A year after he was struck 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

	Steven Domalewki stood on this mound in Wayne, N.J., just 45 feet from the plate when he was struck by a batted ball and nearly died. Photo by Kevin Armstrong

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. 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. The young pitcher, 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 the ball speeding toward home plate from 45 feet away, it exploded back toward the mound 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 adjacent building. Steven remained on the field with an oxygen mask over his mouth. But his heart was not beating and oxygen had stopped going to his brain. Wayne police 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."