Tommy John died on Saturday at age 83, remembered for his astonishing 26 years of pitching in the big leagues and for being the first to undergo the elbow construction surgery that bears his name.
Tyler Kepner quoted Dr. Frank Jobe, who performed the surgery on John in 1974, in his obituary of John for The Athletic:
“We did a little surgery, but the man did all the hard work,” Jobe said at a Hall of Fame ceremony honoring his medical career in 2013, the year before he died at age 88. “His tenacity and unique intelligence enabled us to develop the rehab program that has lasted the test of time.”
In his obituary of John, Joe Posnanski asked, “What pitcher in the last 75 years has changed the game more?”
Beth Harris in the Associated Press quoted Dr. Neal ElAttrache from 2024: “If you put it in dollars and cents, I think there’s no question that Tommy John is the most valuable reconstructive procedure there is.”
On the Effectively Wild podcast last week, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley had a tribute to John on Friday’s episode, looking back 50-plus years on the impact of his eponymous elbow surgery and how the left-hander pitched so long in the majors (including six seasons for the Dodgers, not counting the 1975 season he missed after surgery).
John Griffin at Pinstripe Alley remembered John.
Links
- The Dodgers need Mookie Betts to be Mookie Betts, writes Mirjam Swanson of the Los Angeles Times.
- Kyle Tucker has been so bad at Dodger Stadium this year that he didn’t start twice on this homestand, including manager Dave Roberts on Saturday saying, “I see the frustration” of Tucker pressing at home. Molly Knight at her newsletter The Long Game wrote about how the Tucker signing has been a disaster thus far.
- Laurence Darmiento in the Los Angeles Times examined what’s at stake for Dodgers majority owner Mark Walter as his business dealings are under federal investigation.
- Sam Miller at his Pebble Hunting newsletter used a 13-year-old tweet of his, “Vin Scully called MLB games the same year that Connie Mack managed MLB games. Mack was born 10 weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation,” to try to come up with the extension of this time span, in other words what is something that overlapped with the end of Scully’s career (his final year broadcasting was 2016) that will still be around decades from now.
- ESPN last week updated their ranking of the top 50 players in Major League Baseball, including five Dodgers. Shohei Ohtani is No. 1 overall, along with Yoshinobu Yamamoto 18th, Tarik Skubal 21st, Freddie Freeman 29th, and Andy Pages 30th.