Steven's story
A year after he was stuck above the heart by a batted ball, Steven Domalewski is unable to move or speak. His father is trying to insure another kid doesn't suffer the same fate
By Kevin Armstrong, SI.com
It was half past six o'clock on a Tuesday evening last June 6, and despite the overcast skies, the fluorescent lights had not yet flickered to life above the Police Athletic League field in Wayne, N.J.
Forty-five minutes earlier, the game's first pitch had been thrown by Kevin Olsen, an athletic 11-year-old right hander. After pitching two innings, which is the most the league allows for its young arms, he had been moved to second base. Enter Steven Domalewski, a 12-year-old righty who was deemed by his coach to be one of the league's best kept secrets just a week earlier. After hurling a scoreless third inning, he was negotiating a tough stretch in the fourth, his final frame.
Battling the Gensinger Motors team, Domalewski and his Tomascovic Challengers teammates were playing for postseason positioning. Still, Domalewski stalked the infield area with an unspoken assuredness. Domalewski, all 5-foot-2, 90 pounds of him, was trying to wriggle his way out of a jam. A leadoff triple had been followed by a shortstop's error, leaving runners on second and third. With a 3-2 count on the next batter, Steven began his windup.
"That was the pitch where he would have laid it all out," says Domalewski's father, Joe, who watched from the home team's fenced-in dugout along the first baseline. "He'll either burn one in as fast as he can or he'll throw like a circle changeup."
What pitch Steven threw has never been discussed. Within seconds of Steven's pitch speeding toward home plate from 45 feet away, the ball exploded back at him after connecting solidly with an aluminum bat. Just enough time passed to allow an initial reaction, but Domalewski couldn't escape the ball's path. Striking him square in the chest above his heart, the ball bounced off Steven. He clenched his chest, hopped in pain and crumbled to the grass. Gasping for breath while his face turned blue, his complexion went pallid and not a word escaped from his lips.
"Usually you let a play finish, but this time we stopped it immediately," says Joe Domalewski. "I think he was putting it in the strike zone, and the kid just came around fast on the ball."
While Steven suffered convulsions, a voice from the crowd shouted for someone to call 911. Another adult departed to get an oxygen mask in the PAL's office building next to the field. Lying on the ground, Steven gasped for breath, but then he turned bluer and suffered another convulsion, groaning all the while. By this time, Charlie Rigoglioso, a dentist moonlighting as the third base coach for the opposing team, attended to him. From the adjacent field over the right-field fence rushed Howard Levine, a parent who had been playing with his 9-year-old daughter. Trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Levine conducted chest compulsions as Rigoglioso performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
"It was just an awful scene," says Rigoglioso, who had two sons on the opposing team. "You never expect a scene like that on a Little League field. You usually see sprains and twists of an ankle. This was near death."
Players from both teams were directed to their dugouts, but when the severity became clearer, parents and coaches took them inside the neighboring building. Steven remained on the field with an oxygen mask over his mouth. No matter, his heart was not beating and oxygen had stopped going to his brain. Wayne policemen arrived on the scene, then Wayne medical personnel and Steven was loaded into an ambulance. His father was sequestered to the front of the ambulance, having contacted his wife, Nancy, a clerical assistant at a doctor's office who was just getting off work. Once inside St. Joseph's Medical Center in nearby Paterson, Steven was put on a ventilator and given a 15 percent chance of survival.
"What took 25 minutes seemed like 25 hours," says Nancy.
His parents were constantly by his bedside as he lay in a coma caused by commotio cordis, a rare and often fatal disruption of the heart's electrical system triggered by a sharp impact to the chest at a precise moment between heartbeats. They experienced nights without sleep and days without knowing the fate of their son.
"It wasn't until Friday that we were given word he would live," Joe Domalewski says. "Everything changed with that at bat."
The road to recovery is laced with green and white ribbons on Wilson Avenue in Wayne. Tethered to mailboxes and front lawn trees in the color scheme of Steven's former team, the weather-worn displays of support remain tied to the 13-year-old's tenuous improvement. "We're putting together thank yous right now. It's time for them to come down I think," says Nancy Domalewski. "Even ours has blown away."
In the family's driveway sits a silver Dodge Grand Caravan with a handicapped sticker on the passenger side door and a gutted interior to accommodate Steven's wheelchair. In front of the family's two-story house, the walkway leads to the front door like any other suburban path, but at the steps before the doormat, there is a metal ramp for Steven's wheelchair.
"We had to buy the minivan because it was just too much for my wife to try maneuvering him in and out of our Mazda," says Joe. "The whole dynamic of the house changed."
Inside the house, down a staircase that is lined with an electrical chair lift as a railing, sits Steven on the basement couch. He stares off to the right, and he remains quiet, occasionally releasing a droning moan. "He's been smiling and laughing appropriately," says his father. "He adds light to this situation. He is progressing, just not at the pace that we'd like to see."
