Cancer survivor Devin Smeltzer’s story is even better than it sounds | Phil Anastasia

You think it’s a great story: Childhood cancer survivor Devin Smeltzer makes the major leagues as a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins.

You think it’s storybook stuff: In his MLB debut, Smeltzer throws six shutout innings, allows three hits with seven strikeouts and no walks, and earns the victory in the Twins’ 5-3 win over Milwaukee on Tuesday night.

You don’t know the half of it.

Smeltzer’s story is even better than it seems because it’s not just about a boy who was diagnosed with cancer as a 9-year-old, who underwent rounds of chemotherapy, who played in a game in 90-degree heat the next summer with a do-rag covering his bald head, who overcame all that adversity and all those odds to take the mound at Target Field.

It’s more than just the wonderful scene in that stadium on Tuesday night, Smeltzer’s family and friends — 21 of them, by his dad’s count, including both of his grandmothers — in the stands, breathless with excitement over every pitch.

“I cried when I got there,” his mom, Christina, said Wednesday from Minneapolis, “and I cried every time he struck somebody out.”

It’s more than his former coach with the Young Guns AAU program recalling his amazement at Smeltzer taking the field while battling the effects of chemotherapy and still marveling all these years later that the “toughest kid I’ve ever coached” had made the major leagues.

It’s more than his old high school coach watching the game on his computer and calling pitches in his head just like he used to when Smeltzer was on the mound for Bishop Eustace Prep.

It’s all that, and it’s this: The story of a young boy with cancer who channeled his passion to beat the disease in two interconnected ways. He wanted to be a major-leaguer. Yes. He also wanted to help others.

This is a kid who, as a 10-year-old, warmed the hearts of the doctors and nurses at St. Christopher’s Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia because of his determination to comfort other children, especially the younger ones.

This is a kid whose parents would walk into the hospital time and again and find him sitting on a blanket on the floor, playing with a 2-year-old with leukemia.

Gregory Halligan, a pediatric oncologist at St. Christopher’s, told me in 2013 about treating Smeltzer and marveling at the young boy’s compassion for other patients.

“He was a little older, and he would interact incredibly well with younger kids,” Halligan said. “He wasn’t a typical, egocentric 12-year-old."

In the years since his recovery from pelvic rhabdomyosarcoma, Smeltzer has made countless visits back to St. Christopher’s and other hospitals and clinics to talk with youngsters and their parents.

He launched a “strikeout” foundation as a senior at Bishop Eustace to raise money for children who have been impacted by cancer and their families.

He has written the names or initials of youngsters who lost their battles to cancer under the bill of his baseball cap during the long course of his career, from Bishop Eustace to Florida Gulf Coast University, from junior college in San Jacinto, Texas, to minor-league teams for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Twins.

That’s the 23-year-old who became a major-leaguer on Tuesday night, the remarkably poised and polished athlete who has never lost sight of others while he has been chasing his own dream.

“That makes all the difference in the world,” Tim Smeltzer, Devin’s father, said from his hotel room in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. “If you know Devin, you know he wants to make things better.

“What happened to him made him a different person, a better person.”

Bishop Eustace coach Sam Tropiano couldn’t help thinking the same thing while he was watching Smeltzer buzz through the Twins’ lineup.

“We always talk to these kids about trying to reach a certain level, about trying to be great at what they do,” Tropiano said. “But then there’s another level, and that’s the giving-back level.

“That’s what makes this so great. Devin always understood that. He was super-competitive and super-stubborn, but he also was into something bigger, something greater.”

Said Christina Smeltzer: “It’s from his heart. It’s always been from his heart.”

Pat Fisher, who was Smeltzer’s coach with the South Jersey Young Guns and now is an assistant coach at Rowan University, knew the same thing when that little 10-year-old took the field with that do-rag on his head that long-ago summer day.

“His dad was like, ‘Can you get him in?’ ” Fisher recalled. “I’m talking to the other coach, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how much baseball this kid is ever going to get to play.’

“The other coach was like, ‘Fish, whatever you need. Whatever he needs.’

“That’s always been the thing about Devin. He always had the ability to make the animosity of competition just melt away.”

You think it’s a great story, this kid from Voorhees who overcame childhood cancer to throw six scoreless innings in his major-league debut?

You’re right.

But it’s more than that. It always has been more than that for Devin Smeltzer.

He always turned his battle with cancer and his success on the baseball field into an opportunity to inspire and aid others.

Now, he’s on the biggest stage in the sport, and he’s got a great story to tell. All of it.