LIKE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED

 

               When I visited New York frequently, in the 1980s and ‘90s, my favorite restaurant there was Pino’s, on 34^th Street near Park Avenue. It was a neighborhood place, of the sort that when a regular wanted to make a reservation on his way home from work he’d lean in and holler “see ya at 7:30!”  The food was good, linguini with clams a specialty.

               The proprietor was Jerry Casale, a big, friendly Brooklyn native and gifted schmoozer. As a glance at the restaurant’s memorabilia revealed, he’d been a baseball player, a right-handed pitcher. In 1959, as a 25-year-old rookie whose career had been interrupted by a two-year Army stint (they did that then), he posted a 13-8 won-lost record as a starter with the Boston Red Sox. The next season he won two of his first three starts before he developed what was known as a “sore arm.” That was pretty much it for him; he struggled through the rest of that season and parts of the next two before the pain forced him to quit the game and seek his fortune elsewhere.

               Like many another pitcher with a similar history, Jerry’s misfortune was that he was born several decades too soon.  If he had played in this century or late last, chances are he could have undergone “Tommy John surgery” and pitched again, as well as before.

               I put the words “Tommy John surgery” in quotes because it’s unusual that a medical procedure be named for a patient, not the surgeon who devised it. John was a 31-year-old, left-handed pitcher, a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in 1974, the year he went under the knife of orthopedist Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodgers’ team physician. I’m not doctor, and never have played one on TV, but I can tell you that John had a strained ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow, the piece that connects the humerus, the long bone in the upper arm, to the ulna bone in the forearm.

 Using a tendon taken from another part of John’s body, Jobe replaced and reattached the injured sinew, something that hadn’t been done before. John sat out the 1975 season but returned to pitch the following year. He’d posted 124 victories in 12 seasons before the surgery. He was just as good afterward, winning 164 more games before retiring in 1989.

The technique is easily described but not so easily undergone. Although it’s usually performed on an out-patient basis today it requires about four months of inactivity to heal, and a year or more before pitching can be fully resumed. Further, the technique wasn’t an instant hit. Jobe wasn’t sure how it would turn out with John so he didn’t do in again until two years later, and didn’t see fit to publish an article about it until 10 years after that, in 1986.  Between 1974 and 1994 it was performed just 34 times.

But changes in the game have made pitchers’ elbow problems more frequent and increased the need for remediation. Pitchers keep throwing harder, and as speed-gun readings have increased so has the elbow stress hard throwing produces. Early specialization and longer schedules at the kids-game level also leads to more “sore arms” down the road.  

 As more surgeons learned it and as successes piled up (it’s about 90% effective now), the procedure became almost ubiquitous in baseball; it’s estimated that about a third of the 400 or so pitchers now on Major League rosters have had it, sometimes more than once. That’s in addition to the thousands of times it’s been done on players at other levels, down to high schoolers. Parents have been known to request the procedure for their sons before a problem develops, to improve the kids’ chances of success. That’s a bad idea, but it’s probably been done.

Ligament-replacement surgeries, sometimes using cadaver parts, have spread beyond elbows; ruptured Achilles tendons used to end sports careers, but now they can be treated that way. Ditto for injured-shoulder parts. In all, they’re probably the biggest advances in sports medicine ever.

 “Tommy John surgery” has become part of the American lexicon; a few years ago John turned over his original elbow cast, signed by Jobe and the 1974 Dodgers, to the Smithsonian Institution, for exhibition. It’s been suggested, seriously but posthumously (he died in 2014 at age 88), that the surgeon be named to Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Subsidiary but probably related celebrity for the name is seen in the advent of a Tommy John men’s underwear line. The ex-pitcher has no ties to the maker, and pondered suing it, but dropped the idea when he learned that it would cost six-figure legal fees to mount a court challenge.

Tommy John himself carries on at age 79, living in California with his second wife, whom he married last January. After he retired as a player he stuck around baseball as a broadcaster and minor-league coach and manager. In 2020 he contracted a severe case of covid that required several months of hospitalization and a rehab that continues. He’s said he watches little baseball these days, finding the sport “unrecognizable.”

John’s Major League career spanned 26 seasons (1963-89), a run matched by few. His career won-loss record was 288-231 and his ERA was 3.34. He was a very good pitcher for very long time but never a great one, and didn’t come close to the 75% vote required for election in 15 years on the Hall of Fame’s sportswriters’ ballot, topping out at 31.7%. Last year, however, a Hall veterans’ committee elected to membership Jim Kaat, whose pitching record (283-237 over 25 years) mirrored that of John’s, so John’s stock for eventual election has risen. When he’s elected (and he will be) they should transport his elbow cast from the Smithsonian to Cooperstown.