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.

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.

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.

“Baseball,” Mark said, “I just can’t seem to get enough of it.”

Mark and Peggy LoRusso, married 30 years, sit in the front row and can’t see a thing. And there’s no other place they’d rather be.

“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.”

“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.”

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.