Tommy John, Whose Repaired Arm Transformed Baseball, Dies At 83

John died Saturday at his home in Lakewood Ranch, a master-planned community near Bradenton, Florida, according to a statement from his agent, Mike Maguire. He had entered into home hospice care following a recurrence of bladder cancer, the New York Yankees and MLB.com reported earlier this month after John issued a public farewell. The Yankees were one of six teams John played for.

John was in his 12th Major League season when he departed a July 1974 outing for the Los Angeles Dodgers after throwing a pitch that triggered a severe burning sensation in his arm. X-rays of his left elbow revealed a torn ulnar collateral ligament, a thick band of tissue in the elbow's inner half that absorbs most of the shock of the throwing motion.

He rested his arm for a month, then tried to stabilize it with athletic tape to reduce pressure on the ligament. Neither worked. "If that kid ever pitches again, it's going to take more than human work," the Dodgers' team doctor, Frank Jobe, told John's wife, Sally, according to a 1978 account in the Saturday Evening Post.

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John wasn't ready to retire. At 31, he was considered one of baseball's most reliable starting pitchers and was in the midst of one of the best seasons of his career.

Jobe mulled whether he could graft a part of a tendon from elsewhere in John's body to form a new elbow ligament, similar to how doctors grafted part of a wrist tendon to strengthen the ankles of polio patients. He gathered a team to perform the experimental surgery and told John that it had a 1% chance of success. (Jobe later admitted he was confident that it would work but didn't want to give John any false hope.)

Jobe recalled that John stared at him before saying, "Let's do it."

The surgery took place on Sept. 25, 1974, two months after John threw his fateful pitch. Jobe drilled three tiny holes in a Y shape on John's medial epicondyle, a small bump on the left elbow. He wove a figure 8-shaped graft through the holes three times so it had the same size as the torn ligament.

Nobody had any idea how long it would take for the new ligament to incorporate into the bone, or whether it would at all.

Early Worries

The result initially appeared disastrous. Jobe had damaged John's ulnar nerve, impairing the arm's circulation and leaving the pitcher's hand looking like a gnarled claw. John required another surgery to reroute the nerve around scar tissue.

Eventually, the new ligament set and strengthened. Following Jobe's advice to "listen to your body," John gradually rebuilt strength in the elbow over the next 15 months, missing the entire 1975 season. He returned to the Majors in April 1976 and reestablished himself as one of baseball's best pitchers in 1977, earning him the nickname the Bionic Man.

"Whatever they did in that surgery room," wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, "baseball better hope they kept the blueprint."

The surgery gave John's career a stunning second act: He started 382 more games over 14 more seasons, twice finished as the runner-up for the National League Cy Young Award (given to the best pitcher in a given season) and was named to three All-Star teams. In 1977, he threw a complete-game shutout against the Philadelphia Phillies to clinch the National League pennant. By the end of his career, he had become just one of 13 pitchers in Major League Baseball's post-integration era to pitch after turning 45 years old. He was one of just seven pitchers to start 700 games in the sport's history.

What swiftly became known as "Tommy John surgery" transformed how throwing arms are treated and healed. A database kept by baseball analyst Joe Roegele estimates that more than 2,700 professional players have undergone the surgery, including some of the best pitchers in baseball, such as Shohei Ohtani, John Smoltz and Jacob Degrom (twice).

A 2018 study in the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery found that most players returned to any level of play within 13 months and Major League Baseball players had an 80% chance of returning to their prior level of performance.

In The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports (2016), Jeff Passan wrote, "The arm in baseball has had two eras: Before Tommy John and After Tommy John."

Throwing at Night

Thomas Edward John Jr. was born on May 22, 1943, in Terre Haute, Indiana to Thomas Edward John, a lineman for the Public Service of Indiana, and the former Ruth Woods. John credited his love of pitching to a 1948 book by pitching great Bob Feller called How to Pitch. His father built him a batter-sized target - shoulders to knees, 17.5 inches wide - and installed floodlights so he could practice at night.

John starred in basketball and baseball during high school but struggled with a stutter that hampered his ability to communicate with classmates. By the time he reached the Major Leagues, he had defeated the stutter so thoroughly that Yankees manager Bob Lemon once quipped, "Ask Tommy John what time it is and he'll tell you how to make a watch."

Recruited to play basketball by University of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, John instead chose to sign with the Cleveland Indians for $40,000 after graduating high school. He attended Indiana State University in his off time from baseball. He debuted with Cleveland in 1963, just three months after his 20th birthday.

He met his wife, the former Sally Simmons, at Indiana State University on a date organized by the university president. They would have four children. 

In 1982, the Johns' 2-year-old son, Travis, plunged almost 40 feet from a window in a family vacation home and was in a coma for three weeks. He made a full recovery and later that year threw out the first pitch of a playoff game between the Yankees and Milwaukee Brewers. In 2010, their youngest son, Taylor, died of a seizure and heart failure caused by an overdose of prescription drugs.

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The marriage lasted more than four decades before ending in divorce. John's second wife was the former Cheryl Zeldin.

John credited his Christian faith for aiding him during his injury rehabilitation. In 1979, a short religious film called The Tommy John Story played to church groups across the country. John maintained a friendship with Richard Nixon, who phoned him during contentious contract negotiations with the Yankees to encourage him to "keep the faith."

High School Arms

In his latter years, John denounced how frequently the surgery that bore his name was being performed on young pitchers. John and his son, Tommy John III, a chiropractor, began touring the country in 2018 warning against the dangers of year-round baseball development and campaigning to end the surgery on young ballplayers, a practice the elder John called "appalling."

A 2025 study in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that high school teenagers were undergoing the procedure at significantly higher rates than college-aged patients.

John and Jobe were effusive in their mutual praise. Following Jobe's death in 2014, John said he had been lucky "to have one of the greatest surgeons of all time" working for the Dodgers at the time of his injury. The next year, John told the National Baseball Hall of Fame that Jobe was one of the three most important figures in baseball history, the others being Babe Ruth and union leader Marvin Miller.

The mild-mannered Jobe had wanted the procedure to be named after John and not after himself as a way to honor the pitcher's courage for undergoing an experimental surgery that could have ruined his arm

"I did a little bit of surgery," Jobe said about the procedure. "But he did all the hard work."