Dave Dravecky is counting on his faith to take him through another fight.
Dravecky, who battled back from cancer to pitch for San Francisco this season, will have surgery in January because of a recurrence of a tumor in his left arm.Dravecky, 33, will undergo the procedure at the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York on Jan. 4.
"As I said prior to the first surgery, I feel completely comfortable with this operation," Dravecky said in a statement released at the winter meetings Tuesday night. "Everything is in God's hands, and Janice and I will need to keep taking things one day at a time."
Dravecky spent most of the season in rehabilitation while trying to make it back from surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his left arm in 1988.
He drew national attention when he returned to the Giants in August and beat Cincinnati at Candlestick Park in his first game back.
In his next start, at Montreal, Dravecky shattered a bone in his left arm while making a pitch. He collapsed in front of the mound in agony as his teammates rushed to help.
That fracture was healing on schedule when he sustained another break in the arm during a celebration following the Giants' victory for the NL pennant in Game 5 of the playoffs against Chicago.
During the World Series, Dravecky returned home to Boardman, Ohio, and underwent X-rays and an MRI examination at the Cleveland Clinic on Oct. 27. Doctors examining those reports expressed concern over a lump in the location from which the original tumor was removed.
"Right now, I feel good physically, and the fracture in my arm is continuing to heal," Dravecky said.