by John Smoltz
After he saw me on the mound, Dr. Chandler got it: My looseness was an incredible blessing; it was a big part of what made me the pitcher I was. But medical science still told him another story: My joints were likely to be my curse someday.
The deck was stacked against me, physically speaking, before I ever began my big-league career. On the one hand, there was my unique physical makeup, this incredible looseness in my joints, and on the other hand, there was a lingering injury from high school that I would contend with throughout my entire career.
As a freshman in high school, I had suffered a pretty serious injury in the first game of a doubleheader. While I was running from first to second base during the game, something popped in my groin and it felt like I had been shot in the leg. I literally tumbled to the ground and rolled. The second baseman tagged me out and all the guys laughed at me because they thought it was just a spectacular trip. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a case of being clumsy; I had pulled something in my groin and it was bad.
Injury or not, my coach was not about to put me on the bench for the second game. I had played shortstop in the first game, but I was supposed to pitch in the second. He told me to just wrap my leg and keep walking, in order to keep it from tightening up. So, like a dummy, I listened to him. I wrapped it and walked the rest of the entire first game so I could stay loose and still be able to pitch. Honestly, I knew at the time it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but that’s just how important baseball was to me—and obviously to my coach, too—back then. He should have known better, for sure, but I can’t deny my part in it. I was the one who walked that entire game, falling down occasionally whenever I would slightly tweak it again, but still going out and pitching five innings on it. It was not my smartest move of all time.
Every time the other team would bunt or hit a soft roller back in my direction that would cause me to run after the ball, I’d fall. Suffice to say, by the time I went to see a doctor after the game, I had done such damage to my groin area that I was out for seven or eight weeks.
Something about the location of the injury and the fact that my hips are so prone to sublux, or dislocate, left me with some chronic instability in my lower body. In those first years in the big leagues, it was not uncommon for me to be walking along and just fall to the ground for no apparent reason. There were certain movements that would trigger it, and pain would shoot through my leg and I would just drop to my knees. Other times, it would feel like something popped out of place slightly. Like on the mound, I always had to be really careful about reaching over to pick up the rosin bag. More often than not, when I bent over, I would feel something shift slightly out of alignment and I just wouldn’t be able to pitch right afterward.
The Braves knew that they had acquired a young pitcher with a dynamic arm, but they obviously had some concerns about the long-term sustainability of what I was doing. It wasn’t helping my cause that over the course of a season there would be about twelve or thirteen times when I threw a pitch that wasn’t exactly mechanically sound and my shoulder would dislocate slightly on the mound. Even I knew it didn’t look good whenever I had to come back in from pitching an inning and hang from the roof of the dugout as I carefully worked my shoulder back into place.
The Braves understandably wanted to take a proactive stance toward protecting the investment they had made in me and were interested in pursuing options that would help sustain my pitching career. For them, the most logical course of action was surgery. They thought it was critical to go in and try to counter the looseness and surgically alter my shoulder joint.
While I completely understood and frankly shared their concerns, I was totally against surgery as the first course of action. I always viewed surgery as the kiss of death for my career and I avoided it like the plague as a matter of course. As I look back now, maybe there were times I was overly stubborn about it, but right there at that point in my career, I am absolutely convinced I did the right thing. My loose joints allowed me to do what I did, and be the pitcher I was; shoulder surgery at this point would have changed everything.
That said, I knew I had to do something, so I enlisted the help of my agent at the time, Myles Shoda, and he ended up introducing me to Chris Verna. Chris was hailed as a nonconventional trainer, which maybe would have concerned some people, but I was up for trying anything short of surgery. And honestly, it sounded like a good fit to me because I certainly had a nontraditional body. Chris turned out to be an absolute guru; he’s just one of those guys who can look at a body the way an architect looks at a building. I would never have played for as long as I did without Chris Verna and later Peter Hughes. I have no idea what my career would have turned into, or even if there would have been one.
Chris had come in to address my shoulder issue, but he didn’t come in and just work on that joint exclusively. Chris examined my entire body, noting not only the looseness in my joints, but also the muscular imbalances throughout my body, and the peculiar aftermath of my high school groin injury. Chris looked at my body as a whole and quickly realized that the key to unlocking some of my shoulder issues was first to unlock my hips.
Before I started working with Chris, pitching coaches had always told me that I needed to improve the way I finished pitches. Meaning, when I would throw a pitch early in my career, I was likely to be almost falling off the mound and almost spinning out like a car hitting the brakes at the last second. I knew what they wanted me to do and why I needed to do it, not only to be more mechanically sound, but also to finish in a better defensive position, but the problem was I just couldn’t ever physically do it. Chris helped me understand not only why I was struggling with this, but how I could fix it. Chris helped me change my body so I could change my mechanics.
