SPORT, September 1980
The count was 3 balls and 2 strikes; it was not the time to prove a point. To make an impression on a batter, a pitcher must wait for the right moment—a count of 0-and-2 or l-and-2—to remind the hitter of who owns home plate. Then, after the hitter gets up and removes the dirt from the seat of his pants, everyone can get back to work with a clear sense of where he is. But that reminder, psychological or otherwise, is just not done on 3-and-2. Any intelligent pitcher knows that and 12 summers ago, if lefthanded Tommy John was known for anything, it was his intelligence. Nastiness, no. Intelligence, yes.
He was pitching for the Chicago White Sox in 1968 and his fourth full season in the major leagues had become his best so far. His record at one point was 7-0. He was on the American League All-Star team. His earned-run average was 1.98.
John was pitching against Detroit. The count was 3-and-2 against Dick McAuliffe, a lefthanded hitter who stood in an odd open stance with his hands held high. The pitch took off to the backstop, about 2½ feet over everything—the catcher, the umpire and the batter’s head. And in McAuliffe’s opinion, that was too close.
McAuliffe charged the mound. John tackled him and as he did, McAuliffe’s knee crashed into John’s left shoulder. His pitching shoulder was separated. He considered going back to school to get a degree in mathematics and plan for a life without baseball.
Twelve years later 37-year-old Tommy John is still planning and still pitching. He is in his 15th full season, his second with the New York Yankees. This season he won his first seven decisions and became the first American League pitcher to win 10 games. In early June, John won his 200th career victory with a rebuilt left arm that is almost the same age as his oldest child, six-year-old Tami. By the All-Star break, he was 12-3. With a fluid pitching motion and that bionic arm; with intelligence plus a cunning that has led to allegations that he cheats, and with an inner toughness that is masked by an often jocular manner—it is conceivable that one day Tommy John will achieve his 300th victory.
There is irony in the idea that his career could have ended 12 years ago because he had been accused of throwing the knockdown pitch that has become a staple of baseball in 1980. There is irony because John, a deeply religious and conservative Midwesterner (“I’m just to the left of Barry Goldwater”), insists he would never throw at anyone’s head and that he has intentionally hit only two batters in his career. And the additional irony is that criticism he was not mean enough when he was with the White Sox makes John bristle.
“That’s the thing that upsets me a lot of times about baseball,” John was saying one afternoon this summer as he ate in a restaurant in Manhattan’s Central Park. With him was his blond wife, Sally. “People say you aren’t mean enough. They misconstrue meanness with desire. You don’t have to kick dogs or curse little old ladies.
“When you become that mean, you lose perspective about what you’re trying to do. A lot of people, they think you have to growl all the time. I think the days of the guy who comes in and snarls at people, those days are gone.
“I was never taught to hit the next guy after I gave up a home run. If a guy hits a ball off me, it’s because I made a mistake. If you retaliate and if they warned you beforehand, you’re thrown out of the game and that’s not what you're there to do. You’re there to win a game.
“Reggie Smith once told me: ‘Don’t worry about getting somebody. I don’t expect you to fight my fight. If a pitcher is trying to hit me, that’s between him and me and I’ll be out there swinging.’
“You have to protect your teammate. You absolutely have to. But where’s the line? If there is a fight and one of the pitchers gets hurt and you’re out for six or eight weeks, that hurts the ballclub.
“There just seems to be a rash of it now. The hitters have been so aggressive the last few years. They go into the ball. A pitcher has to pitch both sides of the plate. When you throw inside to establish the inside corner, to help you get the outside corner later, that is construed as a knockdown, or trying to hit him, when in essence all you’re doing is trying to establish the inside part. It’s something that I don’t think will ever be solved, because there’s no answer.”
Earlier in his career, when he was criticized in print for an unwillingness to knock batters down, John said, “There’s a difference between pitching somebody up and in and pitching to knock somebody down. Suppose I pitched against your son and hit him in the head? What would you say? Tommy John’s a great pitcher because he killed my son?”
Yet John admits there have been two times when he threw the ball not up and in, not a knockdown, but right at a hitter. When John was with the White Sox, Luis Tiant—once a teammate in the Cleveland farm system and a teammate again with the Yankees—hit Bill Melton of the White Sox. The next time Tiant batted, he was hit by a pitch. “On his posterior,” John says. “It took me three shots to hit it.”
The second incident happened in a game against the Orioles. With his team ahead by seven runs, Baltimore’s Luis Aparicio stole second and then third. John asked Manager Al Lopez to let him stay in the game long enough to face Aparicio again. He hit Aparicio in the legs.
After the McAuliffe incident, John was asked if he would ever retaliate. He left enough doubt to use to his advantage.
“I said, ‘He’ll always wonder,’” John remembers. “‘Will it be this pitch? Will it be the next pitch?’ He never really took his swings against me after that.”
