WEST ORANGE, N.J. (AP) — Ryan Lasko threads his left middle finger through a loop on his left sneaker. His face reddens as he slowly pulls the leg across his body to the opposite side of a training table. He is spent.
Those legs that once powered Lasko to chase falling line drives as a top baseball prospect for the Athletics now have to be lifted by hand. He uses all the energy he can muster, mastering skills that will allow him to move from bed to wheelchair
and back again.
“That’s a day in the life right there,” the 24-year-old said.
Months ago, Lasko was a promising outfielder in Double-A ball, on a path he hoped would make him a major leaguer.
Everything changed on June 30, on a play he’d made hundreds of times. Lasko, playing center field for the A’s Midland team in Frisco, Texas, sprinted toward the ball as right fielder Devin Taylor did the same. Their heads crashed when both dove trying to make the catch.
Lasko didn't get up. His terrified parents, Patti and James, and girlfriend, Alli Graff, were in the stands watching.
Lasko had fractured the C6 and C7 vertebrae in his neck, paralyzing him. He needed emergency surgery for spinal decompression and stabilization.
The injury left Lasko a tetraplegic, meaning he lost motor or sensory function in all four limbs and his torso. The 5-foot-11, 190-pound athlete known for going all-out spent more than two weeks in the hospital before being flown home to New Jersey on a stretcher, his mom and Graff by his side.
“I think that’s the part that made it worse for me, because they saw it in person,” Lasko told The Associated Press in his first interview since the accident. “Because I think everyone’s just used to me getting up.”
For two months at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, Lasko performed hundreds of repetitions in order to accomplish functional tasks on his own.
“I kind of explained it a lot as like a death, that’s what it feels like to me,” he said. “So I feel like I’ve gone through the whole grieving process."
Any feeling he gets in his legs or feet, Lasko calls “big wins.” When he arrived at Kessler on July 16 and mentioned “small wins,” staff members challenged him to consider them major victories.
While encouraging, those twinges aren’t necessarily signs he'll fully recover.
Dr. Jeremiah Nieves has monitored Lasko each step of the way and believes he's made large strides in a short period because of his sports background.
“This is just the early phase. I have a ton of optimism for him but that has to be tempered with a little realism,” Nieves said.
Being an elite athlete "started him off in a different place compared to most folks. ... By no means are things easy for him but you see that elite athlete (in him) every day.”
Lasko’s box of baseball equipment from Texas recently arrived at his parents’ home, and when his mother opened it, she began to cry. She moved it to the basement, to be sorted another day.
“It’s a loss, absolutely. I feel the loss, my husband feels the loss, uncertainty for his future,” Patti Lasko said of her son's dream since he was 8 years old.
Then she added: “He’s a very determined young man, always has been, he has never accepted I can’t do it or you’re not good enough, he’s always proved everybody wrong.
“Every single time.”
The A’s are grateful for the support Lasko received, from the night of the injury thanks to prompt assistance from the Texas Rangers’ medical personnel, to staff throughout the organization’s farm system. Medical costs surrounding the work-related injury will be covered under Major League Baseball’s insurance program for the rest of Lasko's life.
Lasko’s girlfriend slept on a mattress next to his bed every night at Kessler.
“I told her to leave a bunch and she won’t leave,” Lasko said. “So to have that, I remind her a lot I couldn’t have made the progress without her.”
They consider this challenging time their “new normal.”
“I would do absolutely anything,” said Graff, 23.
Graff undertook Kessler’s training for care partners, to assist in Lasko’s daily life and help him navigate regaining his independence.
That, he says, is the No. 1 goal — to become as independent as possible.
Lasko plans to return to Rutgers in the spring to finish his criminal justice degree with a minor in psychology.
He always knew baseball wouldn’t last forever, but didn’t anticipate it being taken from him this way.
“It’s difficult to see it fade away, but I’m still holding onto it, that maybe one day I can get back to that.”
Later, though, he added: “I can do more with my life now.”
Lasko’s daily therapy sessions at Kessler ran about three hours, approximately the same as a typical ball game.
“It’s just how I’m wired, it doesn’t make sense for me to not go through with something,” he said.
Lasko has dealt with bad hours and bad days.
He would slip into what he calls a “sorrow state,” dealing with stretches of impatience — “I can’t control what my body wants to do” — only to have Graff or the Kessler staff come to the rescue.
“I’ve kind of experienced through this the lowest point of my life and somehow come out of that and not let myself kind of fade into just giving up ... and being OK with how I am, because I’m not,” he said.
“I’m fully confident that I’m going to walk again. I’m fully confident that I’m going to be able to do a lot of things in life that I was able to do," he said, adding he has "to stack up the small moments ... that’ll hopefully eventually lead to what I in the end want.”
If Lasko can inspire someone — “even if it’s just one person” — dealing with a life challenge through his perseverance, he'll count that as another big win.
On the days he struggled to find any motivation and just wanted to stay in bed, it often came down to tough love.
Many of those who were there for him offered a “clap out” as Lasko left Kessler in a wheelchair on Sept. 16 — two months after he had arrived.
“What in the world?” he said. “I’m getting out of here as fast as I can.”
From now on, Lasko would be coming to Kessler a few days a week as an outpatient.
The baseball player who endeared himself to everybody was headed home, another milestone.
“Every win,” he says, “is a big win.”
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