John still loves game of baseball

Nick Christensen

Friday, May 9, 2003 | 9:38 a.m.

Eleven years after he first put on a major-league uniform, Tommy John wasn't ready to leave the game.

So after years of trying to rehabilitate an injured elbow he got while pitching for the Chicago White Sox in the last 1960s, he reportedly told Dr. Frank Jobe in 1974 to "make something up."

Jobe transplanted tendon from John's right arm to his left, and John went on to pitch in the majors until 1989. His name will live forever because of the surgery first performed on him.

But don't think John's contributions to the game are done quite yet. Pitching more than 4,700 innings over 26 years just wasn't enough for him.

So Tommy John got a job coaching high school baseball. Soon, he was coaching collegiately at Furman.

"I just had fun doing it, so I thought, let's try it on a level of a little better expertise," he said.

John was hired into the Expos' system last year and worked as the pitching coach for Double-A Harrisburg in 2002. He was promoted to Triple-A Edmonton over the winter.

Even at the advanced level, many of John's players don't know much about him, his long career, or his groundbreaking surgery. He lets them figure it out on their own.

"They can look it up on the Internet, or get a bubble-gum card of mine," said John, 60. But after they do find out, they often say they didn't realize he'd pitched almost 5,000 innings.

"They say, 'What was your workout program?' and I didn't have one. I threw and I ran."

John doesn't encourage the same regimen for today's pitchers, though, instead deferring to the professional training staff. "You've got guys coming out of college now. Our first trainer that we had wasn't a trainer, he was a corpsman in the service or something."

But he has plenty of other advice to offer young pitchers. "Whatever I tell them never came out of a book, it never came out of a clinic. Everything I tell them is stuff that I'd tried."

John says he likes to ask his players questions so they have to answer them.

"I think if they can answer my questions, they're more apt to be able to help themselves to be a better pitcher because they have to think about what they need to do to improve."

His advice to his pitchers Thursday, with winds blowing straight out at 30 mph?

"Low and slow."