Radinsky Is Finally Back on Fast Track : Baseball: Now that the White Sox reliever from Simi Valley High has regained the pop on his fastball, his painstaking triumph over Hodgkin’s disease seems complete.

Scott Radinsky didn’t want to believe his doctors when they told him it would take a year for him to recover fully from cancer treatments.

Unfortunately, they were right.

However, they also were correct about him recovering completely. Almost a year after his final treatment, Radinsky is starting to feel like the relief pitcher he was before he was diagnosed 18 months ago with Hodgkin’s disease.

It has been a difficult season for the Chicago White Sox left-hander. The former Simi Valley High star took a 2-1 record and 5.45 earned-run average in 34 2/3 innings into Wednesday night’s game against the Angels.

“At first I was disappointed,” Radinsky said of his performance. “Then I just kind of realized I had to deal with what I got. As time passes, I am a little more pleased with the results and the everyday consistency.”

White Sox catcher Ron Karkovice said Radinsky is just starting to resemble the pitcher who won eight games and saved four in 1993, before he missed the 1994 season while undergoing treatment.

“He has gotten a lot stronger at the end of the season,” Karkovice said. “It’s taken him a while to get his fastball, but just in the last two weeks he’s been throwing the ball like he used to.”

On Monday night in Anaheim, Radinsky pitched 2 1/3 scoreless innings, the longest of his 40 appearances this season.

Radinsky, 27, said it took time to build up the strength in his arm. After spending last summer undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Radinsky was unable to get the pop on his fastball that he had before he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s in March, 1994.

“I was making the pitch, but there’s a difference between 84 m.p.h. and 88 or 89 m.p.h.,” he said. “I was lacking the strength to really let it go.”

He said he never doubted that he would eventually make it back to full strength.

“I just felt it inside,” he said. “I knew that I wasn’t getting beaten. I just wasn’t physically there. I could feel myself getting better every day, but it just took a while.”

Perhaps the most significant day in his recovery was one back in April, when the strike ended and he returned to spring training.

“That was a big day,” he said. “That was something I had been looking forward to for a long time. I came [to Anaheim, when the White Sox were in town] last year, but I knew I wasn’t getting in the game. To get back to spring training and be around everyone and participate in everything, that felt really good.”

Radinsky said he is now free from the cancer, but he will continue to be tested every few months to check for a recurrence. He isn’t concerned.

“It’s gone,” he said. “I don’t worry about it. They say if you get sick you will start worrying if it’s back. As far as I’m concerned, it was really never there. I never felt the effects of [the disease]. It was just the treatments.”

While undergoing treatments, Radinsky experienced nausea and weakness. But all along he looked fit. He coached pitchers at Simi Valley High and played in an adult baseball league with old friends.

Those activities were therapy in themselves.

“I made myself get up and get out and do all that stuff,” he said. “I just wasn’t going to let [Hodgkin’s] get the best of me. And I don’t think it did. It did get part of me, but it didn’t beat me down to the ground.”