Tommy John surgery continues to save baseball careers 50 years after its debut: 'Revolutionary'

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It’s been nearly 50 years since one of the biggest advancements in sports medicine: Tommy John surgery.

On Sept. 25, 1974, Dr. Frank Jobe first performed the operation on Tommy John, a professional baseball pitcher who played on Major League Baseball (MLB) teams between 1963 and 1989.

During the surgery, Jobe reconstructed a torn ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in John’s left arm. 

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It was a pioneering achievement for Jobe and a lifeline for John, who went from a career-ending injury to 14 more years in the majors — and an eponymous connection to sports medicine that would live on long past his playing days.

Since then, Tommy John surgery — more formally known as ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine — has been performed on many other baseball players. 

New York Yankees pitcher Tommy John delivering a pitch versus the Kansas City Royals during a game at Yankee Stadium on July 9, 1988, in New York.  (Getty Images)

Those players include David Wells (1985), John Smoltz (2000), Stephen Strasburg (2010), Rich Hill (2011), Shohei Ohtani (2018), Justin Verlander (2020) and Bryce Harper (2022), to name a few, according to MLB. 

"I wouldn’t still be standing here if it weren’t for a surgery like this," Chicago White Sox pitcher Michael Kopech said, according to the Associated Press. "It’s doubled the length of my career."

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John Gallucci, a New Jersey-based physical therapist