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Mosh Pitch: The Straight Edge Punk and Cut Fastball of Scott Radinsky

There wouldn't seem to be room for punk edge in baseball, a sport that still gets extremely pissy about bat flips, but Scott Radinsky proved that wrong.
Image via Discogs

After more than a year and a dozen-plus installments of this column, one nagging question has lurked in the margins: Can Sportscore be punk? Whether something is truly, sufficiently punk is one of the great pop-ideological struggles of our time, an argument that alienates curious dilettantes and reduces the faithful into rampart-building maniacs defending a half-century-old aesthetic against interlopers who don't really exist anymore.

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The poseurs long ago moved on to different poses, but the authenticity arguments rage on amongst people who somehow find solace in using Brooklyn Vegan's comment section as an anger outlet. As a wise sage of the genre's primordial phase once stated: No fun, my babe. No fun.

But the main question at the root of most Sportscore-centric examinations is this: Is there any correlation between sporting talent and musical talent? Since punk prides itself on bypassing traditional definitions of talent in the name of personal expression, weirdness, energy, and other forms of three-chords-and-the-truth simplicity, what we're left with is not "Can this athlete competently perform within the boundaries of pop-music expectations?" but "What kind of ideas does this athlete have about self-expression?"

Read More: The Unlikely EDM Career of Twins Reliever Trevor May

Still, if there's anything the Dead Kennedys have taught me—and, full disclosure, I already knew how loathsome the Reagan administration was—it's that punks are supposed to hate athletic pursuits that don't involve halfpipes. Where you see a pep rally, "Jock-O-Rama" sees an invitation to "come lick the butts of the beef patrol," which I'm pretty sure is not meant as the erotic come-on it appears to be out of context. Here, sports are martial, oppressive, an act of Americanized aggression toward the weak and nonconformist. Not punk.

And yet baseball, the most American of sports, harbored one figure who reconciled the two. He was not a superstar in either field, but he wasn't a nobody, either. If pitching well under the aegis of obscurity relative to the dudes you send back to the bench can qualify as iconoclasm, then how's this for Kill Yr Idols: reducing John Olerud to a flailing schlub (.136/.269/.318), making George Brett look like Mario Mendoza (.111/.158/.111), striking out Ken Griffey Jr. seven times in 16 at-bats (.063/.118/.125), and faring better against Tony Gwynn than most Hall of Fame hurlers did (.143/.300/.286). These are the small sample sizes of a situational relief pitcher, but if Scott Radinsky proved anything during his years as a big league reliever and professional punk musician, it's that enthusiastic focus can really pay off in short bursts.

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Radinsky, far left, reaching out to the Cleveland Youth Crew in 2012. Photo by David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Two years before he was picked by the Chicago White Sox in the third round of the 1986 amateur draft, Radinsky made his musical debut on a compilation called Nardcore, named after Oxnard, California, one of many about-an-hour-from-L.A. scenes that spawned a ton of skatepunk and hardcore bands. As the lead singer for Scared Straight, Radinsky fronted a band that was simpatico with the drug-and-alcohol-free straight edge movement, making him one of the most visible professional sports figures with that connection until CM Punk came around.

Scared Straight's two contributions to Nardcore"Skate to Live" and "Peer Pressure"—are a microcosm of their whole deal: fast and sloppy and teenage as hell, driven by a stress and a need to figure out who they were (skaters) and weren't (wasted). Sports, even kickflip-based ones, do benefit from the same kind of rigorous discipline that can be found in the sXe ranks, though it does seem mildly ironic that the future ChiSox bullpen mainstay would develop dual careers in music and baseball at a time when both professions seemed to be competing for which one had the bigger coke problem.

Radinsky's baseball career took off just as quickly as his music career did: after a few years of Little League, he started pitching for his high school team in the last game of his sophomore year, around the same time as Scared Straight's 1985 debut 7" EP Born to Be Wild dropped (yes, the title track's a surprisingly faithful, kinda Redd Kross-ish Steppenwolf cover). By the time You Drink, You Drive, You Die was recorded the following year, Radinsky—billed on the album as "Scott Rad"—was earmarked for a trip to the Gulf Coast League after blowing everyone away with 180 strikeouts in just over 100 innings his senior year.

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The album had a belated, semi-official release on Mystic Records in 1988; it features an insert that juxtaposes Radinsky's draft-day headlines and photos of him mid-windup with the lyrics to songs like "Shit Parade" ("Radio dictates what you hear/No weird music, no not here") and "Fight Back" ("Ignorance, stupidity go hand in hand/Sexism, racism rule this land"). Just from his discography alone, you could probably put Radinsky in the bullpen of the Major League All-Time Nonconformist Team, throwing relief for Dock Ellis or Bill Lee.

