OK, I'm not sure what this refers to -- "Tommy John surgery"?
I suppose I could go to espn.com or cnnsi.com and look him up, or
mlb.com, and find out just what he had surgery for, but I'm going to ask
you to define your jargon for me instead. :)
Julia
Sorry. "Tommy John surgery" is, appropriately enough, named after the
pitcher it was first performed on, Tommy John. He tore the ulnar collateral
ligament in his elbow. This is one of the classic pitcher injuries and
before him it had always been a career-ender. Tommy John went to Dr. Frank
Jobe and apparently said - I don't care what you have to do, figure
something out and fix me. Jobe took a tendon from his non-pitching arm and
grafted it onto his pitching arm, threading it through holes he drilled in
the bone. John recovered and went on to win I think something in the range
of 170 more games, although he did it with greatly reduced velocity on his
throws. Since then the surgery has improved greatly. It's almost a rite of
passage for pitchers - many of them have gone through it. Kerry Wood, Matt
Morris, Matt Mantei, Scott Erickson, John Smoltz - there's basically no end
to the list. The surgery is often performed for tears of the Medial
Collateral Ligament as well. What makes this really interesting is that
pitchers who have the surgery now often report that they can throw _harder_
afterwards - it seems to add 1-2 mph to fastballs fairly consistently. The
theory is that the new replacement ligament is actually tougher than the old
one. It usually takes a pitcher 2 years to recover fully. They miss one
full year, then usually pitch at greatly reduced effectiveness for another
year, before usually (but not always) bouncing back all the way. I imagine
it won't be too long before someone undergoes it willingly in the hope of
the benefits.
Incidentally, the next time someone claims that pitchers were better in the
old days - Tommy John surgery is one of the (many) convincing arguments for
why they weren't. Think how bad pitching would be in the majors if all of
those pitchers, plus many more, had their careers ended prematurely. That's
what did happen until 1974.
A good description of the surgery is
http://espn.go.com/trainingroom/s/2000/0315/427112.html
Gautam
