The passing of Tommy John this weekend, at age 83 after a period of hospice care, should be one more reminder that we need to sufficiently honor transformational souls while they are still alive.
It’s now too late for John, former Dodger and former Angel, but most notably the first pitcher to successfully undergo what is now commonplace elbow ligament replacement surgery. Equally, it is too late for Dr. Frank Jobe, who passed away in 2014. He had the idea for transplanting a tendon into the elbow and performed that surgery for the first time on John in 1974.
But there is no excuse for not hanging their plaques in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Maybe it’s just a quirk of mine, as a BBWAA member and a sometimes cantankerous Hall of Fame voter, but I’ve always felt that the shrine in Cooperstown shouldn’t just recognize those who put up huge numbers and excelled on the field, but should also honor those who changed the game in other ways.
I’d always voted for Maury Wills during his years on the writers’ ballot, because without his role in the Dodgers’ light-hitting offense of the 1960s – and particularly his record 104 stolen bases in 1962 – would Lou Brock, Tim Raines and Rickey Henderson, among others, have further advanced baseball’s running game? I think not.
And it was heartening to see Marvin Miller, the longtime leader of the Players Association, ultimately elected by one of the Hall of Fame veterans committees in 2020, even though I’m sure a good number of current and former owners and commissioners were apoplectic at the very idea. But he changed the game. He belongs.
Similarly, there are thousands of pitchers – literally – who have had their elbows and thus their careers saved by the daring, never-tried-before procedure that Jobe first performed on John in 1974, which has advanced now to where the surgeon reattaches the ligament and in some cases adds an internal brace.
Consider that as of Monday morning, on ESPN’s baseball injury report, 52 players on major league injured lists – all but a handful of them pitchers – had either recently undergone Tommy John surgery, were recovering from it or were in rehabilitation stints preparing to come back.
More than 2,500 major leaguers alone have had the surgery. Add to that all of those who have had the procedure done among minor leaguers, college players, high school players … is that enough of an impact for you?
John, who had been acquired by the Dodgers from the Chicago White Sox before the 1972 season, and Jobe first crossed paths in spring training that year in Vero Beach, Fla.
“I didn’t know him from any other orthopedic surgeon,” John told me in a 2017 conversation. “The end of that year I had to have elbow surgery. I tore the flexor muscle off the bone in my elbow, so he went in, reattached it, cleaned the elbow up. It had (bone) chips in it, as most pitching elbows do.
“We just sat there and talked. And then when I came back, I really wasn’t throwing like I should have, and everybody was asking, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’
“And Dr. Jobe said, ‘Look, I can tell you right now that you are 100 percent healed. You’re fine. The pitching coach can’t tell you. The trainer can’t tell you. Nobody can tell you you’re ready to pitch again at a major league level but Tommy John. So when you convince yourself you’re ready to pitch, that’s when you can do it.’
“That was a stepping stone,” John added, because it established a level of trust that he tapped into two seasons later, when his elbow gave out during a July 17 game against Montreal. John entered that game with a 13-3 record and 2.59 ERA and was being mentioned as a Cy Young Award candidate.
The issue following that night? There was no way of knowing the severity of the injury without surgery.
“He talked to me more like a father than a doctor,” John recalled. “The big thing was, he said, ‘You really don’t need this and you’ll be fine. You’ll be able to play catch with your kids and throw batting practice to them. You’ll just never be able to pitch in Major League Baseball again.
“I said, ‘But I want to pitch in Major League Baseball again.’ So he said, ‘So, we have to do the surgery, but the chances are one or two in 100. Don’t expect any miracles.’”
The actual procedure, which involved grafting a harvested tendon to replace the ruptured ulnar collateral ligament, had been used in hand and wrist surgery but never with the elbow. The gamble, Jobe said in a 2005 interview, was whether the new tendon, taken from the wrist or forearm and attached to the humerus and ulna bones, would accept the body’s blood supply and become strong enough to withstand the stress of pitching.
“We began to feel like we had a success,” Jobe said. “But I still didn’t do another one for a couple of years, because I wanted to watch and see how (John) did.”
Later, Jobe told him he should have seen the signs with Sandy Koufax, whose elbow issues led him to retire at age 30. “I really believe I missed it,” he told John. “All the symptoms that he had were Tommy John injury symptoms, but I blew it. I wasn’t a good enough doctor, I guess, to see that.”
John asked him, “Well, how could you see mine?”
Jobe’s response: “Stevie Wonder could have seen yours.”
“So actually, I had the Sandy Koufax surgery,” John said in our conversation.
The timeline has become a little speedier in the decades since, but John was throwing again 16 weeks after the operation, appeared in an Arizona Instructional League game on Sept. 16, 1975 – a year and a day after the operation – and was back on the mound and in the Dodgers’ rotation in 1976. He won more games after the surgery than before, 164-124, and wound up pitching 26 years in the majors with three 20-win seasons, a pitcher who wouldn’t blow you away but had impeccable control and got opponents to hit the ball on the ground.
You would think that 288 career victories, more than any pitcher still outside the Hall of Fame besides Roger Clemens – who has issues of his own with the voters – would be enough of an endorsement. In his last appearance on the writers’ Hall of Fame ballot in 2009, John received 171 out of 539 votes, 31.7% and well short of the 75% needed to get in.
Since then, John has been on five veterans committee ballots, 2011, ’14, ’18, ’20 and ’25, and never come close to the 12 of 16 votes needed to get in.
Sadly, maybe it will take his passing to remind people of his worthiness as a pitcher as well as his and Jobe’s place in baseball history. The doctor was at least honored by the Hall of Fame in July of 2013, a year before he passed away.
But both deserve plaques. The Hall has room for managers, executives and former commissioners. Why not the doctor whose innovation helped save thousands of pitchers’ arms, as well as the pitcher whose name was a part of the game decades after his career ended?
And along with everything else, Tommy John provided the most succinct explanation why modern pitchers’ arms are at such risk:
“Kids are pitching to radar guns,” he told me, “rather than pitching to get outs.”
jalexander@scng.com