Five days short of a year later, progress is slow and measured in blinks. Steven has been back in his family's house for three months after spending eight and a half months between St. Joseph's and Children's Specialized Hospital in Mountainside, N.J. His communication skills have been depleted to the point where a recent utterance of "dada" is seen as improvement. His parents and doctors do not know what he sees, if anything at all. The lifting of his left hand to his lips elicits the continued hope that more movement will follow.
"It kills you to see an active kid like this," says Joe.
On the wall in Steven's first-floor bedroom, which was his parents' room before the accident, hangs a calendar with a variety of therapy appointments. Occupational, physical, massage and speech therapists have their allotted times and dates. Medications are also spread out. Two teachers from his public school alternate visits to the house each weekday at 3:30 p.m. On Saturdays, Steven is transported to Manhattan for weekly analysis from the International Brain Research Center's doctors. "Steven has a large receptive vocabulary. He can double blink and he'll give signals back to us for yes and no," says Dr. Philip A. DeFina, the chief scientific officer who assesses Steven's cognitive and motor function. "The big challenge is to develop meaningful speech. There was little hope when we began."
A year into his work, DeFina says, "You cannot just reboot him. Steven improves, plateaus, regresses, and the path to recovery is not just one straight path. Time is needed for the brain to adjust."
For all the cutting edge and new age technology, though, the doctors do not have a crystal ball. No timetable is set on recovery.
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Increasingly entrenched in a purgatory of pain, Joe Domalewski and his Polish Catholic family have prayed to the heavens while enduring hell. On a tabletop in Steven's room stands a miniature statue of Padre Pio, a Roman Catholic saint associated with Jesus Christ's stigmata and supernatural healing. But while their faith and strength have been a buoy, it is the metal bat industry that has felt their wrath. To listen to the father tell it, Steven would be outside climbing trees, collecting grass stains on his pants and leaving dirt trails today if the batter last June had been swinging a wood bat rather than an aluminum one. He does not blame the batter, a boy Steven used to play with in the family's spacious yard.
Domalewski, a 47-year-old graphic arts and editorial design teacher at Kearny (N.J.) High, says he can recognize the difference in a batted ball's speed from a wood bat and an aluminum one. "To me, hands down, it's a safety issue. People ask me if I think this would have happened if it was wood, the answer is definitely no," he says. "Steve needed a blink of an eye more time to react."
Admittedly uninformed on the metal-versus-wood bat debate prior to Steven's accident, Domalewski's eyes were opened by a New York Times column last summer that linked Steven's situation with that of Brandon Patch. An 18-year-old right-handed pitcher from Miles City, Mont., who died on July 26, 2003, after being hit in the chest by a ball batted from an aluminum bat, Patch was said to not have a chance to react to the batted ball in an American Legion game.
"I visited the Patch's Web site, and that was my first education into metal bats," says Domalewski. "I didn't tie it to the aluminum bats for a while because I was not thinking outside of Steven."
From advertisements and patents to case studies and internal memos, Domalewski researched the industry. He read a 2002 Brown University study, which states that aluminum bats outperform wooden bats. Still, metal bat supporters say no conclusive study says metal is more dangerous than wood.
To the naked eye, Domalewski says, there is no doubt, and the advertisements show it as well. In last December's issue of Men's Health, under a picture of three Easton Stealth Comp CNT baseball and softball bats, the following passage appeared: "Witness the world's first carbon nanotube all-composite bat, fancy NASA-speak for fully capable of beaning the third baseman. The carbon-composite material is 16 times stronger than steel, aligned so as to widen the sweet spot across the entire barrel. The handle flexes slightly, catapulting the ball on contact. Somehow it's completely legal."
Sitting at his kitchen table, Domalewski gets emotional when talking about his first reaction to the advertisement. "Now, you can't tell me that as a father, with my son in the condition that he is in now, that you don't get sick reading something like that," he says. "The metal bat people will tell you it's just advertisements, but the language of increasing performance is another word for speed and power."
That is why he voluntarily testified in front of both New York City and New Jersey lawmakers as a proponent in the movement to ban metal bats.
"Joe is a hero for what he has done in assisting our efforts," says New York City Councilman James Oddo, who sponsored the bill to prohibit New York City high school teams from using aluminum bats starting next season. "He goes home to a kid who is hanging on -- not after playing on a railroad tracks or messing with a chemical. He pitched to a metal bat."
Domalewski has heard arguments on both sides and he believes the bat companies' relations with youth organizations like Little League International and the American Legion are interconnected, if not by money, by their testimonies in favor of maintaining the status quo. "I see Steve Keener from the Little League showing up at the New York meetings, which are for high schools. Why would he be there? Why are they so interested?" asks Domalewski.
