After beating cancer, KC's Hill won't let COVID-19 stop him

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Not long ago, Royals pitcher Tim Hill was wrapping up eight brutal months of chemotherapy to treat colon cancer.

If anybody had a reason to opt out of baseball's restart, it would be him.

Yet there he was, on a blazing evening at Kauffman Stadium, throwing pitches to teammates as they prepared for the start of their 60-game season next weekend in Cleveland. One after another, the lanky left-hander with the easy grin, infectious personality and brutal-to-hit sinker-style delivery left the woefully out-of-sync hitters baffled.

Cancer couldn't keep him in the dugout. The threat of contracting COVID-19 wasn't going to do it, either.

“It's hard to imagine a guy his age going through what he's gone through already,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said, "and I think it's another testament of faith in himself and faith in the process to keep him in a good place, and it also shows how much he loves this group and loves this team and wants to get out and compete.

“When you hear stories like that, it brings the onus back on us that we're being as careful as we can for everyone's sake.”

Hill's trouble began about a year after he was drafted out of Bacone College in Oklahoma. He had dominated lower levels of the minors but still felt as if something was amiss. He would get tired walking up stairs, much less running. A routine blood test administered by the club raised red flags, but it was a follow-up colonoscopy that revealed the tumor. The biopsy came back positive for colon cancer, the same disease that claimed his father when Hill was just 17 years old.

There were signs the cancer was beginning to spread, too, so Hill began treatments immediately. The chemotherapy wound up lasting eight months, shrinking him from a sturdy 220-pound athlete to a...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/After-beating-cancer-KC-s-Hill-won-t-let-15414001.php