A Giant Miracle Is Happening in San Francisco : Dravecky Survives Cancer, Plans to Pitch This Season

The word miracle rarely pops up among the tobacco stains and caked dirt that go with major league baseball. The season is too long, the ball too small, the players too human.

All of which makes special what is happening here, where the otherwise sane men of the San Francisco Giants are spreading the word as if it were pine tar.

“That the man is even in uniform, that’s a miracle,” pitcher Mike Krukow says. “I get chills just talking about it.”

Says pitcher Craig Lefferts: “Anybody will tell you, there’s no way that man should be doing what he’s doing. But he’s doing it. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s a miracle.”

In the Giants’ clubhouse at Candlestick Park, the man they are discussing has the corner locker. He is pitcher Dave Dravecky. He has cancer. Or had cancer. Part of this nightmare is that he’s not sure.

“How should I say it?” Dravecky, 34, asked idly. “I know I’ve just had cancer. And if it comes back, I guess I’ll have cancer. But what about now?

“I just know there has been an alien in my body, and it might come back, and it might not. I guess how I say that is really not important.”

What is important, Dravecky has shown without saying, is that he is here, six months after having had a “low-grade malignant” tumor removed from the upper part of his left pitching arm. Six months after that operation also took 50% of his deltoid muscle, which helps raise the arm and is one of the chief muscles used in pitching.

He is in uniform six months after his surgeon, George Muschler of the Cleveland (Ohio) Clinic, told him he had “zero percent” chance of ever taking the mound again.

Dravecky hopes to pitch again by midseason.

Said Muschler: “Our biggest hope, to be honest, was that he would one day be able to play ball in the back yard with his kids.”

Muschler said he was able to extract all of the tumor, that Dravecky is in no danger. But Muschler also warns that there is a “50% chance” of such tumors returning.

Yet Dravecky, every day, is stretching No. 43 across a slightly overweight body and working every imaginable part of that body to compensate for what it no longer has. And yes, he has started throwing. Every other day, for 10 minutes that can seem like 10 hours, he throws from a mound.

Says Lefferts: “The physical therapist told me that all fitness tests show he’s got no arm strength, that he should not be able to throw the way he’s throwing.”

“Imagine that,” Krukow marvels. “The man is pitching with half an arm.”

His ball doesn’t have much velocity, and may never have much velocity. Dravecky says his arm feels naked, and will probably always feel naked.

“Half of my deltoid is gone, and it’s not coming back,” Dravecky said. “There can be no transplants, and it will not grow back. It’s gone, and that’s it. I’m at 50% arm strength, period.”

Which may lead you to believe that the odds against his ever pitching in a big league game again are considerable. Yet, the way Dravecky figures it, how can you figure odds on something you’ve already beaten?

So he is celebrating his survival of the surgery by trying to prove that one reason he survived was to pitch again. His daily 10-hour routine that takes him to therapist, to clubhouse trainers’ room, to field to home, as fruitless as it may seem, is his own victory tour.

“It’s a miracle of God that I’m able to be here,” Dravecky says. “So I owe God 120% of my effort to come back on the field. That’s the bottom line.”

Dravecky deals with his cancer the way he deals with its scar, which covers several inches of his upper arm. Ask to see it, and he pulls up his left sleeve and smiles.

Says Krukow: “First time I saw the scar, he pulls up the sleeve and starts smiling and talking about how he’s going to pitch again. I have to turn my head. I can’t bear to look at it, and he’s talking about pitching again.”

This attitude mirrors his career which, although lacking overly impressive statistics--he has a 62-57 record and a 3.13 earned-run average--is better known for one specific talent. Dravecky is a big-game pitcher.

Witness the 1984 playoffs and World Series with the San Diego Padres, during which he threw 10 2/3 scoreless innings. Then, after he was acquired by San Francisco in a mid-season 1987 trade, specifically to help them to the division championship, he did just that. He went 6-2 with a 2.68 ERA after the seven-player deal July 4.

In the 1987 playoffs against the Eastern champion St. Louis Cardinals, he tied a league championship series record in Game 2 for fewest hits allowed, pitching a two-hit, 5-0 shutout at Busch Stadium.

A year later he was thinking about that game while watching Orel Hershiser celebrate the Dodgers’ World Series championship on television. He was just a couple of weeks out of surgery. His left arm throbbed and, oddly enough, his right leg was in pain because of a second emergency operation that was required to restore blood flow there after Dravecky lay on the leg during nine hours of his first surgery.

“But if I sat just right, I could get comfortable, and that’s how I was able to watch Orel,” Dravecky says. “I knew he was out there celebrating and thanking God and, for a moment, I thought, you know, I’m never going to be able to do that again.”

If you’re looking for a vulnerable moment in this story, that’s it. That as weepy as Dravecky will get.

Although the cancer was a surprise, the lump wasn’t. Dravecky discovered it in September of 1987. In the ensuing year, several doctors glanced at it, but it was causing no pain and no treatment was required. Then, late last summer, while rehabilitating a separate shoulder injury, he realized the tumor had grown.

“It was like a little golf ball,” Dravecky says. “You could see it plain as day.”

After the operation, Dravecky spent the winter watching the snow fall and answering the dozens of phone calls and letters from teammates and friends. He said he remembers them all, but one in particular. “Just a letter from a man who I didn’t know and didn’t know me,” Dravecky says. “The man said he also had this type of cancer. Had it 16 years ago. It was a good letter to get.”