Tommy John, a left-hander who won 288 games during his 26-year major league career but will be forever linked to Frank Jobe’s groundbreaking elbow reconstruction surgery that bears the pitcher’s name, died on Saturday, his agent confirmed. He was 83.
John died at his home in Bradenton, Florida, surrounded by his wife and other family members, his agent Mike Maguire said in a statement released on Sunday, according to CBS News.
John, a four-time All-Star who played for six teams from 1963 to 1989, had been dealing with “health issues” from his home, the New York Yankees said in a social media post on Aug. 8. According to Reuters, John had been in hospice care.
That same day, John shared an emotional open letter to Yankees fans on the occasion of the team’s 78th Old-Timers Day.
“I want to thank the Yankees organization & the Steinbrenner family for giving me this opportunity to say goodbye to everyone, along with all the friends & fans who followed me throughout my 26-year career,” John wrote. “Thanks to Dr. Jobe, who saved my arm & made it possible for me to continue pitching. That surgery has since gone on to save the careers of countless pitchers, including many of the very best in the game today.”
John had previously been diagnosed with bladder cancer, The Athletic reported. He also had COVID-19 and suffered blood clots in his lungs, according to the sports news website.
John pitched for eight seasons with the Yankees, seven with the Chicago White Sox, six with the Los Angeles Dodgers, three with the California Angels, two with Cleveland and one with the Oakland Athletics.
He started 700 games and won 20 games or more three times; his 21-9 record in 1979 led to a second-place finish in American League Cy Young Award balloting behind winner and fellow left-hander Mike Flanagan of Baltimore. Two years earlier, John was second in National League Cy Young voting, finishing second to another southpaw, Steve Carlton of Philadelphia.
On July 17, 1974, John was 13-3 and leading the National League in victories when he started for the N.L. West-leading Dodgers against the Montreal Expos, according to Retrosheet.org.
John began the third inning by giving up a single to Willie Davis and walking Bob Bailey. After two pitches to Hal Breeden, John felt agonizing pain in his left elbow, according to MLB.com. He threw one more pitch, called time and then walked off the mound.
“It felt as if I had left my arm someplace else. It was as if my body continued to go forward and my left arm had just flown out to right field, independent of the rest of me,” John told Sports Illustrated in a 1978 interview.
John believed his career was over. “The doctors, most of them, took one look and shook their heads,” Jay Price of The Staten Island Advance wrote in 1976.
Not Jobe.
On Sept. 25, 1974, Jobe, the Dodgers’ team physician, performed what would become the most important surgical procedure in MLB history.
According to MLB.com, the surgery is a procedure in which a partially or fully torn ulnar collateral ligament on the medial side of the elbow is replaced with a tendon from another part of a patient’s body or from a cadaver. Jobe took a tendon from John’s right wrist and drilled holes into the pitcher’s left ulna and humerus bones. He grafted the tendon in a “figure-eight” design, held securely in place by anchors.
“Part of his right arm was in his left arm,” Price wrote. “And working.”
Jobe, who died in 2014, said in 2013 that he gave the surgery “about a 1 in 100 chance” of working, MLB.com reported. John missed the entire 1975 season and returned to action in April 1976. He lost his first outing at Atlanta and pitched seven shutout innings in his next start but did not figure in the decision, according to Retrosheet.org. He would finally break through with a 7-1 victory on April 26, 1976, at home against Pittsburgh – his first win since July 7, 1974.
“I never had any doubt I could pitch again,” John said after the game, according to The Associated Press. “But these guys, they felt I was a little Pollyann-ish.
“They thought I was wasting my time.”
Dodgers manager Walter Alston was just as surprised as other baseball doubters.
“I don’t know that much about medicine, but I’m sure the doctors would have been happy if his left arm had been strong enough for him to drink a cup of coffee,” Alston told the AP.
John would win 164 games over the next 14 seasons, according to Baseball-Reference.com. During his first 12 seasons, John won 124 games. He relied mostly on his breaking pitches and a sinking fastball.
He once joked that when he had surgery on his arm, he asked the doctors to “put in a Koufax fastball,” one of the bread-and-butter pitches of Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax.
“They did,” John said. “But it was a Mrs. Koufax fastball.”
Jobe would perform the surgery again in 1978 on pitcher Brent Strom, according to MLB.com. Other notable pitchers who had the procedure since then include John Smoltz, the first pitcher elected to the Hall of Fame after having Tommy John surgery (2000); Stephen Strasburg (2010); Tarik Skubal (2016), who won back-to-back Cy Young Awards in 2024 and 2025; Shohei Ohtani (2018); Justin Verlander (2020) and Chris Sale (2020), who would earn Cy Young Award honors; and two-time Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom, who had Tommy John surgery twice, according to MLB.com – in 2010 and 2023.
While John was unable to pitch in the 1974 playoffs and World Series for the Dodgers, he did reach the postseason with Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978, compiling a 3-1 record. He also appeared in the postseason with the Yankees in 1980-81 and had a 2-1 mark; and in 1982, he went 1-1 with the Angels.
The second major crisis in John’s career came away from the baseball diamond. On Aug. 13, 1981, while John was in Detroit, his 2-year-old son, Travis, fell from the third-story window of a family friend’s condominium in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and struck his head on the fender of a parked vehicle, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.
John flew back east to be with his son, who remained in a coma for 19 days and was in critical condition for a month. John continued to pitch when the Yankees were at home but did not travel when New York went on the road so he could be with his son.
Travis John would recover from his injuries and would even throw out the first pitch before the Yankees’ Game 3 A.L. East Division Series game on Oct. 9, 1981, against the Milwaukee Brewers.
Thomas Edward John Jr. was born on May 22, 1943, in Terre Haute, Indiana. He attended Gerstmeyer High School and was signed by Cleveland in 1961, according to SABR.
He made his pitching debut on Sept. 6, 1963, appearing in relief for one scoreless inning during Cleveland’s 7-2 loss to the Washington Senators. He allowed back-to-back singles to Dick Phillips and Don Zimmer, then got a double play and fly out to end the inning, according to Baseball-Reference.com. He appeared in his final major league game on May 25, 1989, starting and pitching 5 1/3 innings against the Angels as a member of the Yankees. He did not figure in the decision.
Following his retirement at age 46, John became a broadcaster for the Minnesota Twins and then a coach at the college and minor league levels, The Athletic reported. He managed the Staten Island Yankees in 2004 and the Bridgeport Bluefish in 2007, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
John has never come close to being elected to the Hall of Fame. He was on the BBWAA ballot from 1995 to 2009, and his best showing was 31.7% in his final year of eligibility, according to Fox Sports. He was skipped over by the Veterans Committee in 2011, 2014, 2018 and 2020.
In the letter he published for Old-Timers’ Day, John said he remembered the advice his father gave him.
“The day I left for my first job as a pitcher,” John wrote, “my father looked at me and said, ‘Good luck, Tommy. Just remember one thing: whether you make it in the big leagues or you don’t, you’ll always just be Tommy John from Terre Haute, Indiana.
“I’ve never forgotten those words. Thank you and God bless.”