Boy hurt by ball at Scrappers game hits milestones toward recovery

The Holko family has taken up the cause of fan safety at baseball games.

WARREN (AP) — A 4-year-old boy who was hit in the head by a foul ball at a minor league baseball game in September spoke his first words since the accident this week, a major breakthrough in his recovery from an injury that nearly killed him.

Luke Holko, whose fractured skull and brain injury spurred fans to donate $24,000 at ballparks to help the family with medical bills, told his mother he wanted “more” crackers during snack time Tuesday night, his father said.

The boy can also say “no.”

Verbal communication is a sign that Luke’s brain is making new nerve connections to overcome tissue that was destroyed by the ball’s impact, said Dr. Micah Baird, a physical medicine specialist overseeing the boy’s rehabilitation at Akron Children’s Hospital.

Though his long-term prognosis remains uncertain, Luke, whose injury initially left him in a coma and unable to move, has reached a series of important milestones this month, Baird said.

Luke can crawl, sit and roll on his own, and he’s able to use a walker without much assistance.

“Little by little, our Luke is coming back,” said his father, Chad Holko.

Luke and his parents had front-row seats near first base for a Sept. 2 doubleheader at the home of the Mahoning Valley Scrappers, a short-season Class A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.

The boy was hit in the back of the head as he sat in his father’s lap and immediately fell limp. A horrified crowd watched his father run up the stands to meet paramedics stationed at the ballpark. The boy vomited, aspirated into his lungs and nearly died on his way to a hospital.

The injury destroyed tissue in Luke’s cerebellum and brain stem, but the front of the brain, which controls thinking, decision making and personality, was not injured, Baird said.

Luke’s measured progress is a comfort to Ben Carlson, who hit the foul ball. Carlson, a first baseman out of Missouri State who was drafted by the Indians in the sixth round of the June draft, said he’s using Luke’s recovery as motivation in his offseason workouts at home in Topeka, Kan.

“I’m working hard for him because I know he’s working hard to get back to where he was,” said Carlson, who cried with the Holko family during hospital visits in the weeks after the accident. He stays in touch with phone calls to the family and reads a daily blog on Luke’s recovery posted by the boy’s mother, Nicole.

Nicole Holko, who recently left a job as a medical assistant, drives Luke 40 miles from their home in Greene Township in Trumbull County to Akron, where for five days each week, he gets six hours of physical, occupational and speech therapy.

The family doesn’t blame Carlson for the accident.

But the family is interested in improving safety at baseball games and would like to see netting extended from home plate to foul territory, Chad Holko said.

Scrappers general manager Dave Smith said the organization has had discussions about the issue. The debate at all professional levels is whether extended netting would interfere too much with fans’ view, he said.

The back of every baseball ticket has a warning about the risks and dangers of foul balls. Teams have been unwilling to keep data on fan injuries to further protect themselves against liability, said Robert Gorman, a librarian and baseball historian at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.

“It’s what I call the ’ignorance is bliss’ defense: If you don’t know, then it becomes harder to hold you legally accountable,” said Gorman, who co-wrote the 2008 book “Death at the Ballpark.” Using old newspaper clippings and Internet searches, Gorman documented 52 fan deaths from foul balls from 1867 to 2007 — 49 at amateur games and one each in the major leagues, minor leagues and Negro leagues.

Gorman favors extended netting at ballparks. If nothing else, teams should refuse to sell field-level seats to families with children under a certain age, say 10, he said.

Chad Holko wants to take Luke to a game next season, though the family won’t sit so close to the field again, he said.

The Scrappers are also eager to welcome Luke back, Smith said. The team, along with others in the New York-Penn League that made the playoffs last season, collected the $24,000 in fan donations.

Local banks, restaurants, firefighters and other community groups have chipped in, too.

“I don’t know how we’ll repay everyone,” said Chad Holko, 30, a maintenance worker at a pipe and tubing mill. “I know they don’t expect us to, but we just really appreciate everything.”

Carlson, who hit .228 with three home runs and 27 RBIs last season, could be assigned in 2010 to the Lake County Captains, the Indians’ Class A affiliate in Eastlake, Ohio, just 40 miles from Akron Children’s Hospital.

If it works out that way, Carlson said he’ll visit Luke as much as possible.

“I know Luke has a long way to go, but he’s a fighter, and I hope he gets a chance to play baseball some day, and if he does, I want to be there to play catch,” he said.