Baseball Guru
06-21-2002, 05:34 PM
Sunday, June 16, 2002
By SAM BORDEN
HARRISBURG, Pa.
Tommy John's legacy is scattered around the world, in the elbows of pitchers who have had their careers saved by the surgical procedure named after him.
But Tommy John, the man, is here — in a small town on the Susquehanna River, the coach for 11 Harrisburg Senator pitchers, most of whom won't come close to a fraction of his 288 career wins.
First-year Senators pitching coach Tommy John watches his starting pitcher warm up. John says this is the time for coaching, not in the middle of a game.
At 20, John made his debut in Cleveland, at 31 he revived his career with the revolutionary arm surgery, and at 59 he is back in the minors, back in the Eastern League where he got his start.
It is a circle, but it's also a necessity if John hopes to achieve his latest dream: managing in the majors.
"Nobody thinks that a pitcher can know anything about baseball," he says. "They think you only worry about the game every five days. But I'm going to prove them wrong."
If John does, it won't be the first time. On July 17, 1974, John was 13-3 and pitching for the Dodgers when he felt his elbow nearly disintegrate. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodgers' orthopedist, suggested a radical type of surgery, where he would take a tendon from John's right arm and fuse it to his left — offering what amounted to a brand-new elbow.
"If I didn't have the surgery I wouldn't be able to pitch again, if I did have the surgery maybe I'd be able to pitch again," John says. "It was a no-lose situation for me because I couldn't pitch as I was."
John turned that "maybe" into 13 more seasons in the majors (including eight with the Yankees), birthing a new career and a name for the surgery that provided it. "Tommy John surgery" is a part of the sports lexicon, a saving grace for pitchers who need new arms. "Every time I'm watching SportsCenter or some highlights show and I hear someone mention ‘Tommy John' I always look up," says Mark Connor, who coached John while he was with the Yankees and is now the pitching coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. "I always wonder if they're talking about the man or the arm."
* * *
The irony in John's current venture is that when Dallas Green and Syd Thrift (Yankees manager and GM, respectively, in 1989) released John on May 30 of that year, they offered him a job as a Single-A pitching coach — which he vehemently declined.
"I thought I could keep pitching," he says. "I made a few calls to other teams and I was working out. I was riding my bike up and down the hills of Cresskill and Alpine (New Jersey). The guys on my son's (11-year old) team were catching (my pitches). You don't have to throw hard to keep your arm in good shape."
Eventually it became clear that 26 seasons (second to Nolan Ryan), 288 wins (22nd alltime) and 2,245 strikeouts was all he would get. He played in the World Series three times, but never won it, and was an All-Star four times.
After retiring, he worked on the TV and radio side — "I was learning how to be a John Sterling," he says — but he always yearned to be back in the dugout.
And so it was by chance that John and his wife were on a flight from Charlotte to New York on Sept. 11, and that they were the last airplane to land at LaGuardia before the airport was shut down.
The couple went to a friend's house in Long Island to figure out how to get back to North Carolina. While he was waiting, John found that his host had a connection to former Mets assistant GM Omar Minaya — who a few months later would take over as GM of the Montreal Expos, the parent club of the Senators.
"The guy we stayed with, his late father-in-law was a guy named Bill Shea — as in, Shea Stadium," John says. "So I said ‘Do you know Omar?' and he did. So he made a phone call for me."
That phone call turned into a fulltime job with the Senators, where John has established a unique style as the team's pitching coach. Popular protocol dictates the pitching coach make several trips to the mound each game, ostensibly to calm the pitcher down or give a quick tip.
But John stays in the dugout — he has only gone to the mound once this season — preferring to do his teaching on off days.
"You can't go out and give a lesson in 20 seconds," John says. "Part of pitching and being successful is figuring out what you have to do on your own. When they're out there, I'm a cheerleader and a psychologist."
Says Senators manager Dave Huppert: "He's got credibility right off the bat, however he does it. He knows this game frontward and backward."
If the Senators' pitching staff continues at its current pace, it will finish with the lowest ERA since 1996. That would be an accomplishment for John, but he maintains that he has never noticed statistics much.
"People thought I wanted to stay in the league after the Yankees let me go because I was chasing 300 wins," he says. "But the teams I talked to were looking at me pitching in the bullpen because I could throw everyday. I don't care about wins — I won more games than I ever thought I'd win."
* * *
John has only made one trip to the mound during a game this season.
When John was with the Yankees, there were days he would drive over the George Washington Bridge — "When I came in '79 the toll was a buck-fifty," he says with a laugh — go to the Stadium and trudge out to the bullpen.
He'd climb the mound with a bucket of balls — no catcher needed — and throw his signature pitch, the sinker, over and over. The ball would start high and then dive to the ground, bouncing off the back of home plate to the backstop.
It's that will that John hopes will someday turn him into a successful manager in the majors.
"He's the only guy I knew who threw every day in between starts off the mound," says Connor.
"He just loved to throw the baseball, to make it do things that no one else could. He has so much perseverance. And that's why he'll be good at managing. I can easily see T.J. doing it in the big leagues someday."
