by John Smoltz
Tiger Stadium was already going nuts in the top of the ninth and with each out recorded, the volume increased. By the time Tony Gwynn popped out to left field for the final out, it was downright pandemonium. Fans started rushing onto the field and soon they were literally tearing up the grass and throwing it into the stands. The three of us sort of looked at each other for a second, and then without a word my brother and I started snatching up hunks of grass. We ended up with two or three bags of sod and were just beside ourselves. We drove home elated by the win and with our own physical piece of Tiger history.
We carefully planted our sacred infield turf in the backyard. Eventually my parents added a big Tigers statue to stand watch over our Tiger grass, thereby completing the Smoltz Memorial to the Tigers’ ’84 Series victory. What we didn’t know then was the very next year I would be drafted by the Tigers. And three years after that, well, let’s just say the Tiger grass didn’t make the cut to Atlanta.
The next three years would include some dramatic twists of fate that shaped how my career looks today. It’s remarkable, when I think about it, how everything worked out in the end.
Going into the 1985 draft, I wasn’t sure what to wish for, to be quite honest. I had already signed a letter of intent to accept a full scholarship to play baseball the next year at Michigan State, right there in Lansing, but that wasn’t even the best part. The baseball coach was open to letting me also give college basketball a try. Here I was on the verge of playing the two sports I loved the most at my favorite school in my hometown. And the icing on the cake was my best friend, Chuck, was going to be in town as well, with plans to attend a community college nearby. Life that next year could very well resemble life right now: school, baseball, basketball, and my friends and family.
And then, on the other hand, there was the draft. The scouts we had talked to had projected me to be taken in the early rounds, anywhere between the first and fourth. But it didn’t happen. The phone didn’t ring until the twenty-second round. Of all teams, it was the Detroit Tigers on the other end of the line. In a lot of ways it was amazing and gratifying and yet, at the same time, really disappointing. Getting the call from the Tigers was awesome, but the twenty-second round just wasn’t going to cut it. The only way I was going to go play pro ball right now, and skip the opportunity to go to college, was if I could get signed for first-round money. School was just too important.
So that was that. It was encouraging to get drafted out of high school, but I was surely headed to college now, I thought. What I didn’t know was that I was about to embark upon a summer baseball season unlike any I’d ever experienced, and it would prove to be pivotal to my future with the Tigers. Without a doubt, the summer of 1985 changed my destiny.
I kicked off the summer with the All-American Amateur Baseball Association national tournament in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with my team from Lansing. Then I got picked up by another team and went and played in the Stan Musial World Series. And after that, just when an unbelievable summer couldn’t get any better, I got picked up for the Junior Olympics and ended up pitching against Chinese-Taipei and Cuba for Team USA.
While the opportunities were tremendous, I didn’t actually have much success on these grand stages of amateur baseball. This was most especially true at the Junior Olympics, where I pitched in the gold medal game for Team USA against Cuba. We were up 1–0 and I was cruising, taking the game to two outs in the eighth before Cuba scored two runs at the plate, bang bang, just like that. And that’s how the game would end: Cuba 2, USA 1. One second I was pitching my way to a gold medal and the very next it was silver. Never had I been more discouraged than when I gave up those two runs in my USA jersey; I felt I had let my entire country down.
I lost some heartbreaking games in these huge tournaments, but it was against the greatest competition I could play against. And I progressed so fast that summer, seriously by leaps and bounds, that the Tigers took notice of their twenty-second-round pick out of high school. At the end of that stretch, the Tigers contacted us and struck up negotiations.
My dad and I were invited to Tiger Stadium, and they put me in uniform before a game, and I got to walk around and meet all the players who I had been watching from afar all those years—Trammell, Whitaker, Morris, Gibson, and Parrish. Once the game started, I changed out of uniform and my dad and I went upstairs and talked with the front office. They handed us a piece of paper with an offer on it and told us to take it home and think it over. My hopes were riding so high at that moment, right up until I looked at the number on the page. The offer was so ridiculously low, it just wasn’t worth considering when you weighed it against the opportunity I had to go to college.
