being blindfolded and experiencing the game with the students.</p> <p>“I grew up right across the street from the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock. I’ve always had affection for the blind and the deaf, and for what they go through. ”</p> <p>Mark and Peggy both became blind in a similarly heart-wrenching way — upon birth, each was placed in what Peggy called “an incubator,” and the overwhelming oxygen levels blinded the babies.</p> <p>And so, young Peggy, too, was enraptured by baseball broadcasts while growing up in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. The “golden voice of Harry Kalas” transported her to Philadelphia Phillies games. To this day, she’ll tell stories about random Phillies from long ago.</p> <p>“It’s an awesome game,” said the peppy Peggy, who spices each sentence with color and colloquialisms.“ I’m always yellin’ at them — he’ll tell ya! Hey, I’m into baseball.... I yell at the TV, I yell at the radio. I listen to a lot of radio because they describe it better. I’ll sit there at home and be yelling! That’s the passion of baseball! What kid and adult doesn’t like baseball?”</p> <p>Mark and Peggy first met at an adult camp for the blind.</p> <p>“I invited her down to my house in Baltimore, and it just kind of went from there,” Mark said one recent day at Coors Field. “I was 31.”</p> <p>“No!” Peggy chimed in. “He was 31 when we got married. I’m seven years older. I robbed the cradle! ...He had to then come to Pennsylvania. He had to come to my hometown to chase me.</p> <p>“Thirty years. Married 30 years.”</p> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-12 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <div class="photorow twinphoto"> <div class="photoleft"> <img src="./img/inning-one-pair-001.jpg" alt="Mark LoRusso on the stairs" /> <p class="caption"><span class="photog">Brent Lewis, The Denver Post</span> Mark LoRusso takes one of his favorite walks, leaving his Northglenn home for a Rockies game at Coors Field.</p> </div> <div class="photoright"> <img src="./img/inning-one-pair-002.jpg" alt="Peggy LoRusso walks with Dan Sauvageau" /> <p class="caption"><span class="photog">Brent Lewis, The Denver Post</span> Dan Sauvageau escorts Peggy LoRusso to a prime seat near home plate at Coors Field. “You get to be good friends, and you do things for people,” Sauvageau says. </p> </div> <div class="clear"></div> </div> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-6 large-push-3 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p>This is a love story. They’re devoted. Attraction isn’t just a visual sense. Both are blind, yet together, they’re so competent and confident.</p> <p>“I had to learn how to cook. I can’t starve, so I got to learn,” Mark said of his early adult years. “When people tell me I can’t do something, it just makes me want to do it even more.”</p> <p>Later, Peggy put it in the most Peggy way possible: “Tell me I can’t do it, man? Watch out, buddy! I’m a go-getter.”</p> <p>Together, they raised a daughter, now 30 and living back in Baltimore, and caring for Mark’s father.</p> <p>It was Mark who first moved to Colorado. He needed work. So he took vocation education courses at the National Federation of the Blind. He soon nabbed a job with Big Brothers Big Sisters, then later worked for Yellow Cab as a call taker. Peggy made the move to Denver a year later and worked in food service at the state capitol.</p> <p>“Tuna fish on toast was a favorite of Governor (Bill) Owens,” Peggy dished.</p> <h3 class="subheading">Baseball captures the senses</h3> <p>Mark remembers attending games in Baltimore when he was young.</p> <p>“You could smell the newness of the programs,” he explained.</p> <p>He remembers feeling the grass at Coors Field during a postgame fireworks show. “It was cropped real short and felt so uniform. It was perfect — what you would dream baseball fields being like.”</p> <p>The LoRussos savor the details that make baseball special.</p> <p>“I hear the pop of the bat,” Mark said during batting practice. “In the games, when I hear the ball hitting the bat, I can hear it on the radio and on the field — it brings everything together.”