But the separated shoulder had made John think about what he would do with his life without baseball. In 1974 he began to think a second time about life without baseball when he ruptured the medial collateral ligament in his left elbow. Doctors told him he would never pitch again. Common sense should have told John the same thing: no big league pitcher had been known to come back from so severe an arm injury.
But he did come back. In an operation believed to be the first of its kind performed on an athlete, a tendon from John’s right arm was transplanted into his left elbow to replace the ruptured ligaments. Two months later, after there had been nerve deterioration, a more risky operation became necessary. John had become unable to manipulate his left hand. An inflamed ulnar nerve had to be moved from behind the elbow to a spot in front of the joint. At that point the question was not whether he would pitch again but whether he would ever again have the full use of his then-useless left hand. For most of the 1975 season the only throwing he did was to lob to his wife in their backyard. Sally wore a mitt—not to protect her hand but to protect her husband’s pride.
Late that year he suddenly regained feeling in the hand. It was. Tommy and Sally John are convinced to this day, “a gift from God.”
In 1976 he proved he had full use of the hand and arm by making one of baseball’s most remarkable comebacks. John started 31 games for the Dodgers and had a 10-10 record. Since then he has twice won 20 or more games.
The “new” left arm, despite all the surgery done on it, has never been sore. Like the arms of most big league pitchers, it is packed in ice after use. And as John likes to point out in his cheerful way, it is in a sense “newer” than it was before the surgery, containing as it does the tendon from his right—or nonpitching—arm, the one that was spared the 25 years of hard work throwing a baseball.
Also making it easier on the arm is John's fluid pitching motion. It is a motion as deceptive as John’s former reputation for not being mean enough. What the batter sees is rarely what he gets.
The motion's ancestry traces back to a conversation on a pitching mound in the minor leagues. When John was at the beginning of his career, Steve Jankowski was at the end. They were roommates in 1962 with the Indians' Charleston, W. Va., farm team where Jankowski, a second baseman, was a player-coach. John, who grew up in Terre Haute, Ind., was in the second year of a pitching career that he had chosen over 35 college-basketball scholarship offers. In his first year, there had been a 10-4 record at Dubuque, with 99 strikeouts in 88 innings. In 1962. at Charleston, he was still trying to be a strikeout pitcher but his lack of control kept getting him into trouble.
“I would pitch five innings,” John remembers, “and strike out eight or nine guys. That’s good but I’d walk six and give up five hits and five runs and lose the game. And the other guy would pitch an eight or nine-hit game and win.”
“He wanted to make it so bad that he used to fight himself,” says Jankowski, who now works for a company that distributes newspapers and magazines in Cleveland. “He was his own worst enemy. I couldn’t imagine how he’d blow up so fast. All of a sudden he starts walking these fellows. I said, ‘What the hell’s going on?”’
One day, Jankowski said a lot more than that. He and John still remember the conversation. They cannot remember exactly when it took place or in what city, but it was on a mound where John’s control was starting to come apart and another game was slipping away. Jankowski decided to pay a little visit.
“I swore a few times,” Jankowski says. “I got mad at him. I knew what he could do and I figured if I roughed him up a little bit, he’d say, ‘Hey, these guys mean business.’ I really laid it right on the line to him.”
Jankowski pointed out that if John cared to turn around, he could see that there were seven guys behind him, all wearing the same shirts and all willing to try to catch the ball.
In other words, throw strikes.
John threw a three-hitter in his next start, but there were more visits to the mound and more reminders. John began thinking about pitching for the first time and the results showed. In 1962, at Charleston and Jacksonville, John walked 87 batters in 162 innings. The following season, with the same two teams, his totals were 51 walks in 197 innings.
In 1965, after he went to the White Sox, he was part of a group that learned how to throw the sinker from Manager Al Lopez and pitching coach Ray Berres. John learned that a pitching motion is a lot like a golf swing: an easy swing can make solid contact.
“The way I pitch,” John says, “is a lot like the way Gene Littler hits a golf ball. You see his easy swing and you say he can’t hit it that far, but he’s out there with them. You don’t have to grunt to crank out a long drive.”
John says his easy motion creates an optical illusion that makes the ball seem to travel slower than it is. Not that his fastball is Nolan Ryan-fast. It doesn’t have to be. “The art of pitching,” John says, “is making the hitter think you’re throwing the ball harder than you are, or slower than you are.”
“A lot of guys who come down the pike have good arms and good stuff.” says Red Adams, the Dodger pitching coach for the past 11 seasons. "Tommy realized what his strength is and he's developed it. He’s an artist. He’s always studying hitters. He has a good memory. He remembers how hitters hit him in a certain situation. He’s probably got a pretty good book in his mind. He’s going to make you beat him at his game—keeping the ball down and making you reach for the ball.”
“There’s a difference," John says, “between throwing strikes and throwing strikes. The plate is 17 inches wide. You’re throwing from the inside three inches to three inches off the plate and from the outside three inches to three inches off the plate. You're throwing to a foot but you take out the middle of the plate. A strike is not just to lay the ball over the plate but to throw the ball over the corner. That’s the art of pitching. And that’s what a lot of guys in baseball never acquire.”