The next two weeks were a teeter-totter of emotions. My dad, acting as my agent, continued to talk and negotiate with the Tigers and I worked on getting ready for school just in case. The whole time I was thinking, Am I going to college? Am I not going to college?
It came down to the last couple days before school was supposed to start and things were still in the air with the Tigers. Meanwhile, on the college front, everything was lined up: I had my dorm room, I had worked out my schedule, and my first class was set to begin at 8 A.M. Monday. It looked like I was going to be a freshman in college in a few days right up until the phone rang on Sunday night and the Tigers came through with their final offer. The numbers were finally in the first round neighborhood that we had been aiming for. My parents and I talked it through, and at about ten o’clock that Sunday night, I signed a contract that made me a Detroit Tiger.
I still think about this time in my life today. What if that hour had slipped by and I had gone to college? What would my career look like? What would my life look like? It’s an interesting thing to sit and ponder, but it’s not like I would go back and change things. I may regret a few things in my career, but this is certainly not one of them.
From this point on, I was on my journey to becoming a major league pitcher and it seemed almost too good to be true. To be getting a chance at the big leagues right of high school and for the Tigers. I thought I was starring in my own fairy tale until August 12, 1987, rolled around.
In 1987, I was playing Double-A ball for the now-defunct Glens Falls, New York Tigers. Things were not going well for me or the team. We were a ragtag collection of prospects and we weren’t playing our best. We had loads of potential, but we all had a lot to learn. And on top of that, some key guys were out with injuries. All of which meant we were in dead last that August.
Back in those days at Glens Falls, let’s just say there wasn’t a lot of money being spent on minor league development. It was sort of bare-bones baseball. We had only a couple bona fide coaches, and not one pitching coach. And there I was, in the midst of a 4–10 season with a 5.68 ERA. I was just another prospect, plodding along, trying to figure out my way.
On August 12, I was sitting in the dugout watching a game on an off day and I got a message about a phone call. The note said simply, “Call your dad.” I was immediately a little freaked out, as I thought surely something was wrong at home. Why else would I get a note to call my dad during a game?
I got into the clubhouse after the game and called my dad first thing. I was a little panicked and started out the conversation, “Dad, what is it? What’s wrong?”
He proceeded to tell me that I had been traded for Doyle Alexander. I was actually relieved; I just thought it was a case of my dad being my dad, calling in a practical joke just to mess with me.
“Whatever, Dad, quit being funny.”
But he was adamant. “No, Johnny, I’m not joking,” he said. “I just heard it on the news. Do you want me to come out there and help you move?”
At this point I was starting to get a little angry. He had gone a bit too far with his little joke as far as I was concerned. So I said, “Dad, if this is a joke, I’m going to… I mean, I can’t believe you’re even trying to pull a joke like this!”
It was right about this time that I started to tak
e a closer look at the piece of paper in my hand. I suddenly realized it wasn’t just one phone message, but two. Right behind the note that said “call Dad” was another that said “call Detroit front office.”
A pit was already forming in my stomach and I just said, “Dad, I think I’m gonna have to call you back.”
I called the club next, and when they confirmed the news that they had traded me for Doyle Alexander, I was devastated. They told me I would be going to the Richmond Braves, the Triple-A affiliate of the Atlanta Braves.
I was speechless. I handed the phone to my manager and he couldn’t believe it either. Soon I was packing up all my stuff and walking out of the Glens Falls clubhouse for the last time.
As I got in my car and started heading south on I-87, I couldn’t help but think I was headed in the wrong direction, but the drive to Richmond was actually good for me because I needed the time to be alone with my thoughts and process for myself what the trade meant. I was twenty years old and my initial reaction to the trade was not just disappointment about my now-shattered dream of playing for the Detroit Tigers, but also this horrible feeling of not being wanted.
