High Heat (27 page)

“I remember thinking, ‘Gee whiz, that was really foul. Did I get out of synch or something with my arm slot or delivery?'” he says “That's what I figured it must have been, so I tried not to think anything of it.”

John went ahead and uncorked another pitch. Once again his elbow went totally out of kilter, feeling like it was “flying out somewhere to right field. . . . It happened again when the arm was coming through, in the same motion, as I was driving to the plate. The sharp pain was back and I knew this wasn't like anything else I'd had before.”

With that John called time and walked off the mound. Dodgers manager Walter Alston came out of the dugout.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“I hurt myself,” John replied.

In the dugout, John put on his warm-up jacket and the word was spread to find Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodgers' physician, who was in attendance that day. After the game, Dr. Jobe examined John in the trainer's room as teammates and reporters milled about, asking questions that John couldn't really answer. Of course, this was before magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, so Dr. Jobe and other medical experts were flying blind.

The next day Dr. Jobe reexamined John's elbow again. The joint, swollen and sore, was loose to the touch when manipulated. After icing the elbow for another day, taking X-rays, and a visit to Dr. Herb Stark, an expert in tendon injuries, Dr. Jobe concluded that John had torn the left elbow's medial collateral ligament, which ties the arm's two largest bones, the ulna and the humerus, together. The pitching motion puts tremendous force on the elbow joint, where the medial collateral is located. Repeated pressure causes the joint to deteriorate over time. Medical experts say it's akin to a rope that gradually frays due to great force. The pain that John felt on those last two pitches to Breeden was the result of his arm tearing apart at the elbow.

Back in 1974, such a diagnosis meant retirement. Up to that point in its history, baseball was filled with pitchers who had felt something snap in their arm—a moment that ended their playing days forever. In John's case, the pitching arm was further compromised by surgery he had undergone two years earlier to remove bone chips. Immediately after hearing the diagnosis, John realized that the odds were against him. “For a pitcher, having arm operations is a little like gambling,” he says. “You may win once, but each time you take a chance, hurt the arm again, you're coming closer to losing everything.”

Unfortunately for John, plenty was on the line. His wife, Sally, was due with the couple's first child in a few weeks. With one pitch, John had gone from being the family's breadwinner, perhaps pitching for a play-off share, to being out of baseball as a player. Dr. Jobe advised John to look for another line of work. Realistically there was no way that John would ever throw a ball with much velocity again, let alone deliver it hard enough to get major-league hitters out.

“I had the option to hang it up,” John says. “I spoke with the Dodgers about possibly managing. But I also kept talking with Dr. Jobe about what could be done, if I was willing to take a chance.”

Hypothetically, Dr. Jobe said, it was possible to transplant a tendon from elsewhere in the body and string it through the damaged joint. Holes could be drilled in the ulna and humerus bones, and the elbow joint could then be knitted together with the new tendon. Back in the 1970s, such scenarios sounded like science fiction. Still, John wanted to hear more.

“You need to understand what I was thinking at that time,” John says. “I couldn't imagine my life without baseball. I still can't. It's all I've ever known, so I was open to any and all ideas Dr. Jobe came up with. Even when he started to talk about transplanting a tendon from elsewhere in my body to the damaged elbow, I was ready to go ahead. I was ready even after I asked about the chances of this succeeding and he said, ‘One, maybe two chances in a 100.' I said OK because that's how much I still wanted to play ball at the highest level.”

From such desperate straits, the left-hander became the poster boy for an operation that has now become commonplace in baseball. The first operation on John's elbow was performed in mid-September 1974. During that time the worst fears were confirmed. Not only was the ligament holding the elbow together torn, but the muscles surrounding the joint had separated, and the nerve itself had been severely traumatized.

