Tommy John, a reliable stalwart of big league rotations who won 288 games over three decades while seeing his name become synonymous with a medical procedure that has saved the careers of countless other pitchers, has died. He was 83.
A four-time All-Star left-hander with the second-most wins of any pitcher in the Modern Era not elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, John endured for 26 seasons on Major League mounds. He made his debut with Cleveland in 1963 and threw his final pitch for the Yankees in 1989, when he was 46.
Pitching for the Dodgers on July 17, 1974, John threw a fastball to the Expos’ Hal Breeden and felt what he described as a “crash” in his left elbow. It was later revealed to be a career-threatening complete tear of the hurler’s left ulnar collateral ligament.
“Right at the point where I put force on the pitch, the point where my arm is back and bent, something happened,” John told Sports Illustrated in 1978. “It felt as if I had left my arm someplace else. It was as if my body continued to go forward and my left arm had just flown out to right field, independent of the rest of me. … I walked off the mound and met [manager] Walter Alston coming out of the dugout. ‘You better get somebody,’ I told him. ‘I just hurt my arm.’”
When two months of attempts to rest and ice the injury failed, Dodgers team physician Dr. Frank Jobe performed a revolutionary four-hour procedure on Sept. 25, 1974. Jobe harvested a tendon from John’s right forearm and drilled holes in John’s left humerus and ulna bones, using anchors to secure the ligament.
Lacking sensation in the fingers of his left hand, a second procedure was needed to repair damage in John’s ulnar nerve. At the time, Jobe quoted 1-in-100 odds of John’s return to a Major League mound; John accepted that gamble, reasoning that he’d otherwise return home to sell cars in Terre Haute, Ind.
“I told him, ‘You’re a great doctor and I believe in you. But you’re wrong. I will come back,’” John said. “You did an excellent job inside my arm. Now it's up to me. I know how much pain my body can stand -- and it's quite a bit. I know how hard I can work, and if it takes 18 hours a day, I'll do it. I will come back.’”
John missed the 1975 season, then returned to go 10-10 with a 3.09 ERA in 31 starts for Los Angeles in ’76, earning a nickname from players and journalists: “The Bionic Man.” The next season, John finished second behind the Phillies’ Steve Carlton in the National League Cy Young Award voting, his 20-7 record and 2.78 ERA in 31 starts helping the Dodgers to a pennant.
“I was able to get hitters out when I didn’t have good stuff; my arm was like I never had surgery,” John later said.
He was selected to the NL All-Star team in ’78, a season in which his Dodgers were dispatched for a second consecutive October by the Yankees. John jumped to the Yankees for the ’79 season, inking a three-year, $1.4 million contract over more lucrative offers from the Reds and Royals. Yet John landed on the losing side of a Yankees-Dodgers tilt again in 1981, when Los Angeles took the crown.
“We are saddened to hear the news of Tommy John’s passing today,” Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten said in a statement. “Tommy was an exceptional pitcher throughout his career in Major League Baseball, and his courageous role in becoming the first to have surgery that would go on to bear his name can’t be overstated.
"His impact both on and off the field has been felt by ballplayers of all ages and will be for generations to come.”
That ’81 season marked an extremely challenging time off the field for John. In August, his 2-year-old son Travis was hospitalized after falling from a third-story window. John sat at his child’s side through a 19-day coma, only leaving the hospital to pitch in home games when his rotation turn arrived.
In August 1982, the Yankees traded John to the Angels in exchange for a player to be named later, left-hander Dennis Rasmussen. John pitched 3 1/2 seasons with the Angels, including two appearances in the ’82 American League Championship Series, before being released in June 1985. He completed that year with the Athletics, then attended Spring Training with the Yankees in ’86, signed to a contract in May.
John’s final 91 big league appearances came in pinstripes, including an Opening Day assignment in ’89. When knuckleballer Phil Niekro retired in 1988, John became the Majors’ oldest active pitcher.
“The New York Yankees mourn the passing of Tommy John, who was a bedrock of our rotation during his time in pinstripes and a longtime favorite of Yankees fans," the Yankees said in a statement. "While his incredible longevity and post-surgery achievements changed the fortunes and trajectory of countless athletes around the world, it also overshadowed his excellence as a pitcher, which included consecutive 20‑win seasons with the Yankees.
"We pause to remember the totality of his legacy -- his competitiveness and skill, his penchant for conversation, his kind and gracious nature, and his stature as an athletic and medical pioneer. The Yankees extend our deepest condolences to his family and friends, including wife, Cheryl, daughter, Tamara, and sons Tommy III and Travis. We also keep his son Taylor in our hearts.”
Having matched Deacon McGuire’s record for seasons played with 26 -- a mark later eclipsed by Nolan Ryan (28) -- John retired with a career record of 288-231 and a 3.34 ERA in 760 games (700 starts), with 162 complete games and 46 shutouts. One-hundred and sixty-four of his victories came after the 1974 surgery that saved his career.
“Because of the attention it receives, people think the operation is done only on pitchers,” Dr. Jobe said in 1989. “But I wasn't a pioneer when I performed the operation on Tommy. I didn't do anything revolutionary. That operation had been performed on polio patients. I just made a new application of it.”
Born in Terre Haute on May 22, 1943, John attended Gerstmeyer High School, where he starred in baseball and basketball while graduating as his school’s 1961 valedictorian (though administrators did not permit him to give an address because of a stuttering problem). Recruited by several schools for basketball, John dazzled Cleveland scout Johnny Schulte with his curveball, prompting the club to sign him in 1961 at age 18.
John made his big league debut on Sept. 6, 1963, against the Washington Senators -- Don Zimmer, the second batter that John faced, laced a run-scoring single. Primarily using a curveball-fastball combination, John was frequently used as a reliever until 1966, when the White Sox named him their Opening Day starter.
John once recalled that Chicago manager Eddie Stanky promised his pitchers a free Hart Schaffner Marx suit if they generated 20 ground balls in a complete-game victory, which influenced his pitching style.
“We didn’t have a good-enough team then to go nine innings, but I did get three suits of clothes off of him,” John told The New York Times in 2017. “And a ground ball didn’t have to be an out. It could be a ground-ball base hit. He wanted you to look at it and say, ‘Ground balls don’t go for home runs.’”
John’s final appearance came on May 25, 1989, pitching for the Yankees against the Angels in New York. His last batter faced, outfielder Devon White, was 8 months old at the time of John’s debut.
Following his retirement, John broadcast games for the Twins and Yankees in the 1990s, then returned to the dugout as a Minor League pitching coach in the Expos and Yankees organizations in the early 2000s. In 2007, John tried his hand at managing with the now-defunct Bridgeport Bluefish of the independent Atlantic League, piloting the club to a 159-176 record over 2 1/2 seasons.
John’s later years were tinged by tragedy. In March 2010, his youngest son Taylor died at age 28, related to an overdose of prescription drugs. In response, John formed the “Let’s Do It” Foundation, dedicated to raising awareness about suicides and preventing them -- a cause that he remained active with until his passing.