Do you have any albums you wore out when you were younger that now seem so obscure? I’ve got a bunch — mostly random early-90s ska and punk compilations, and some albums I bought on whims because I liked the one song I knew by the band (usually from one of those compilations).

This was before the Internet had all that it now has, and I wasn’t tapped in enough to read ‘zines or whatever, so I had little more than the patches on the jean jacket of that one mohawked dude in the school for guidance. (I suppose that should be embarrassing to admit, but I’m also pretty sure that’s the way I first heard about Fishbone. So I regret nothing.)

Anyway, I enjoyed Ten Foot Pole’s “Rev” a whole lot for a couple years. I bought it because the band had been featured on Punk-o-Rama. It was straightforward, West Coast punk stuff, but that’s pretty much what I was hoping for when I bought it.

Then one day I was looking through baseball cards and caught the factoid on the back of Scott Radinsky’s: “Scott is the lead singer of the band Ten Foot Pole,” it said. Blew my mind.

Mostly, I was shocked that I had come to the band through its music and not because the lead singer was a baseball player. But then I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed anywhere in the liner notes that Scott Radinsky was the band’s lead singer. For whatever reason, Radinsky was credited on the album as “Scott Pulmyfinger.” Hilarious!

Radinsky was named the Indians’ pitching coach today. Maybe next year when they come to play the Yankees I’ll try to catch up to him and talk about what happened to the Offspring.