OAKLAND — Tommy John, tired of the constant elbow discomfort and cortisone shots, no longer able to throw a pitch without searing pain, pleaded with the Los Angeles Dodgers’ team doctor to try anything humanly possible to keep his baseball career alive.
Dr. Frank Jobe, who worked with children with polio, using tendon transfers to help them, informed John that he could experiment and see if it could work on his elbow. It would be only a 100-1 shot that it would permit him to continue pitching.
John didn’t hesitate and told him to try whatever he needed. Jobe led him into the operating room, removed a tendon from John’s left wrist, drilled four holes in the ulna and humerus bones of his right elbow, and grafted the tendons together, holding them in place with anchors.
The date was Sept. 25, 1974.
Fifty years later, it is one of the most innovative and influential surgeries in the history of sports medicine.
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It is now referred to simply as “Tommy John surgery.”
“It’s amazing how many careers that surgery has saved,” John, 81, tells USA TODAY Sports from his Florida home. “It was just an experimental surgery. I would have tried many things to come back and pitch. I told Dr. Jobe, do whatever you can to fix it. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, hey, we gave it our best.
“Thank God it worked. It was such a blessing. The only thing I hate is that 50 years later, it’s needed more than ever, and that’s sad. You would think with modern training and techniques, pitchers wouldn’t need that surgery as much.”
John, the first athlete to undergo surgery replacing his ulnar collateral ligament, went on to pitch for another 14 years while winning 164 more games. It was fours year before the surgery was performed again, on San Diego Padres pitcher Brent Strom, now the Arizona Diamondbacks’ pitching coach. He never made it back to the big leagues.
Today, studies reveal that 36% of all active Major League pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery, and the rate continues to increase every year. There were more in MLB last year than the entire 1990s.
“We’ve created a problem with such a great surgical procedure,” Dr. James Andrews, who retired in January, tells USA TODAY Sports. “When you have success, you’ve got problems that come with it, and now we have to solve those problems.