It took me something like twelve hours to get to Virginia and I just kept thinking what a bad turn of luck it was. Here I was leaving a team that had recently won the World Series and was in the hunt again this year, and now I was suddenly headed to a new place that I knew practically nothing about. And the one thing I did know was that the Braves organization was god-awful and had been god-awful for quite some time.
About the time I pulled into the parking lot for The Diamond and sat there in my car almost drooling over the brand-new Triple-A stadium before me (remember I was coming from Glens Falls), I had one of those “now wait a minute” moments. As I got my bearings and got adjusted to my new surroundings, it was actually easier than I thought to embrace the change.
I began to realize my time with the Tigers wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Here I thought when I got into the minor leagues there were going to be all these coaches and all this attention on getting better, but it just wasn’t the case back then for Detroit in the places I played. In Class A we had one manager, but there was no other coach on the team. Without a lot of direction, it really was a tough, tough environment for a player in the developmental stage of his career. When I got traded to Atlanta, all of that changed.
In Richmond, they had a multitude of coaches that paid attention to the details, and it really made the difference for me. The mentoring I received from the pitching coaches who tutored me that season and during instructional league the following fall taught me basic principles about pitching in the major leagues and helped transform me into the pitcher I always thought I could be. And it all happened much faster than even I expected; certainly faster than it would have happened with Detroit.
To say the least, my first game in Triple-A was a big deal to my parents and my family. I was a little nervous, seeing all those folks in the stands, including Carl Wagner, my summer baseball coach, and Bobby Cox, then the Braves general manager, who had made the trade, but gone were the misgivings about the trade and the feeling of not being valued. Now I just felt humbled and incredibly excited.
But unfortunately for me, initially in Richmond, I found myself in a little bit over my head. I hadn’t been very good in Double-A and there I was days later facing off against the best team in Triple-A, the Tidewater Tides, an affiliate of the New York Mets, my first time out. In short, it didn’t go too well. But it was just another start, just another step in my journey to the major leagues.
Admittedly, despite the trade and the initial feeling surrounding it, I was still a Tigers fan through and through. As the season went on, Doyle ended up going 9–0 for them down the stretch and helped the Tigers make it to the playoffs. Here I was on the other end of the trade, finding myself rooting for the Tigers and Doyle, until it came to the point where I sort of had to stop myself. I remember sitting there watching a game and thinking, Whoa, this trade is going to look really bad if I do nothing and Doyle goes on to bring home a championship for Detroit. Thankfully, over time, I think I made good on the trade for Atlanta.
I thought I was living a dream when I was with Detroit for those first couple years. I wanted so badly the chance to pitch in my hometown. The following that I had in Lansing, Michigan the proximity; my grandfather working on the grounds crew in Tiger Stadium—it was your ultimate feel-good story. When I got the call that I had been traded, I thought life as I knew it was over. And it was, to be truthful, but I had to just settle down and reinforce my ultimate goal, which was to get to the big leagues, and whether it was with Detroit, Atlanta, or Toronto, it didn’t matter. And the truly ironic thing was that thanks to Ted Turner and the Turner Broadcasting System, my parents were going to get to see me play baseball a whole lot more than they would have if I had been playing for the Detroit Tigers.
In one year I had gone from being a part of my hometown team, a team that was on the brink of competing for another championship, to this team that just was not very good, but had a guy named Dale Murphy on it. In all reality, it was probably the greatest thing that could have happened to me. No, check that. I know it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
On the other hand, my trade to Atlanta was not the greatest thing that ever happened to the Tiger grass in my backyard. The beloved Tiger grass caught the brunt of my dad’s own anger over the trade. To this day, I don’t know how it met its death—by shovel or bare hands—but when I came home from Atlanta the first time, it was dug up and gone and we’ve never spoken about it again.
Chapter Five
PERSEVERANCE
I’m not lying when I tell you I can remember almost every day after shoulder surgery. I can’t tell you much about my other rehabs from my four elbow surgeries, including my yearlong recovery from Tommy John surgery, but my memories after shoulder surgery are vividly clear. It was such a tough surgery, such a tough injury, and it took such an incredibly long time to do anything at first.