But there was a deeper reason for Radinsky's aggression onstage and on the mound. "When I was in the tenth grade my father got diagnosed with lung cancer, and that kind of brought out a little rebellion and a little anger in me," Radinsky told Baseball Prospectus in 2007. "It just seemed like that particular music scene was a good fit for me, and I got attracted to it and locked in. I was 18 years old and had lost my father the year before—someone who had been supportive for pretty much my whole life, coaching teams and all that. It was a real blow, man. I was angry. And I was able to channel that anger—that fight—on the field with my arm." Here, Radinsky makes being a SoCal teenager in the mid '80s sound like a mindstate where you could not only ride for both Mike Muir and Fernando Valenzuela but strive to be like both of them, simultaneously—maybe not on as big a scale but fuck it, do what you love.

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Radinsky hit the bigs in 1990, pitching as a LOOGY and notching a 6-1 record (80 ERA+ notwithstanding) in the same bullpen as Bobby Thigpen during his pre-K-Rod save-record season. These were the ChiSox of Frank Thomas and Black Jack McDowell, the latter of whom had his own somewhat more publicized side career in music. (McDowell's tenure as a demi-grunger in bands like Stickfigure might have spurred some clubhouse music-geek banter, but Radinsky has admitted feeling out of place in the Urge Overkill/Smashing Pumpkins early '90s Chicago alt scene, so a supergroup probably wasn't in the cards.)

Radinsky's hardcore youth was a little too subcultural to be a novelty gimmick played up for the Comiskey faithful—records are scarce as to whether he jogged out of the bullpen to the sounds of Minor Threat blasting through the P.A., although it's nice to think about—and for his first few seasons his music career was pretty dormant. By 1993-94, Scared Straight had been redubbed Ten Foot Pole—the band was skewing closer to pop-punk and wanted to distance themselves from straight edge. Radinsky recorded two more albums with the band; he was credited as "Scott Pulmyfinger" on Rev, the first of three albums for Epitaph, the label of The Offspring, Rancid, and Social Distortion. Eventually, though, the band decided they needed a frontman who could focus on music 24/7, and so they and Radinsky parted ways.

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Things would get worse before they got better. Radinsky was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, and the aggressive treatment for the cancer threatened to take him out of both baseball and punk rock for the bulk of 1994. Radinsky still worked out, still kept in touch with his teammates, and still immersed himself in baseball, but the recovery process was more than just waiting for the cancer to go into remission. His attempt at a comeback season with the White Sox in 1995 was stymied when his solid ability to keep the ball inside the park and mow hitters down faltered drastically: he went from averaging 0.4 HR and 7.1 K per nine innings over the 1990-93 seasons to 1.7 HR and 3.3 K in 1995.

When he was granted free agency after the end of the season, Radinsky wasn't content to fall back on a full-time band gig. He strove to get signed again, even if it meant being demoted to the minors. As it turned out, one team in particular wanted him: his home-turf Los Angeles Dodgers. And so Radinsky spent three years taking advantage of baseball's most renowned pitchers' park and itching for tense, high-leverage situations to hammer through—and, as a 1997 Sports Illustrated profile reveals, getting Mike Piazza to psyche him up through strategic use of Angry Samoans lyrics. He also assembled a new band: Pulley, a group largely composed of alumni from bands like Face to Face and Strung Out that had sprung up in the late '80s, early '90s wave of SoCal pop-punk.

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Radinsky has admitted to feeling more confident on the mound staring down a circa-'98 Sammy Sosa in front of 50,000 fans than he ever did onstage facing 500 fans at a club: "The guys behind you all have guitars, or a drum set, to kind of hide behind, and all I have is this little microphone," he told Baseball Prospectus. "I'm the guy who is kind of responsible to entertain, and sometimes I wonder if I have that in me."

Radinsky's playing career wound down long before his music career did. He threw his last 13 pitches as a big leaguer with the Cleveland Indians, in a game against the Blue Jays on October 5, 2001. Four days later, Pulley's Together Again for the First Time came out on Epitaph and earned a rave review from AllMusic.

Between his continued touring and recording with Pulley and Skatelab—the skate park, shop, and museum he built in his hometown of Simi Valley after signing with the Dodgers, because there hadn't been anywhere else for locals to session—Radinsky probably could've made a pretty good life for himself outside of baseball. "If I get tired of all the rules, if those five minutes [on the mound] are not enough, if the phone rings in the bullpen and the coach tells another reliever to warm up and I don't mind, then it's time to walk away," Radinsky told SI, summoning his own version of the no-sell-out ethos as it applied to someone who pitched because he pretty much needed to. He was writing his own ending even then.

Except he didn't stick to it. Radinsky is still in baseball, in the right place and the right role. This season is his first as the bullpen coach for the Los Angeles Angels, where his role is pretty much to help relievers maintain their equilibrium and go out there without letting the hitters see them sweat. Doing it yourself is a start, always. Inspiring others to do it themselves is where you really nail things down.