In response, Keener says, "I do not want to sound callous about this issue, and my heart goes out to the family, but the science just does not show that there are numbers that wood is safer. We have always left the option of wood open to our players, but we tell them that if they use wood because they think it is safer then it is just not proven. We believe that if kids were mandated to use wood, there would be a decline in participation. Our sole reason for attending these meetings and hearings is to make sure that kids are not turned off from the game."
"The bat people and the guys like Keener say the injuries do not add up, but what is Steven then? The cost of doing business?" asks Domalewski. "Wasn't Brandon Patch enough?"
In response to the charges of being financially related to the bat companies, Keener says that Little League International, which has an $18 million operating budget, does not make decisions regarding safety by weighing financial or business concerns.
"I felt relieved that somebody is looking out for these kids when the congressmen got involved," says Domalewski. "It certainly was not going to come from the manufacturers. Up to this point, you knew how the ball came off the bat, but you didn't think they were making them to put your kids at jeopardy."
Deborah Patch, the mother of Brandon, champions the same cause, and she, too, wonders why the American Legion always made appearances in support of the bat companies rather than the injured. "You cannot feel the pain that we have dealt with until you are in the emergency room," Patch says. "Is it going to take a child getting killed by a line drive on national television with the Little League World Series in Williamsport?"
In the last week, Pennsylvania lawmakers announced that they will consider aluminum bat bans. The North Dakota High School Activities Association board of directors voted two years ago to make the change from metal to wood, and New Jersey's state assembly is exploring options as well. On May 10, the governing body for high school sports in Massachusetts rejected a proposal to ban non-wood and composite bats in high school baseball for the third straight year. On March 30 in Massachusetts, Matt Cook, a freshman pitching batting practice for Hamilton-Wenham Regional High, was hit by a line drive that fractured his skull, causing substantial bleeding and swelling in his brain. He is expected to make a full recovery but only after many months of speech, physical and occupational therapy.
"People inherently know that the balls are coming off the aluminum bats faster," Domalewski says. "When I testified it reminded me of the tobacco industry saying that the cigarettes aren't addictive. To say that the ball does not come off metal faster is insane."
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Eleven months and one day after Steven was hit by the batted ball, two games are being played on the Wayne PAL fields. It's a bright May day in which the sun's rays seemingly extend invitations to youthful athletes to go shag fly balls and run the bases, but the 13-year-old boy with the closely cropped buzz cut cannot reach out to answer ol' Sol's call. Whether or not he knows it, Steven has become the face of an issue that is coming to a head on amateur baseball fields across the nation.
"That family is so strong to have gone through what they have dealt with," says Linda Jones, whose son, Sean, played on Steven's team last year. "The next day we went out and bought a heart protector for my son because he is a pitcher. Kids were traumatized by that scene. I hope the powers that be will wake up. Wood won't be a hindrance."
Within a few days, the supply of heart protectors, which provide a slip-on padding like that of a football shoulder pad, had sold out at the local Homefield Advantage athletic equipment shop. "When are people going to realize that kids just don't have the same motor reaction skill as pro athletes?" asks Jones.
Out from the stands and over the fence is the mound where Steven was last seen on a baseball field. There are no makeshift memorials on the field. No signs mark the spot where Steven crumbled. No stopwatch timed it. No radar gun clocked the batted ball's velocity. The PAL, which did not return an email or phone calls from SI.com, has moved the pitchers mound back five feet and the bases are now 10 feet deeper. "Some of the towns that are not making the move to wood are throwing aspirins at the game," Domalewski says. "The metal bats need to be taken out of the game."
Through it all, there have been reminders that others are watching and caring. Beefsteak dinners and fundraisers have been organized, and enough money has been raised that Steven's mother is able to stay home by his side. An idea of one of the Domalewski's nieces was to make green and white bracelets like the Lance Armstrong-popularized LiveStrong symbols. More than 3,000 have been sold. On the family's kitchen fridge hangs a photo of the New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez wearing the bracelet as he tags out Magglio Ordonez in Game 1 of last fall's division series against the Detroit Tigers.
"Anyone who has stepped on a diamond understands there are risks, but you just hope that Steven can bounce back from this," says Rodriguez.
"There's one thing that went wrong with the ball, but there are so many things that went right. This town, support from every place, a couple of fundraisers and A-Rod," says Domalewski, who recently earned CPR certification.
Three miles away from the field, nestled in his house on a suburban side street, while the games play on, Steven lies on the couch. A red belt in the Korean martial art of Hwa Rang Do and a lover of the outdoors, Steven remains immobile. "Every day is painful, some are just less so," says his father. "The school buses get me when they drive by. There are reminders that he should be outside everywhere."
Up in his room are a Yankees bear and a Wheaties box with A-Rod on the front.
"A-Rod offered us tickets whenever we wanted, but I told him now just isn't the time," Domalewski says. "What we need is to hear Steven respond. I want to say, 'Hey, Steve, Alex Rodriguez wants you as a guest'. And then I want him to say, 'Dad, let's go'."