“Considering the long odds with the surgery, what Dr. Jobe had told me about finding another line of work, I figured I better have a serious backup plan when it came to playing baseball,” Johns recalls. “So, I called Hoyt Wilhelm at his home in Sarasota. I asked him if he could teach me how to throw a knuckleball. He seemed to think I'd have no problem learning it. Sometimes I think maybe that's the way I should have gone. If so, I'd still be pitching. I'd be baseball's Methuselah.”

John never followed up with learning Wilhelm's knuckler. Many believe that's because the ligament surgery was a success right off. In reality, the radical procedure almost didn't work.

In the weeks after the operation, scar tissue compromised the surrounding nerves and paralysis began to set in. Tommy Lasorda says that John's “ring finger and little finger had curled up into his palm. It had atrophied into the hand of a cripple. All he felt was pain and numbness.”

After John scalded himself, due to increasing numbness in his fingers, he returned to Dr. Jobe. “Something had to be done. The arm was dying,” John explains. “By this point, I had no choice but to keep going down this path.”

A few weeks before Christmas 1974, a second operation was performed to clear away the scar tissue. Afterward John's left arm was placed in a cast for several weeks. Never one to mince words, John says his left hand resembled “a monkey paw” when the cast was taken off. That didn't stop him from giving his wife a softball mitt for a game of catch in the backyard. Despite hot-water therapy and squeezing Silly Putty, the arm was slow to respond. To hold a baseball, John needed to pick the ball up with his good right hand and
place it in his lifeless left hand. To keep it from falling out, he had to curl the fingers around the ball, sometimes taping them in place.

Even though John couldn't really grip a ball at first, he insisted on attending spring training at the Dodgers' complex in Vero Beach, Florida. Several of his teammates thought he was crazy; just another washed-up pitcher in denial. None of the catchers wanted anything to do with him, so John took half a dozen balls every day down to a concrete wall at the Dodgers' facility, where pitchers practiced their pickoff moves. There, with nobody watching, he tried to throw as best he could.

“What I tell guys who've had this surgery done is that it's like learning how to pitch all over again,” John says. “You have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to have good days and a lot of bad days. No avoiding it because of the steep learning curve involved. You have to accept it. Some days you're going to be horrible out there.”

John says about the only people who believed in him at this point were Dr. Jobe, Lasorda, and Dodgers scouting director Ben Wade. Throughout the 1975 season, John was on the Dodgers' bench, charting pitches and trying to make the best of things. “I believe that the injury was God's way of testing me,” he says. “Adversity can result in patience and discipline, even character.”

John would need all of that and then some to make it back to the pitching mound at the big-league level. Dr. Jobe had told him that nerves regenerate at the rate of an inch a month. So, during that season of purgatory, he kept an eye out for any signs of progress. One morning, when he was driving to the ballpark, John noticed he was able to raise his left pinkie finger, ever so slightly, off the steering wheel. That became another milepost on the road to recovery. In such small steps his body was healing itself. During this time he embraced a line of scripture that he heard at church—“For with God nothing shall be impossible,” Luke 1:37.

“Slowly I was gaining momentum,” he says. “It was coming back together for me. The key was throwing—a lot. That was the only way we knew of to build up strength in my arm again. So I started to throw every day, often off the mound to a catcher. Before all of this,
I had never been a big believer in throwing every day. In fact, my old pitching coach, Johnny Sain, had told me back in 1971 that I should be throwing every day, but I hadn't paid any attention to him.”

What many don't realize is that time almost ran out on John. If anybody needed to go through the routine of spring training, it was the guy recovering from landmark surgery. Yet time in the Florida and Arizona camps was cut short by a labor dispute between the players and owners. By the time it was settled, John had pitched in only three spring training games.

Throughout John's comeback attempt, the Dodgers had been supportive. They let him chart pitches on the bench, even though his teammates thought he was fooling himself. Yet as the 1976 regular season got under way, Dodgers manager Walter Alston began to lose patience. In his first start, John gave up a three-run homer to the Atlanta Braves. Before his next game, just his second start of the season, Alston told John that this could be his last chance. Unless he really showed something against the Houston Astros, the ballclub was of a mind to release him.