Which is why he thinks the radar gun is overrated and why speed is misunderstood. Stan Williams, the Yankee pitching coach, says the few problems John has had this season resulted from throwing too hard, which made his sinker straighten out instead of sink.
“People get obsessed with speed,” John says. “They say, ‘Did he get it to 93? He’s blazing the ball.’ Is it 93 on the outside corner? Or is it 93 down the middle? Or is it 82 with movement? To me, the radar gun is one of the biggest myths in baseball. Some guys pitch very effectively at 88. I don’t. I don’t know what I do right or wrong but I don’t throw the ball well like that. It’s not how hard a pitcher throws. Is he getting guys out? I’ve seen Randy Jones make a lot of hitters look foolish. You watch him throw and you say he can’t do it. But he does go out and do it.”
There are those who believe John’s sinker is too good. It is so good, some claim, because John cuts the ball or greases it or just applies good old-fashioned spit. John was inspected several times last year but was never caught. He admits to having thrown one spitball in his career, to Mickey Mantle. “It was a very good one, too,” John says. “It was all he could do to foul it off. He said, ‘Nice sinker.' I said to Mickey, ‘I thought you’d like it.”’
John once told a reporter that Steve Arlin, a former player who studied dentistry, had made sharp caps for John’s teeth so John could put cuts in the ball. “If I look like I'm eating an apple,” John joked, “I’m cutting the ball.”
But Billy Martin, his manager last year with the Yankees, wasn’t kidding this season when he claimed John had done some things to the baseball that the manufacturer never intended. After John had beaten his A’s, Martin told a reporter, “We have one of the balls John used yesterday. It looks like it's been through a thresher.”
Typically, John laughed when he was told what Martin had said. Often when he is accused of conniving, he will laugh and say something to the effect of “how can people say such things about Good Old Tommy John?” as he likes to call himself in a self-parodying way.
John's arrival in New York is now something he and Sally laugh about. “If you told people in California you were on your way to Central Park,” he says in the restaurant, watching horsedrawn carriages trot by peacefully, “they’d think you were on your way to a mugging.”
He and Sally, who is also from Indiana, thought they were at a mugging three years ago when the Yankees beat the Dodgers in the sixth game of the 1977 World Series. Fireworks exploded on the field and policemen dressed in riot gear stood in foul territory during the final inning. A mob surrounded the Dodger bus as it left the stadium.
“I’m glad the Yankees won.” says Sally, “If the Dodgers had won it in New York, I think some of us Dodger wives wouldn’t have made it out. I was scared to death.”
A year later her husband was negotiating with the Yankees for a three-year contract. “Do the wives go to games?” Sally asked a Yankee official, “Do they take their children? From what I saw as a Dodger wife, I would have been afraid to go by myself”
Instead the Johns discovered that New York could be much like Tommy John on the mound: deceptive. The Johns live in Franklin Lakes, N.J. They can see the Manhattan skyline from their home. Last fall their three children discovered with excitement that once every year leaves change color.
John left the Dodgers after insisting on a three-year contract while the Dodgers were offering him,' at the age of 35, only two more years of security. “They said I was too old,” he says now, When John signed with the Yankees, for a reported $1.4 million, some Dodger players, wives and front-office people suggested John had been disloyal to an organization that had stuck by him for more than a year when his left arm seemed useless for throwing baseballs.
Sally John was enraged when she visited Dodger Stadium—“to say goodbye”—and saw that her husband’s photo had been taken down from a wall where pictures of past and present Dodgers hang. “There was a big empty space and a nail sticking out of the wall.” (The Dodgers deny the photo was taken down and say it's still there.)
Now, almost two years later, Sally sits in the Manhattan restaurant, talks briefly about the incident, then stops herself and says she does not want to be quoted on the subject. But a little later she says, “There were some bitter feelings. We’re trying to forget about it.”
So are the Dodgers. “Here he was, 35.” says Al Campanis, Dodger vice president for personnel. “We offered him a contract for two more years. Bear in mind that we paid for the operation on his arm. We paid for . . .”
Campanis, like Sally, stops himself. “I think they’re nice people. I don’t want to say anything negative because he’s a nice guy and Sally’s a nice gal. I like them both and I hope it stays that way.”
But if Tommy is no longer Good Old Tommy John in Dodger Stadium, that is the way he still likes to parody himself to the Yankees, to clubhouse visitors and even to opposing batters. Masked behind his easygoing demeanor is a highly competitive pitcher who has learned that being mean in the baseball business is a matter of survival—the Tommy John who will do almost anything to beat you even while he's smiling in your face. The meanest man in baseball? No. Tough? Yes.
Pitchers know pitchers and there is one ex-pitcher who knows what Tommy John is really like. “He may give you the impression that he’s just out there to do his best and have a good time and that’s all.” says Red Adams, his pitching coach with the Dodgers. “But if you think he’s not tough, you’re wrong.”