He Needs TJ

Tommy John died on August 15 at his home in Bradenton, Florida. He was 83. Eight days earlier he had missed Old-Timers' Day at Yankee Stadium and sent a statement instead, thanking the fans, the Steinbrenners, and the surgeon who gave him the second half of his career. He signed off with five words: "I will never forget you."

It started on July 17, 1974. He was pitching for the Dodgers, threw a fastball to Hal Breeden of the Expos, and felt something in his left elbow that he later described as a crash. Complete tear of the ulnar collateral ligament. In 1974 that was the end of the story. Dr. Frank Jobe told him the odds of the operation working were somewhere around one in a hundred, because nobody had ever done it. John's other option was going home to Terre Haute.

On September 25, 1974, Jobe spent four hours drilling holes in the humerus and ulna of John's left arm and threading a tendon from his forearm through them in a figure eight. John sat out all of 1975. He came back in 1976. He then won 164 more games, forty more than the 124 he had won before the elbow gave out, and kept pitching until he was 46 years old.

Roughly 40 percent of major league pitchers today have had that operation. Ohtani has had two. So has deGrom. Verlander, Cole, Sale, Skubal, Wheeler, Fried, on and on. The procedure got so common that people stopped saying the whole thing, and three of the most frightening words in the sport became "he needs TJ."

Here is the part that got lost. He was a terrific pitcher on his own terms. 288 wins, 26 seasons, four All-Star teams, back-to-back 20-win years in pinstripes, more career victories than any Modern Era pitcher outside the Hall of Fame except Roger Clemens. The surgery made his name immortal and made the pitcher himself hard to see. Every arm it saved carries a three-inch scar and his name attached to it. That is a strange kind of monument, and it is a real one.