A season to remember
When I think of Michael Ego, I rewind to a moment of him leaving a New York Mets game at Citi Field in 2017 with seniors from his baseball reminiscence program at River House Adult Day Center in Greenwich.
“The satisfaction is seeing people with this terrible disease enjoying themselves and laughing,” he said. “Even if it’s for a short period of time.”
It was Michael’s expression that revealed his resolve to help more people suffering from dementia by tapping baseball memories as therapy. He might as well have been Sandy Koufax winding up to hurl fire, or Jackie Robinson digging in cleats to steal home.
He wanted to share his cherished perspective, like Vin Scully calling play-by-play for anyone listening to a Los Angeles Dodgers game on the radio.
Michael, former director of the University of Connecticut’s Stamford campus, believed baseball could be a balm for sufferers of memory loss. He was a Dodgers guy who wanted programs like his to become a national pastime.
He occasionally expressed mild frustration that Major League Baseball had not embraced the mission. Michael’s death Jan. 27, 2019, at age 68, though, did not end that cause in Connecticut, or on his other favorite coast.
River House Executive Director Donna Spellman pledged Friday that meetings in the Cos Cob offices “will forever be known as the Michael Ego Baseball Reminiscence Program,” and continue to launch every other Wednesday with singalongs of the national anthem and “God Bless America,” and pause for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventhinning stretch.
Last week’s salute to the belated Opening Day of this pandemic-truncated season even featured hot dogs for those whose participation wasn’t limited to Zoom. Spellman experimented with other sports during the off-season, but it was like playing catch with hockey pucks.
“That was a lesson learned. Nothing shares the excitement of baseball as a culture in and of itself,” she said.
Michael’s sister, Kimi, admits she was never the baseball fanatic he was (though she accurately refers to the Houston Astros as “The Cheaters”). Nevertheless, she has come in from the bullpen.
Kimi is helping out with a similar baseball therapy program started by the Los Angeles chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). One of her favorite parts of the program is when participants are asked to recall favorite diamond memories, so she shares some of her own. At their core are childhood Sundays at Dodger Stadium with her family. Their father, a California native who was incarcerated in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, loved to keep score and take photos. Years later, he was chosen to be a “fantasy photographer” and wound up documenting Dennis Martinez’s July 28, 1991 perfect game, just the 13th in baseball history.
Then there was the time Michael convinced his sisters to get him a ticket to the first game of the 2017 World Series at Dodger Stadium. After the Dodgers won (the game, though they lost the series to “the Cheaters”) Michael had another request for his sisters.
“Take me to the airport now. I gotta get back to Connecticut.”
I saw Michael the following evening back with his students at University of Connecticut in Stamford, where he hosted a talk by Sports Illustrated writer and author S.L. Price, who grew up in Stamford. Michael wore the expression of a 10-year-old who’d just gotten away with skipping school for a day game.
Kimi is already thinking outside the chalk box, envisioning programs bringing together Little Leaguers and retired players.
The bench is getting deeper. Jon Leonoudakis, who started the L.A. program with input from Michael and others, drafted former Dodger star Ron Cey for Friday’s BasebALZ session.
In the first half of the 1970s, Leonoudakis spent his teen years in the family business selling parking spaces at Candlestick Park in San Francisco (“It was a dump, but it was dump”). With an IMDB resume packed with documentaries about baseball (and one on the fabled studio musicians “The Wrecking Crew”), Leonoudakis has some of the mojo of legendary baseball owners such as Bill Veeck (who once sent 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate) and Charlie Finley (who failed in his bid to use orange baseballs, but helped usher in the designated hitter).
Leonoudakis expanded baseball reminiscence programs to engage military veterans, and got participants moving. Seniors started playing catch with plastic balls, vets in wheelchairs took swings (“They started trash-talking each other, it was great”), and a pair of 95-year-olds picked up bats for the first time in three-quarters of a century.
Recognizing how baseball engages the senses, he hands the seniors baseballs so they can feel those “108 magical stitches.”
“They’re supposed to give them back when they’re done.” He laughs generously, blowing the punchline, “but some hold onto them.”
He’s encouraged by interest from cities such as Chicago and Cleveland, and embraces Zoom for offering solace to seniors with limited mobility. For all his films and projects with Disney, he says, “This is the greatest job I’ve ever had. I can sit in a room with people and we all talk about baseball, we talk about our lives. We connect.”
I never asked Michael to name his favorite player, so I threw the question 3,000 miles to Kimi. He never told her either, but the former teacher made an educated guess. She recalled him once proudly wearing a No. 42 jersey and sharing a quote that greatly impacted him when he made a presentation at the Sport, Mental Health and Dementia Conference in Scotland.
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
Like Jackie Robinson, Michael Ego continues to have impact.