With that as the backdrop, John took the mound. When the first two Astros hitters singled, Alston ordered the bullpen to start warming up. No doubt about it. John was on a short leash. The left-hander appeared to be out of trouble when Houston's Cesar Cedeno hit into what was a sure double play. But the relay was thrown away and only Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey pegging a runner out at the plate kept the Astros off the scoreboard. A wild pitch had moved Cedeno to second with two out.

When John went 3-and-0 to the Astros' Bob Watson, his comeback bid appeared to be nearly over. Catcher Joe Ferguson called time and came out to the mound to talk things over with John. “Now we're gonna find out what you're made of,” he told John. “Forget about the hand, forget about the elbow, forget everything. I want to see smoke. Gimme your best fastball. Throw as hard as you can—let 'em rip.”

As Johns recalls the moment decades later, “So there I was, one pitch from adios. And I did exactly what Ferguson ordered. I threw three heaters, right down the pipe.”

Watson struck out and John never looked back. He finished the season with a 10–10 record and was named Comeback Player of the Year by the
Sporting News
. He would go on to pitch 14 more seasons after his surgery, winning 164 games over that period.

Much has changed medically since John's operation. In 1974, Dr. Jobe rated the chances of his success at 1–2 percent. Today, the chances of complete recovery are 85–90 percent. The injury and resulting surgery have become common in kids as young as 10. And an unexpected benefit of the surgery was discovered. Pitchers who undergo the procedure can often actually throw the ball harder and faster when they return.

A study by the American Orthopedic Society found that 83 percent of athletes at all levels who had Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery returned to action at “the same or better level of play.”

“Today there's little if any downside to having the surgery,” says scout Don Welke. “It's become commonplace at the professional level and more than a few seem to be adding some speed to their fastball because of it.”

John says he wasn't sure if he threw harder after coming back from the surgery. He was more concerned that his delivery was balanced and the arm came through at the proper angle. Only then could he maintain enough velocity to stay in the game.

In other sports, the limits of performance are methodically broken and shaved away. Thanks to Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, marks in track and swimming were shattered at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. But the gold standard in baseball has long been 100 miles per hour.

“It's a number that is recognized as the elite,” says Nolan Ryan, the all-time strikeout king. “So when someone throws at that level, it gets people's attention.”

It's also a good way to get hurt. Experts at the American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI) in Birmingham, Alabama, where pitchers with sore arms are routinely sent for examination, confirm what Tommy John felt that day in 1974: The harder a guy throws, the more violence can be done to the arm. Pitchers can lift weights, even
skirt the rules by doing steroids, but their ligaments and tendons remain prone to injury.

 

 

“Y
ou ready to throw?” says Glenn Fleisig, tossing a hardball in my direction.

Actually, I look better suited for a pickup game of softball in the park. I try to snag the ball nonchalantly, which is pretty much impossible with the softball glove I've brought along. It's so old it's been endorsed by Ted Williams—yes, the vintage model from Sears. I'm dressed in black spandex biker shorts, white ankle socks, and running sneakers. Also, I'm bare-chested—my red Washington Nationals T-shirt draped over a nearby chair, well out of camera range.

As part of the search for the secrets behind high heat, I traveled to ASMI early in the summer of 2009. Located on the St. Vincent's medical campus, a few blocks east of downtown Birmingham, Fleisig and his staff work in conjunction with Dr. James Andrews, the most famous orthopedic surgeon in sports. His office lies only a short walk away, where framed autographed jerseys from Drew Brees, Clinton Portis, and Carmelo Anthony line the hallways. But this afternoon, we're in the cavernous motion laboratory, the domain of Fleisig and his research crew.

I'm bare-chested because 21 reflective markers have been attached to the end points of the bones used for pitching. I sport three on my right pitching wrist and hand alone. Overhead, eight cameras on the ceiling are ready to record my every move at 240 frames per second. The high-speed cameras will be electronically linked, with the data flowing into a single laptop.