John, 70, was the first patient the procedure was attempted on, and it has since been dubbed “Tommy John Surgery.” John ended up winning more games after the surgery than he won before it.
“It'll go down in history, and I'll be dead in the grave and they'll still be having 'Tommy John surgery,'” John says, adding that he and Jobe are now forever linked “like Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello and Rowan and Martin.”
A star southpaw curveball pitcher, John was pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers in July of 1974 when he started suffering pain in the elbow of his pitching arm. Rest and traditional therapies didn't work.
“We had to think of something different,” Jobe says. “He was only 32 and didn't want to quit pitching.”
After several weeks of exploring and discussing options, Jobe came up with the idea of using the tendon as a ligament replacement and then presented the idea to John.
“Two weeks later, he said 'Let's do it,' ” Jobe recalls. “I said, 'You know the odds.' He was probably thinking the odds were pretty slim—but slim's better than none.”
The surgery was performed in September. John recalls how he wanted the operation done sooner, but says that Jobe delayed the procedure in order to get a top surgical team in place.
“He said, 'I don't know what I'm doing and I need as many good surgeons guiding me that I could get,'” John remembers. “Jobe was honest with me and, as soon as he said that, I knew I had the best surgeon I could find. If he told me to go out to Griffith Park in L.A. and rub dog poop on my elbow, I would have trusted him.”
John missed the 1975 season resting and rehabilitating his elbow and came back in 1976.
“I wasn't ready to start the season, but the season was there,” John says, recalling how he pitched “so-so” for five innings in his comeback game against the Atlanta Braves in a 3-0 loss. Walt Alston, the Dodgers' legendary manager, didn't offer any words of encouragement after the outing.
“He told me, 'Your next start will be your last start if you don't do any better,' ” John says.
He won Alston's approval the next game, throwing seven innings of shutout baseball in a game against the Houston Astros that the Dodgers eventually lost 1-0 in 16 innings. John finished with 10 wins and 10 losses in 1976, and he won the National League comeback player of the year award. He continued to play until May 1989. His 26-season career set a record for longevity that lasted until 1993 when, John said, that “son of a gun” Nolan Ryan played in his 27th season.
John finished with a career record of 288 wins and 231 losses. “One hundred twenty-four wins before the surgery and 164 wins after,” Jobe quickly points out.
“The thing that I'm most proud of is that, I pitched 13 years after the surgery and never missed a start,” John says.
While John was in the middle of his career when he had the procedure done, knuckleball pitcher Tom Candiotti was just getting started and still pitching in the minor leagues when he met with Jobe to discuss an elbow problem after the 1981 season.
“He said, 'If you're going to pitch anywhere higher than where you're at, you're going to have to get this addressed,'” Candiotti recalls. “Then he asked 'Are you a prospect?' I said 'Prospect? They just put me on the 40-man roster!'”
Jobe enjoys telling the story of how Candiotti still sends him a Christmas card each year signed “your prospect.”
Candiotti, 55, went on to pitch in the major leagues for 16 seasons and post a 151-164 career record. This included his second big league start with the Milwaukee Brewers, a 7-0 victory over John and the California Angels. The headline in the Milwaukee Journal read “Candiotti beats idol in the bionic battle.” In a story in which Jobe was featured prominently, Journal sports reporter Tom Flaherty wrote that, “If it hadn't been for John, Candiotti wouldn't be in the major leagues.” Flaherty later quipped, “Maybe Jobe should have thrown out the first ball.”
Jobe credits the work ethic of John and Candiotti and their rehabilitation efforts as having more to do with their success than his surgery. He notes how their procedures were done without CTs and MRIs, which do a much better job than an X-ray of showing whether tendons are healing or not.
After John's surgery, Jobe says he didn't do the procedure again for two years as he waited to see its results. There were a half dozen or so done after that, but they were not as successful or as high-profile. But Candiotti's success led to more UCL reconstruction operations by Jobe and others, and Jobe says he lost track of how many were done. Jobe credits the formation of specialty societies such as the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons and the Major League Baseball Team Physicians Association for advancing the field of sports medicine by providing forums to share ideas and get feedback from peers.
Although technology has helped improve the success of the procedure, John says the rehabilitation time still follows the same prescription: One season off, and don't start throwing until 16 weeks after the surgery.
“We've tried to speed it up, but Mother Nature only goes so fast with the healing,” Jobe says.
Along with working on elbows, Jobe helped keep Dodger pitching star Orel Hershiser in the big leagues for another 10 years after reconstructing his shoulder in 1990. John notes that Jobe has also delivered more than 500 babies.
“A lot of doctors are good technicians, but they never came up with anything innovative,” John says. “He's also got a great bedside manner—a lot of orthopedic surgeons are very cold in the way that they deal with people. The thing that we had that a lot of people don't have with their doctors is that I consider him a friend first and a doctor second.”
Candiotti, who is now part of the Arizona Diamondbacks radio team, says he “could not be happier for any one individual” than he is for Jobe and his recognition by the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I always told him, 'I should be paying you 5% of my salary—not my agent,'” Candiotti says.
Follow Andis Robeznieks on Twitter: @MHARobeznieks