When I say “anything,” I do mean anything. In the beginning, one of the first challenges of any day was simply changing my shirt. As I sat there, struggling to manipulate a shirt around my stiff and painful shoulder, I didn’t let myself dwell on the oppressive reality of the situation. As I wriggled my head into my shirt, careful not to torque my shoulder, I didn’t let myself wallow in the obvious fact that my road back to the major leagues was so long that it had to begin first with conquering the now-tedious tasks of daily life. I was so intent on coming back and pitching again, I had so much to prove to myself, that I just trudged forward almost blindly. Odds be darned.
Every single day after surgery revolved around getting back onto the mound. Even during those early days—when the pain was so arresting that even sitting still in my favorite recliner hurt—I physically willed myself to get up and literally start moving in whatever way I could.
In those early weeks, about all I could really stand to do was go putt. It became my routine that after icing my shoulder, I would go outside to my practice green right behind my house. I would stand there for a few minutes, letting my shoulder thaw out and warm up in the heat of the Atlanta summer, and then I would start making tiny putting strokes. I couldn’t move much at all in the beginning. We’re talking about being able to draw the putter back maybe an inch or two at a time. All I worked on in the beginning was trying to attain that pendulum-swinging motion, back and forth, nice and easy. And I would do it over and over and over again, tick tock, tick tock.
Every day, religiously, I went out and worked on it. It became a daily game, a daily competition for me, to see how far I could swing. Putting golf balls provided two things I sorely needed: progress I could measure and the chance to have a little fun.
The doctors had given me a post-procedure protocol to follow, and follow it I did, but I knew their program wasn’t enough for me. I knew if there was any chance of pitching again next year, I had to be more aggressive
. I employed the help of Peter Hughes, one of the trainers who had been working with me for the last ten to twelve years of my career, and together we got after it. We approached rehab in a fairly unconventional way, but we never did anything counter to what the doctors were having me do. There’s a distinct difference between pushing the envelope and being a little reckless. There’s a fine line between being aggressive and potentially hurting yourself, and we always respected that line.
When it came down to it, rehab was an art and a science that my trainers and I had been perfecting since the beginning of my career, and not by choice.
We traded Doyle Alexander for this?!
Those were the thoughts racing through Dr. Joe Chandler’s mind as he examined me for the very first time in August 1987, days after I had been traded to the Atlanta Braves.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, while the Braves’ team physician performed my routine physical, cycling through all my body parts, he grew more and more alarmed. Every joint—not just my shoulder, but my elbows, knees, ankles, and hips—was double-jointed and hypermobile. My shoulder was actually so loose he could dislocate it four different ways on the exam table. There was no way around it: From a medical standpoint, my physical makeup was not suited for pitching in the major leagues.
Dr. Chandler was completely baffled. Why in the world would Atlanta ever agree to trade a proven veteran with nice, tight joints like Doyle for me, a six-foot-three, 210-pound Gumby? But that was before he ever saw me pitch. It wasn’t until he saw me on the mound that he started to understand.
You see, the natural looseness in my joints was part of my gift with the baseball. I exploited it with every pitch, tapping into that extraordinary flexibility throughout my entire motion. If you think of a pitcher’s arm as being a slingshot, I could draw that elastic band back a few degrees farther than most guys. It doesn’t sound like much, but the fact that I could cock my elbow and shoulder back so far translated into my ability to throw a baseball 98 mph. That’s where the external flexibility in my shoulder came into play. I also had internal flexibility, which meant that I was able to stay on the ball, or keep it in my hand, a split second longer than most guys before releasing it. I could extend my shoulder well past the normal stopping point, allowing me to be able to locate pitches with a fairly high degree of precision. Essentially, thanks to the hypermobility in my joints, I could throw a fastball on the outside corner pretty much anytime I wanted. Dr. Chandler likes to describe my pitching as a “God-given gift of neuromuscular balance and control.” I would just say I have always been able to manipulate a baseball in ways that other guys couldn’t.