TOMMY JOHN SURGERY HAS RUINED BASEBALL, BUT HEY, THE UNDERWEAR IS FUN
Spring creates good vibes only until another ace pitcher is lost, with Gerrit Cole out for the Yankees’ season — even Shohei Ohtani is being watched — while Rob Manfred has no answers for the plague
Tommy John sells underwear. Credit a designer named Tom Patterson, who was sick of wedgies and didn’t want to be “squished, squashed or sweating.” Howard Stern praised it. So did Travis and Jason Kelce, who said, “We love Tommy John underwear. We love the fabric. We love the support. They're so comfortable.”
As we survey the culture of sports, here at the century’s quarter-pole, the garments are far more appealing than the Tommy John surgery that wrecks baseball. Every spring training, we hear about a new set of prime pitchers lost for the year. The latest is Gerrit Cole, the Cy Young Award winner, who sits after the reconstruction of his ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.
The underwear heals a midsection. The procedure makes fans wonder if they should do something else, such as those at Yankee Stadium, where the loss of Juan Soto to the Mets is magnified by Cole’s setback. Last season, Spencer Strider might have won awards before his operation ruined Atlanta’s season. Same goes for Jacob deGrom in Texas and Shane Bieber in Cleveland. Shohei Ohtani, who is paid $700 million, continues to be a one-way interplanetary figure. The Dodgers aren’t certain about his pitching return after his second Tommy John in September 2023.
“We just wanted to kind of slow-play it,” manager Dave Roberts said. “We’re just trying to make it a broad time to return. We just don’t know. And so I think that when he’s ready, when the process, the progression, as it’s going on, we’ll know. But I don’t want to put any kind of expectation on you guys, or Shohei.”
“I do want to see how the body responds,” Ohtani said.
So it’s futile for MLB to compile 63-page reports about pitching injuries. Losing arms is a bigger part of the game than organ music, closer in line with two franchises playing in minor-league parks than something uplifting. Two years ago, commissioner Rob Manfred summoned 200 “former professional pitchers, orthopedic surgeons, athletic trainers, club officials, biomechanists, player agents, amateur baseball stakeholders, and other experts in pitcher development.” Collectively, they finished with one haunting word.
Velocity.
When a young man picks up a baseball, he throws it instead of pitching it, prompting coaches to overwork his arm — which leads to Tommy John. Cole threw 34,126 pitches between 2013 and 2024, with more than 200 innings six times. Did it occur to anybody that his UCL eventually would crash? Forget about the Yankees this season, though they signed Max Fried to a $218 million deal and traded for closer Devin Williams. The other starters: Carlos Rodon, Marcus Stroman, Clarke Schmidt and Will Warren.
Third place, American League East.
“We talk about it all the time: These things will happen,” manager Aaron Boone said. “There’s going to be tough moments, tough times. Look, there’s no sugarcoating Gerrit Cole. We all understand who he is to our team and how important he is to our club. But unfortunately, sometimes, it’s part of the game.”
Unfortunately? It IS the game.
“From the time I first dreamed of wearing the Yankees uniform, my goal has always been to help bring a World Series championship to New York. That dream hasn’t changed— I still believe in it, and I’m more determined than ever to achieve it,” Cole wrote. “The most respected medical experts in the field recommend I undergo Tommy John surgery. This isn’t the news any athlete wants to hear, but it’s the necessary next step for my career. I have a lot left to give, and I’m fully committed to the work ahead. I love this game, I love competing, and I can’t wait to be back on the mound — stronger than ever.”
And how does baseball carry on, as more than a summertime local diversion, when pitchers are doomed via spin rates? A battle between aces once made for great hype opportunities. Now, any talk is dismissed about using a starter for at least five or six innings. “Just too blunt an instrument to fix this problem,” Manfred said. “I don’t think it can be prescriptive: ‘You have to go six innings.’ I think it has to be a series of rules that create incentive for the clubs to develop pitchers of a certain type.”
Not that he has any solution. “To me, this needs to be addressed in a more subtle way, I think maybe through rules surrounding transactions,” Manfred said. “That is, how often pitchers come on and off the roster. One of the things that happens today, guy pitches three days in a row, he gets outrighted, they bring somebody else in to give him some rest, as opposed to him staying on the roster the whole time. I think we need to create incentives through things like roster rules, transaction rules for clubs to develop pitchers who go deeper in the game.”
It’s hard to believe Cy Young pitched 7,356 innings. Of late, Phil Niekro pitched 5,404, Nolan Ryan pitched 5,386, Greg Maddux pitched 5,008 and Bert Blyleven pitched 4,970. Today, a thrower starts thinking about life after a thousand launches.
Tommy John, who pitched for six major-league teams, finished with 4,710.
I’ll stop and buy the underwear. I will need it when my favorite pitcher is lost for the season.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.