Tommy John died Saturday at his home in Bradenton, Florida. He was 83.
The record books will note that he won 288 games across 26 seasons, that he made four All Star teams, that he is one of only two pitchers in MLB history with more than 275 wins who isn’t in the Hall of Fame, which is shameful. They will talk about the surgery that carries his name, the one that turned a career ending injury into a footnote instead of an ending. That’s the Tommy John most of the world knew. I knew a different one. I knew him as a kid.
I met him when I was a very young teenager, first as a starstruck fan, then, almost impossibly, as his bullpen catcher during the comeback year nobody thought would happen.
The Ride of My Young Life
My best friend and I heard that Tommy was making an appearance at an event in Century City, so we caught a bus down from the suburbs just to see him. We already knew him a little by then. Dodger Stadium was where we spent nearly every free hour of our childhood, and Tommy was one of the few players who actually noticed a couple of kids hanging around and took the time to talk to us. After the event that day, he offered to drive us back to the Dodger stadium. I remember sitting in the back of his car feeling like a prince, rolling right past the guard at the stadium gate like we belonged there. Fifty years later, I can still see it exactly as it happened.
The Night of the Injury
I was there the night he hurt his arm. I walked out to his car with him afterward, and I will never forget the look on his face. It was fear, plain and simple, the fear of a man who believed he had just thrown his last pitch. Soon after, he underwent an experimental surgery on his left arm that almost no one expected to work. In the months that followed, Tommy developed a stutter that stayed with him until he finally took the mound again, eighteen months later.
Bullpen Sessions
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. And when Tommy began his comeback the following season, someone had to catch those bullpen sessions with him.
That someone was me. I couldn’t have been prouder.
It was not easy work. Tommy still could not fully extend his fingers, and his control and accuracy was nothing less than 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, and I will admit I tried to duck out of those bullpen sessions when I could, hiding out in the outfield shagging fly balls during batting practice instead, which I loved. It rarely worked. Sooner or later I would hear Red Adams, the Dodgers pitching coach, calling me back to the bullpen to catch TJ, and back I would go. What always stayed with me, even as a kid who barely understood what he was watching, was that Tommy never once gave up on himself.
Winter Ball – He’s Back!
That winter I went with him to Arizona for winter ball. Tommy 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 Tommy something to work with. These kids had no such patience. They would swing at anything, good pitch or bad, and Tommy could not afford to waste a single one testing them. Nothing was a given out there. Every pitch had to mean something.
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, which was how it was done in those days. Back then pitch velocity was measured crossing the plate and not out of the pitcher’s hand as it is today. The older method clocks a pitch that reads 5-10 mph slower. One of his fastballs came in at 88 by that old measurement, which means by today’s standard, Tommy was likely throwing well into the 90s again. Back to his full, pre-injury self.
I shouted out the number, and the whole crowd erupted around me, coaches, Dodger executives, and teammates all cheering at once. Everybody there understood exactly what they had just witnessed. Tommy John was back. He 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.
Tommy John was one of the kindest, most decent men I have ever known. He never made a kid feel small. I loved him then, and I love him still.
Baseball lost a legend this weekend.
The world lost a saint.
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