</p> </div> </div>  <div class="row solo" id="video"> <div class="large-12 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <h3 class="subheading internal">The Pop of the Bat</h3> <div class="large-12 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns centervideo"> <div class="vid-embed-wrap"> <div class="vid-height-space"></div> <div class="vid-embed" id="video1" onclick="playerCreator('video1', 'inning1');" style="background-image:url('./img/inning-one-video-thumbnail.jpg');">  <div class="vid-embed-play"> <div class="playicon"></div> <div class="playtext"></div> </div> </div> <div class="clear"></div> </div>  </div> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-6 large-push-3 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p>They’ll both listen to the KOA broadcast while at the games, as if they have Jerry Schemmel seated to their left and Jack Corrigan to their right. Sometimes, when there’s an extra-base hit — and the crowd is so loud that they can’t hear through their headphones — Dan will scream an impromptu play-by-play into their ears. Dan loves those moments.</p> <p>At the LoRussos’ home, their voice-activated computer and television allow them to experience any baseball game they please. Baseball is something to look forward to, the best part of the day, every day. When one game ends after another has already begun, Mark will quickly flip over to the second game, explaining that it’s “like you didn’t get your ticket on time.”</p> <p>Baseball announcers are their idols. Mark does a spot-on Vin Scully. These are the voices that get their imaginations running.</p> <p>“These are who they see baseball through,” Sauvageau said.</p> <p>At a Dodgers-Rockies game a couple years ago, Dan told Mark that he felt ill. He asked Mark to accompany him to the stadium medical station. They took an elevator up. Suddenly, they heard a voice. The Voice.</p> <p>“ ‘Where’s Mark?’ “ Dan remembers Dodgers announcer Vin Scully saying. Dan had set the whole thing up. “And Mark just lit up. It’s something he’ll never forget.”</p> <h3 class="subheading">How to see your life</h3> <p>I wonder if Sauvageau fully comprehends his generosity? Three hundred games. He drives 18 miles from his home in Firestone to Northglenn, where he picks up the LoRussos, and then 10 more to Coors Field And in the earlier years, when he lived in Thornton and the LoRussos lived in Aurora, his drive to their home took 45 minutes.</p> <p>Emily comes, too. She’s Dan’s 11-year-old daughter. Baseball is her middle-school crush. Emily has yet to miss an opening day in her lifetime, including 2004, when she was 7 months old. She has attended more than 550 Rockies games, a southpaw’s glove attached to her right arm like Linus’ blanket. When Emily was younger, she would sit on Peggy’s lap in their seats at Coors Field, Section 153 in left field, first row.</p> <p>Dan and Emily, Mark and Peggy.</p> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-9 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <div class="centerphoto"> <img src="./img/inning-one-lorussos-004.jpg" alt="Mark LoRusso is helped to stand" /> <p class="caption"><span class="photog">Brent Lewis, The Denver Post</span>Dan Sauvageau helps Mark LoRusso, next to wife Peggy, stand from his seat at Coors Field. “We have no idea what they think a baseball looks like, or a rainbow,” Sauvageau says. “It’s something we take for granted every day.”</p> </div> </div> </div>  <div class="row"> <div class="large-6 large-push-3 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p>“It’s just like a regular family outing,” Mark said. “That’s what it’s been, all these years.”</p> <p>Dan drives the gang to the games in his 2014 Kia Rawlings.</p> <p>See, Emily’s sixth-grade teacher recently had the students draw a futuristic dream car. Emily’s drawing looked like a baseball. So, Dan the dream-maker made the dream car. He wrapped his Kia with a replica of red stitching on a white exterior, the perfect chariot for his carpool.</p> <p>During batting practice on this May day, a Phillies player in the outfield tosses a ball to Emily. The wind whips. Bats thwack. That grass is just so green. Mark tells me he’s blessed. I don’t fully believe him.</p> <p>“I’m blessed in many regards. I really am,” he explains.</p> <p>So I asked him for his perspective on life, because he seems to try to make the most out of it.