By SAM BORDEN
HARRISBURG, Pa.
Tommy John's legacy is scattered around the world, in the elbows of pitchers who have had their careers saved by the surgical procedure named after him.
But Tommy John, the man, is here — in a small town on the Susquehanna River, the coach for 11 Harrisburg Senator pitchers, most of whom won't come close to a fraction of his 288 career wins.
First-year Senators pitching coach Tommy John watches his starting pitcher warm up. John says this is the time for coaching, not in the middle of a game.
At 20, John made his debut in Cleveland, at 31 he revived his career with the revolutionary arm surgery, and at 59 he is back in the minors, back in the Eastern League where he got his start.
It is a circle, but it's also a necessity if John hopes to achieve his latest dream: managing in the majors.
"Nobody thinks that a pitcher can know anything about baseball," he says. "They think you only worry about the game every five days. But I'm going to prove them wrong."
If John does, it won't be the first time. On July 17, 1974, John was 13-3 and pitching for the Dodgers when he felt his elbow nearly disintegrate. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodgers' orthopedist, suggested a radical type of surgery, where he would take a tendon from John's right arm and fuse it to his left — offering what amounted to a brand-new elbow.
"If I didn't have the surgery I wouldn't be able to pitch again, if I did have the surgery maybe I'd be able to pitch again," John says. "It was a no-lose situation for me because I couldn't pitch as I was."
John turned that "maybe" into 13 more seasons in the majors (including eight with the Yankees), birthing a new career and a name for the surgery that provided it. "Tommy John surgery" is a part of the sports lexicon, a saving grace for pitchers who need new arms. "Every time I'm watching SportsCenter or some highlights show and I hear someone mention ‘Tommy John' I always look up," says Mark Connor, who coached John while he was with the Yankees and is now the pitching coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. "I always wonder if they're talking about the man or the arm."
* * *
The irony in John's current venture is that when Dallas Green and Syd Thrift (Yankees manager and GM, respectively, in 1989) released John on May 30 of that year, they offered him a job as a Single-A pitching coach — which he vehemently declined.
"I thought I could keep pitching," he says. "I made a few calls to other teams and I was working out. I was riding my bike up and down the hills of Cresskill and Alpine (New Jersey). The guys on my son's (11-year old) team were catching (my pitches). You don't have to throw hard to keep your arm in good shape."
Eventually it became clear that 26 seasons (second to Nolan Ryan), 288 wins (22nd alltime) and 2,245 strikeouts was all he would get. He played in the World Series three times, but never won it, and was an All-Star four times.
After retiring, he worked on the TV and radio side — "I was learning how to be a John Sterling," he says — but he always yearned to be back in the dugout.
And so it was by chance that John and his wife were on a flight from Charlotte to New York on Sept. 11, and that they were the last airplane to land at LaGuardia before the airport was shut down.
The couple went to a friend's house in Long Island to figure out how to get back to North Carolina. While he was waiting, John found that his host had a connection to former Mets assistant GM Omar Minaya — who a few months later would take over as GM of the Montreal Expos, the parent club of the Senators.
"The guy we stayed with, his late father-in-law was a guy named Bill Shea — as in, Shea Stadium," John says. "So I said ‘Do you know Omar?' and he did. So he made a phone call for me."
That phone call turned into a fulltime job with the Senators, where John has established a unique style as the team's pitching coach. Popular protocol dictates the pitching coach make several trips to the mound each game, ostensibly to calm the pitcher down or give a quick tip.
But John stays in the dugout — he has only gone to the mound once this season — preferring to do his teaching on off days.
"You can't go out and give a lesson in 20 seconds," John says. "Part of pitching and being successful is figuring out what you have to do on your own. When they're out there, I'm a cheerleader and a psychologist."
Says Senators manager Dave Huppert: "He's got credibility right off the bat, however he does it. He knows this game frontward and backward."
If the Senators' pitching staff continues at its current pace, it will finish with the lowest ERA since 1996. That would be an accomplishment for John, but he maintains that he has never noticed statistics much.
"People thought I wanted to stay in the league after the Yankees let me go because I was chasing 300 wins," he says. "But the teams I talked to were looking at me pitching in the bullpen because I could throw everyday. I don't care about wins — I won more games than I ever thought I'd win."
* * *
John has only made one trip to the mound during a game this season.
When John was with the Yankees, there were days he would drive over the George Washington Bridge — "When I came in '79 the toll was a buck-fifty," he says with a laugh — go to the Stadium and trudge out to the bullpen.
He'd climb the mound with a bucket of balls — no catcher needed — and throw his signature pitch, the sinker, over and over. The ball would start high and then dive to the ground, bouncing off the back of home plate to the backstop.
It's that will that John hopes will someday turn him into a successful manager in the majors.
"He's the only guy I knew who threw every day in between starts off the mound," says Connor.
"He just loved to throw the baseball, to make it do things that no one else could. He has so much perseverance. And that's why he'll be good at managing. I can easily see T.J. doing it in the big leagues someday."