In Miracle League, runs, hits, smiles are plentiful

It was a couple of days before Thanksgiving when a young woman with red hair named Shanna Sabet arranged for me to speak with Shane Victorino, before he signed with the Red Sox, about his charity work in Las Vegas.

Like most publicity people, she was personable and accommodating; unlike a lot of publicity people, she seemed sincere about it.

When I told her I liked writing about people who are charitable with their money and/or time, especially baseball people who are that way, she asked if I was familiar with the Miracle League for special needs children and adults. I said that I was, that I had come out when the local Miracle League ballpark at Engelstad Family Park was built a couple of years ago.

I told her judging from the smiles that day it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the Miracle League players or the able-bodied “buddies” who help push the special needs kids around the bases or swing the oversized plastic bats, if required; she asked if I would consider being a Miracle League buddy sometime.

I said “sure” and she said “great” and maybe I could come out on Opening Day then, in spring?

“You can be the buddy for my daughter, Sasha,” she said.

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Little Sasha Sabet with the pigtails and the black-rimmed glasses that sometimes slip down her nose was a healthy baby girl until she went in for her year-old checkup. It was then she was misdiagnosed with hydrocephalus — water on the brain — and then the doctors totally botched the surgery, and I do mean totally botched it.

“They put a hole in her brain with the endoscope,” Shana Sabet said.

Then the seizures began.

They were terrible seizures, and the only way to cure them was more surgery, experimental surgery.

Dr. Gary Mathern at UCLA Medical Center in 2010 performed a delicate hemispherectomy on Sasha Sabet. He removed the right side of her brain; that explains why the left side of Sasha’s body doesn’t work very well, and why Sasha has to catch and throw a baseball with the same hand, sort of Jim Abbott-style.

But the seizures have ceased. Shanna Sabet has her daughter back. And though Sasha has learning disabilities, often it’s difficult to tell.

Unlike most kids her age, she didn’t much care for soccer, however — “sometimes she would just go off and sit under a shade tree,” her mom said. But when Shanna took Sasha out to a ballgame, to a Miracle League ballgame, Sasha fit right in.

When she hit the ball the first time and started running toward first base, her mom was overcome with emotion and began to cry.

“We come out to be normal, to be typical,” Shanna Sabet said. “The best thing about the Miracle League is it’s so inclusive. The kids can just come out here and be kids, and that is so cool.”

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So when 9-year-old Sasha Sabet of the Miracle League Yankees lined one into right field Saturday afternoon and limped/ran to first base, I limped/trotted behind her. (Too much yard work on Friday.)

She knew exactly where she was going. But the kid playing right field for the Miracle League Twins appeared to have a cannon for an arm, so I wanted to advise Sasha that trying to stretch her hit into a double maybe wasn’t such a good idea.

“Did you run fast?” she said, looking up at me with big eyes from under her batting helmet.

“Not as fast as you,” I said.

She held out her right hand, her good hand.

“Maybe you should hold my hand,” she said.

I said too bad she wasn’t around when Herb Washington got picked off first base in the World Series, because Charlie Finley’s designated runner could have used somebody to hold his hand.

The Herb Washington reference went over little Sasha Sabet’s head, perhaps because it happened in 1974, 30 years before she was born. But she laughed anyway, and then so did I.

And when the next Miracle League kid to come to bat hit a screamer down the third-base line into the left-field corner, we circled the bases together, holding hands, and we did not stop running until we had made it all the way home.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.