</p> <p>“Yes, sir,” he said, the lone time he called me sir. “I believe that whatever punches you’re thrown, you enjoy life, have fun and do the best you can — and try to help people, because you get more out of helping people than you do actually wanting something for yourself....</p> <p>“I’ve lived a full life. Now I’m trying to enjoy the heck out of it.”</p> <p>A full life. A beautiful, poignant description from a man who has never seen a thing, yet has seen it all.</p> </div> </div>   <div class="row"> <div class="large-9 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <div class="centerphoto"> <img src="./img/inning-one-lorussos-005.jpg" alt="Peggy LoRusso dances during the seventh inning stretch" /> <p class="caption"><span class="photog">Brent Lewis, The Denver Post</span>Peggy LoRusso is no shrinking Violet while wearing purple at Rockies games, which husband Mark knows very well. “Watch out, buddy! I’m a go-getter,” she says when someone tells her she can't do something.</p> </div> </div> </div>   <div class="row"> <div class="large-6 large-push-3 medium-8 medium-push-2 small-12 columns"> <p class="bylinebottom"><i>Benjamin Hochman: <a href="mailto:bhochman@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings">bhochman@denverpost.com</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/hochman" title="@hochman">@hochman</a></i></p> </div> </div>  </section>         <div class="row"> <div class="large-10 large-centered medium-12 medium-centered small-12 columns"> <div class="row adcubes"> <div class="large-6 medium-6 small-12 columns"> <div id="div_Cube5" class="adcube-wrap"> <script type='text/javascript'> googletag.defineSlot('/8013/denverpost.com/Lifestyle/Health/Mental-health', [300,250], 'div_Cube5').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSyncRendering(); googletag.enableServices(); googletag.display('div_Cube5'); </script> </div> </div> <div class="large-6 medium-6 hide-for-small columns"> <div id="div_Cube6" class="adcube-wrap"> <script type='text/javascript'> if ( window.innerWidth >= 660 ) { googletag.defineSlot('/8013/denverpost.com/Lifestyle/Health/Mental-health', [300,250], 'div_Cube6').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSyncRendering(); googletag.enableServices(); googletag.display('div_Cube6'); } </script> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div id="adwrapper"> <a class="boxclose" href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="hideAdManual();"></a> <center> <div id="adframewrapper"></div> </center> </div> <div id="next-page" class="closer"> <a href="inning2.html"> <div id="next-inning-teaser"> <div class="teaser" id="teaserphoto2"></div> <h2><span>Continue reading</span> Second Inning: Obie Sanni and the Jennings family</h2> </div></a> </div>    <div class="modal-nav"> <div id="credits" class="reveal-modal credits-modal infobox" data-reveal> <div class="row"> <div class="large-12 columns"> <h3 class="subheading">The Crew</h3> <div class="large-4 columns"> <p class="category">The Story</p> <p><a href="mailto:bhochman@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Benjamin Hochman</a> <em>Writer</em></p> <p><a href="mailto:smonserud@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Scott Monserud</a> <em>Editor</em></p> <p><a href="mailto:mjudson@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Mike Judson</a> <em>Copy Editor</em></p> </div> <div class="large-4 columns"> <p class="category">Photography & Video</p> <p><a href="mailto:blewis@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Brent Lewis</a> <em>Photographer, Videographer</em></p> <p><a href="mailto:ptraylor@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Patrick Traylor</a> <em>Photo Editor</em></p> <p><a href="mailto:dkrakel@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Dean Krakel</a> <em>Photo Editor</em></p> <p><a href="mailto:abrothers@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Amy Brothers</a> <em>Video Editor</em></p> </div> <div class="large-4 columns"> <p class="category">Design & Development</p> <p><a href="jneumann@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Jeff Neumann</a> <em>Lead Designer, Developer</em></p> <p><a href="dschneider@denverpost.com?subject=Nine Innings project">Daniel J. 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