Tommy John

Tommy John's name is on a surgery, and most people who know that don't know he ever pitched for the New York Yankees at all. That's a little backwards. He won 91 games in pinstripes across two separate stints, finished runner-up for a Cy Young Award in his first season in New York, and started a World Series game against the team that had drafted the operation-turned-verb into existence in the first place -- his old team, the Dodgers. The surgery made him famous. The Yankees years are where you actually find out who he was as a pitcher.

The Elbow That Started It All

Before any of that, John was a 31-year-old sinkerballer having a career year for the Los Angeles Dodgers -- 13-3, a 2.59 ERA -- when he tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow during a start in July 1974. In 1974, that injury ended careers. It didn't get fixed. It got a farewell tour.

Dr. Frank Jobe had a different idea. On September 25, 1974, he performed a surgery nobody had ever tried on a professional athlete's elbow: drilling anchor points into the bones and grafting a tendon across the joint in a figure-eight pattern. Jobe himself put the odds of it working at about one in a hundred. John missed all of 1975 rehabbing, then came back in 1976 and didn't stop pitching until 1989 -- 14 more seasons on the same reconstructed elbow.

He won 124 games before the surgery. He won 164 after it. The operation that carries his name didn't just save a career -- it built a second, longer one on top of the first.

Signing with the Team He Couldn't Beat

Here's the part that gets lost: John started World Series games against the Yankees twice as a Dodger, and both times the Dodgers still lost the championship. He took the loss himself in Game 3 of the 1977 Series (Reggie Jackson's three-homer Game 6 still gets all the ink from that one). He personally beat the Yankees 1-0 in Game 2 of the 1978 rematch -- and New York still won the whole thing in six games anyway. Two tries, two championships for the other side.

So of course, that November, John signed with the Yankees as a free agent. If you can't beat them, and George Steinbrenner is waving a contract, you join them.

It worked immediately. In 1979, at age 36, John went 21-9 with a 2.96 ERA and finished second in the AL Cy Young voting -- Baltimore's Mike Flanagan ran away with it on 26 of 27 first-place votes, but John got the other one, edging out teammate Ron Guidry for the runner-up spot. In 1980, he set a career high with 22 wins and led the league with six shutouts. That one didn't produce a repeat trophy chase -- Steve Stone won it outright for Baltimore, Oakland's Mike Norris was the actual runner-up, and John finished fourth behind teammate Goose Gossage in third. Back-to-back 20-win seasons at an age when most pitchers are already broadcasters is still back-to-back 20-win seasons.

The Pinch-Hit Heard Around the Bronx

The strike-shortened 1981 season cost John some of his shine on paper -- 9-8, though his 2.63 ERA said the stuff was still there -- but the postseason is where his Yankees tenure got its defining moment, and it wasn't a good one for him.

New York beat Milwaukee in the division series, swept Oakland in the ALCS, and ran into the Dodgers -- John's old team -- in the World Series. He'd already gone 2-1 with a 2.42 ERA that October. Then came Game 6. Tied game, fourth inning, John due up with runners on. Manager Bob Lemon pinch-hit for him with Bobby Murcer instead of letting his starter hit. The Yankees didn't score. Reliever George Frazier gave up three runs the next inning, New York lost 9-2, and the Dodgers -- the team John had lost two World Series to as their own pitcher -- won this one at his expense from the other side.

It's still one of the most second-guessed calls in Yankees postseason history, and John wasn't the one who made it.

Traded Away, and Somehow Back

The Yankees dealt John to the California Angels on August 31, 1982, closing out a rocky final season (10-10) in his first stint. He kept pitching well into his 40s for the Angels and briefly the A's, then came back to the Bronx in May 1986 at age 43 because the rotation needed arms and John still had one.

He gave the Yankees three more full seasons after that -- 13-6 in 1987, 9-8 in 1988 (the year he became the oldest player in the major leagues after Phil Niekro's retirement) -- and made the Opening Day start in 1989 at 45 years old. He won his 288th and final career game that April, struggled through May, and was released before the month was out. He announced his retirement that September, tying Deacon McGuire's major-league record of 26 seasons pitched.

He never got the ring. He got something else instead -- a surgery that carries his name into every clubhouse in baseball, and a Yankees career that, on its own, would be a perfectly good story even if nobody ever called it "Tommy John surgery." Ninety-one wins, two stints twelve years apart, and a fastball he was still throwing at 45 (a fastball his own surgeon gave a one-in-a-hundred shot of existing at all). Not bad for a guy who was supposed to be done at 31.