Ted Berg

USA TODAY Sports

TEMPE, Ariz. - Sustained success in Major League Baseball requires extraordinary natural ability, incredible focus, and an outrageous competitive drive. Sustained success in punk rock requires unyielding passion for the music and its spirit, a perpetually anti-establishment ethos, and the energy and enthusiasm necessary to rock the hell out of whatever venue will have you. Baseball, to a large extent, expects its players to conform to its standards and customs. Punk rock, by definition, rejects conformity.

The pursuits may seem inherently contradictory to just about everyone but Los Angeles Angels bullpen coach Scott Radinsky. Perhaps the only person in history who has both struck out Ken Griffey Jr. and opened for Green Day, Radinsky spent the 1990s pitching as a high-energy lefty reliever in Major League bullpens and spent his offseasons - still spends his offseasons - touring as a frontman for a series of Southern California-based punk outfits, first as a founding member of the group Ten Foot Pole and, for the last two decades, as the lead singer in his band, Pulley.

Radinsky, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports while the Angels warmed up before a Cactus League game at Tempe Diablo stadium on Sunday, doesn't seem to think it all that strange to balance baseball and punk, since it's all he's ever known: He started the band that would become Ten Foot Pole years before the White Sox drafted him out of high school in the third round of the 1986 draft.

"It wasn't weird for me at all," Radinsky said. "Before the mid-90s, modern-day internet and all that, it was really easy to manage both and there wasn't much of a big deal about it. Once it got exposed, I got ribbed a bit for being an athlete - just normal sarcastic banter from the crowd: 'Throw a fastball,' stupid (expletive) like that.

"I've always been in the bullpen - always on the other side of the wall, part of the anti-establishment. I's corporate. It's all corporate now. I used to laugh, going through the baseball season, staying at the Ritz-Carlton, the Marriott, and a month later I'm somewhere in Brazil, sleeping on the floor, just played a divey-ass punk club the night before. I have always been grounded and the balance has always been there, but this is what I did. I never sold out musically, and I don't think I ever sold out in the baseball world. I was part of two major corporations, but in my mind I think I was always in the underground part of it."

The album Rev, Ten Foot Pole's 1994 debut offering for the legendary Epitaph Records, included no mention whatsoever of its singer's fairly notable day job. Billed as "Scott Pulmyfinger" in the liner notes, Radinsky sang about vandalism, homelessness and broken relationships over driving, melodic guitar riffs. The band's song My Wall appeared on the Epitaph compilation album Punk-O-Rama, alongside singles from the Offspring, Rancid, Bad Religion, and NOFX.

But as West Coast pop-punk groups like Green Day and The Offspring began enjoying crossover commercial success, Radinsky's bandmates wanted to pursue music full-time instead of continuing to work around his baseball schedule.

"We had been a band for ten years, and all of a sudden things kind of started moving and the wheels started going in the music world, and I think they kind of forgot the whole concept of how the band was started," he said. "Baseball always has come first. If we were given an opportunity, if our band would've broke through on radio and sold tons of records and had all sorts of airplay, and I was getting close to the end of my career, maybe that would have been an entertaining thought. But that was never the motive behind playing music, and never really the goal.

"Money is the root of all evil, man. I think in a creative venture, in a band, in music, the whole idea is to continue to have fun."

Scott Radinsky pitching for the Dodgers in 1997 (PHOTO: USA TODAY Sports)

Radinsky missed the entire 1994 MLB season battling - and beating - Hodgkin's Disease. He returned to the mound with the White Sox in 1995 and started Pulley, with the understanding that the band would have to limit its touring to the four months that constitute the MLB offseason. Pulley released its first album Esteem Driven Engine on Epitaph in 1996.

Now 49, Radinsky says his side gig as a punk frontman mattered about as much to his teammates during his playing days as it does to the Angels relievers now in his charge: Not at all.

"I don't think they care," he said. "It has nothing to do with what we're doing on the field. If it comes up in conversation, I've got a billion great stories I could share, but it doesn't really come up all that much."

"I've heard about it, and I think I looked it up on Wikipedia," said Angels reliever Cam Bedrosian. "Other than that, I don't know a whole lot. I just know he's a rocker. I think I asked him last year, but it was the middle of the game and he kind of brushed it off. I didn't really push him much because I didn't know how he went about it, if he wanted to keep it separate from baseball or whatever."

Baseball gave Radinsky the opportunity to perform around the country in stadiums full of screaming fans, and as a musician he's played for crowds as large as 30,000. But the particulars of fronting a rock band, unsurprisingly, are very different from those that come with specialist work out of a Major League bullpen.

"Unlike baseball, where people come to try to pick apart what you're doing on the field, people that come pay money to watch a band play music, at least in my experience, they're not coming to (expletive) us or to bash us, they're genuinely coming to support us," he said. "If the people are there to watch and sing and genuinely enjoy it, we get the most gratification on the stage. We played a gig a few weeks back in San Diego at a bar, there might have been 100 people there - it was awesome. It was Super Bowl night, and it was awesome."

Radinsky believes his experiences touring North America, South America and Europe with his bands make him better suited for his role as a bullpen coach.

"I've gotten so much out of the musical experience through touring, through meeting real people - actual, real people that are coming out to our gigs. Hanging out with these kids, talking to them, whether it's overseas where they're more politically conscious than the kids here, or just interacting with a human being that's not a stereotypical American - not that there's anything wrong with Americans - to be that culturally exposed, it has made me a better communicator. I understand all different types of people, whether it's a kid from Alabama, a kid from Southern California, a kid from Moss Point, Mississippi, wherever they're from, I like to think that I'm going to get them way quicker than the average guy who has never been exposed to that."

Now signed to the label Cyber Tracks - owned by El Hefe of NOFX - Pulley put out its sixth full-length album, No Change in the Weather in November. Among other gigs, the band played at West Hollywood's famous Whisky A Go Go and toured in support of Down By Law until early February, when it came time for "Pulley season," as they know it, to end and baseball season to begin anew.

"Any major band member started in a garage playing music with his buddies to have fun, but somewhere along the lines, they lose that," Radinsky said. "I'm 49 years old, and I've been doing this since I was in eighth grade. That's still the same feeling I get when I go to practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I love it. We all love it. We have fun. And if that feeling went away, I wouldn't be doing it."