Tommy John, the Pitcher Who Changed Baseball Economics, Dies at 83

I was there the night he hurt his arm. I walked out to his car with him afterward. The look on his face was fear, plain and simple, the fear of a man who believed he had just thrown his last pitch. Soon after, he underwent the experimental surgery. In the months that followed, he developed a stutter that stayed with him until he finally took the mound again, 18 months later.

A couple of months after his surgery, I got the job every baseball-obsessed kid in Los Angeles dreamed of: ballboy and batboy in the Dodger clubhouse. As I grew older, bigger, and stronger, they started trusting me to throw batting practice and catch bullpen sessions before games. When John began his comeback the following season, someone had to catch those bullpen sessions. That someone was me.

It was not easy work. John still could not fully extend his fingers. His control was horrendous. Pitches bounced in the dirt. Pitches sailed over my head. A few caught me in places a catcher never wants to be caught. It felt like a small war zone back there. I tried to duck out of those bullpen sessions when I could, hiding out in the outfield shagging fly balls during batting practice instead. It rarely worked. Sooner or later I would hear Red Adams, the Dodgers pitching coach, calling me back to the bullpen to catch TJ. What always stayed with me was that John never once gave up on himself.

That winter I went with him to Arizona for winter ball. He told me once that pitching to those young hitters, most of them just out of high school or college and nowhere near the majors, was harder than it looked. A big leaguer had discipline. He would take a pitch off the plate, wait for his spot, give a veteran like John something to work with. These kids had no such patience. They would swing at anything, good pitch or bad. John could not afford to waste a single one testing them.

One afternoon from that winter has stayed with me my whole life. I was working the radar gun behind the plate, clocking his pitches as they crossed it. That was how it was done in those days, before pitch velocity was measured coming out of the pitcher's hand, a method that reads 5-10 mph faster. One fastball came in at 88 by that old measurement. By today's standard, John was likely throwing well into the 90s again. Back to his full, pre-injury self. I shouted out the number. The whole crowd erupted around me. Coaches, Dodger executives, and teammates all cheered at once. Everybody there understood exactly what they had just witnessed. Tommy John was back.

John went on to win 20 games in a season with the Dodgers, and two 20-game winning seasons with the Yankees, on a rebuilt elbow that, by all reason, had no business working that well again.

Baseball lost a legend. The business of baseball lost a quiet architect.