THERE’S a voice in the Staten Island dugout, and it’s starting to crack.

As Tim Battle Jr. talks about his first professional baseball season, he rubs the underside of his right arm.

Battle, now a Staten Island Yankee, touches his tendons and muscles, the stuff he thought would matter when he joined the Gulf Coast Yankees last summer. He touches the veins, too, which ended up mattering so much more.

Then he looks out toward center field, the place the Yankees drafted him in the third round to play.

The place where a year ago this week, he thought he may never roam again.

The place where he’ll play for years to come, thanks to the support and deep pockets of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who chipped in when Battle’s medical bills skyrocketed.

“Cancer is the worst thing anyone can ever go through,” he said, and then he waits a moment, the way he does when he camps under a fly ball. “Ever.”

Twenty-seven games into his pro career, Battle learned he had B-cell lymphoma, a rather benign cancer that when caught early has a 90-percent cure rate.

The diagnosis ended Battle’s season and sent him home to Riverdale, Ga., for six months. Every 21 days, he headed to Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital for seven hours of chemotherapy and other treatments.

Back in the Staten Island dugout, there’s a voice on the other end of the phone, and it’s starting to crack. Now there are tears. As Loretta Battle talks about her son’s illness, she crumbles.

She remembers the boy she calls “Timmy Two” in bed for four straight days after each hospital session, unable to hold down food or liquids. She remembers wishing God would grab the disease from her son and give it to her.

At the end, she remembers the man who picked up the $40,000 treatment tab, a multimillionaire owner saving a divorced woman who currently can’t afford to visit her son in New York.

“No words can describe how that man’s helped my son,” she says of Steinbrenner. “I’ve never met him, but when I do, I don’t know what I’m going to say.”

This may be the most noble victory Steinbrenner’s dollars ever bought. The chemo worked, and after months of rehab, Battle is back on the field.

There’s a voice shouting from center field. It’s right-handed Tim Battle, celebrating after throwing out a Hudson Valley Renegades runner at home plate. The muscles matter most again.