Cooperstown Chances examines the Baseball Hall of Fame case of one candidate each week. This week: Tommy John.
Who he is: It’s fairly arbitrary. Tommy John retired in 1989 with 288 wins over 26 seasons. If he had 12 more wins, he’d long since have been in the Hall of Fame. Of the 24 pitchers with 300 wins, only Roger Clemens isn’t enshrined. While just six 300-game winners have been first-ballot Hall of Fame selections according to Baseball-Reference.com, having 300 wins generally gets a pitcher inducted within five years on the writers’ ballot.
MORE: The 25 best players not in the Baseball Hall of Fame
John completed his BBWAA eligibility in 2009, peaking at 31.7 percent of the vote, well short of the 75 percent needed for enshrinement. He appeared on the Expansion Era Committee ballots for the 2011 and 2014 elections and is a likely candidate when the committee meets again in December. John has a good shot at induction at some point because of his win total, his longevity, and being the first pitcher to have ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, better known as Tommy John surgery. But he’s not holding his breath about being voted into Cooperstown.
“I don’t even know when my chances begin,” John told Sporting News. “I have no idea when the voting is. It’s so convoluted now.”
He has an idea on what’s holding back his candidacy.
“I won 164 games after surgery,” John said. “That was one less than Sandy Koufax won in his entire career. Entire career. I’d have sportswriters tell me, ‘Yeah, but his wins were better than yours.’ And I said, ‘Better?’ I said, ‘A win’s a win.’ When Sandy (pitched), did he strike out more guys? Yeah. Did he have less hits? Yeah. But he won the ball game. That’s what he set out to do. I set out to win a ball game, and that’s what I was supposed to do.”
Sabermetricians might debate this assertion. Koufax had 30.7 wins above average over 12 seasons, while John had 9.1 wins above average after his surgery and 21.9 wins above average lifetime. But John was a reliable pitcher for many contending teams, the Dodgers and Yankees chief among them. In 26 seasons, John never finished in the top 10 in strikeouts, but he carved out a long career, he explained, by being left-handed, staying in good shape and never trying to do what he couldn’t.
“My whole thing is, if you’d looked at the pitchers of my era on the number of ground ball outs to total outs, I had the best ratio in the history of baseball,” John said. “I was very, very good at what I did, and I wasn’t a strikeout pitcher. I was when I was in high school and all that. But I wasn’t when I became a pro. So I’m being held back because I didn’t conform to some sportswriter’s idea of what is good and what is not good.”
Cooperstown chances: 50 percent
Why: The good news for John and candidates like Jim Kaat, Dale Murphy and Steve Garvey is that once a player is on the Hall of Fame’s radar, it’s less a matter of if than when they’ll get in. If a player tops out at even 20 percent of the BBWAA vote, there’s perhaps a 50 percent chance they’ll later be enshrined. Hall of Fame committees tend to consider the same candidates again and again and induct them as they reach consensus and the public demands it. Whether a candidate like John gets in while he’s alive is a different story. He’s 72 as of this writing.
Similar to Kaat, another supremely durable pitcher who may or may not be voted into Cooperstown in his lifetime, John seems fairly detached and disillusioned about the Hall of Fame voting process. “I have no idea, and I don’t even follow it, truthfully,” John said. “I have no control over it, so I basically don’t really worry about things I have no control over.”
But he wonders about players like Don Mattingly, one of the best first basemen of the 1980s before injuries took their toll. “The sportswriters said, ‘You should have won 288 games. You pitched all those years,’” John said. “Then they say Mattingly... didn’t play enough years. When is enough enough and too much is too much?”
There are other things out of John’s control. He said he doesn’t get invited to Yankees Old-Timers' Days anymore because the woman responsible for sending out invitations “got pissed at Tommy John and is not going to invite me back.” John and his rep would like readers to know that he has no relationship to Tommy John Underwear. John said he considered a lawsuit but abandoned it after attorneys he approached for representation wanted $250,000. People ask him about the underwear, he says, “all the time.”
“My girlfriend called the company and said she was representing me and that they should think about using me as a spokesperson,” John said. “Their reply was they don’t have it in their budget.”
So John finds other pursuits. He lost his son Taylor, who had bipolar disorder, to suicide six years ago; now John does mental health advocacy and fundraising for suicide prevention through his Let’s Do It Foundation. John has three other children, one of whom, Travis, fell out of a third-story window as a child in 1981 yet survived. “The pediatric surgeon who worked on him said, ‘We know more about the planet and we know more about the oceans than we know about the brain, and we’ll never know that much,’” John said.
When he’s not with his children, now grown, or two grandchildren, John lives in Palm Springs, Calif., with his girlfriend and enjoys golfing. While his handicap is 14, following hip and knee replacement and spinal column surgeries in the last year, he said he shot a 68 while with the Dodgers. That came when he was golfing with longtime Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, who regularly golfed with his players and team employees. “Walter liked to win, and if you ever played against him, you had to keep score,” John said. “He could make four plus four add up to seven.”
Some players campaign shamelessly for Hall of Fame induction. Bert Blyleven, who has one less career win but a better case by sabermetrics than John, regularly made media appearances before the BBWAA inducted him in his 14th year on the ballot. That’s not John’s style.
“If getting into the Hall of Fame would make me a scratch golfer and win my club championship, I would be out there campaiging the s— out of that,” John said.
John does care, though, about the candidacy of two people who helped him much during his career: Marvin Miller, the former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association; and Dr. Frank Jobe, the doctor who performed his landmark surgery in 1974. John got five minutes to talk when the Hall of Fame honored Jobe without inducting him in 2013.
“I said there were three men, in my opinion, who changed the face of baseball, and that would be Jackie Robinson for changing the color barrier, Marvin Miller for changing free agency, and Frank Jobe for (introducing) UCL reconstruction surgery,” John said. “The game will forever be changed because of those three men, and I don’t think Marvin will ever get in the Hall of Fame. Because the owners, if they have a vote, they will vote him out. These guys getting paid $200 million, it’s because of what Marvin did back in the ‘70s.”
Cooperstown Chances examines the Baseball Hall of Fame case of one candidate each week. Series author and Sporting News contributor Graham Womack writes regularly about the Hall of Fame and other topics related to baseball history at his website, Baseball: Past and Present. Follow him on Twitter: @grahamdude.