Without getting into all of it, Chris showed me that I had been relying on the bigger muscles in my hips and the external rotation in the joint. The key was developing and working on the smaller muscles in my groin, and getting me to be able to rotate internally as well. By doing this, he helped me be able to better sync up my hips and my shoulder so that my shoulder wasn’t constantly being overexerted.
Chris drew up a plan to systematically address all of these problems and we began to attack my weaknesses with an aggressive regimen of stretching and strengthening. Working with Chris, I started to gain the proper rotational flexibility in all my joints, and it made such a difference. He was able to strengthen my shoulder in a way I never thought possible. Working with Chris, I came to know my body inside and out and I became attuned to how things should feel and where things should be. Knowing my body like this and having someone like Chris by my side would prove critical time and time again throughout my career when it came to deciphering what was ailing me and what I could do to overcome it.
We made remarkable progress that first off-season, allowing my shoulder to go from dislocating thirteen times that year to only two times the next. And eventually it never happened again. Chris helped me get my shoulder to a place where it could stand the test of time. In addition, he figured out a way to manipulate my hips back into position whenever they did sublux. This was a critical discovery because despite all the work I did to prevent it, it was something that continued to plague me throughout my career. I eventually had to teach the Braves’ trainers the technique that Chris had perfected so whenever or wherever my hips got out of alignment—like on the road in Los Angeles, thirty minutes before game time—they could get them back in place. I can’t tell you how many games I would have missed in my career had I never figured this out.
When it comes to what I had to do to be successful, I know there are people who have worked harder than me, but I don’t think there are many. My body was always a burden that I had to deal with, but understanding the burden made it an asset for me. It made it possible for me to push my body in ways that just didn’t seem possible to some people.
When it came down to it, I really had no choice. If I wanted to have a baseball career, there were certain things that I had
to do. All the strengthening and stretching basically bought me time, allowing me to squeeze as many innings and as many years out of my body as I possibly could. But Dr. Chandler would always be right in the end. My loose joints would eventually become my curse.
Throughout the course of my career in pro baseball I suffered more injuries than I care to admit. They have varied from your typical, run-of-the-mill nicks, bumps, and bruises to those that required surgical intervention on five different occasions. It’s hard to say definitively what caused everything, because truthfully, there are a lot of dynamics to consider. Not the least of which was my habit of avoiding surgery and the disabled list at all costs.
Obviously, I was a pitcher who came with some physical baggage: namely, my genetic predisposition to incredibly loose joints and the groin injury from high school. In addition to those two factors, I endured the same reality that all pitchers face, the fact that the profession of pitching is going to naturally create discomforts from time to time. My response to those discomforts was to make adjustments to override them and pitch through pain as a matter of course.
If you liken my professional career to a game of dominoes, it seemed like a lot of times there was one thing affecting another thing, which affected another thing. I would do whatever it took to take the mound, altering one part of my delivery to override one particular ache or pain, which sometimes caused a whole other problem down the road. It’s safe to say mine was a career at times held together with duct tape and bailing wire.
On top of the domino effect of all the factors I just described, I would also argue that the problems that plagued my elbow starting in 1992 up until the time I had Tommy John surgery in 2000 were at least in part the product of continual postseason play. During that time period, the Atlanta Braves not only made the playoffs, but we made deep runs in the playoffs, making it all the way to the World Series four times.
The privilege of playing in the postseason is accompanied by the price of playing in the postseason. I just got done broadcasting parts of the 2011 playoffs for TBS, and people listening at home probably got tired of me making this point, but it’s absolutely true: Pitching one inning in the postseason is like pitching two or three in the regular season. It’s that much more stress and that much more important. I always pitched a postseason game as if it was my last game ever because it always could be. You never knew how many opportunities you were going to have to get the ball in October. Getting after it like it was my last time out meant I was constantly reaching into the upper ranges of my velocity and throwing the fastest fastballs I could muster. And those pitches, the ones that you are really trying to zing in there, are the ones that really start to take their toll after a while.
The fact is that if you go to the World Series, you play an additional month of baseball and endure a whole additional month of wear and tear on your body. During the run-up to the Series, a starting pitcher could possibly pitch five times; that’s about the most you can reasonably fit in, and after that, you’re spent. You’re so completely exhausted that it’s going to take a lot longer to recover. But since the World Series typically ends on almost the last day in October, the one thing you don’t have the luxury of is time. You can really only afford to take November completely off, because by late December it’s time to start the whole process all over again. Pretty soon it’s February and spring training is only a couple weeks away. That’s just not a lot of time for the body to rest and heal.
I wouldn’t be so inclined to point to the postseason if I was prone to bad mechanics, or if I made a habit of throwing pitches that banged my elbow all the time, but that really wasn’t the case. Now, granted, things might have been different if I had just thrown eighty-five or eighty-seven miles an hour; I might not have had as many problems. But I probably wouldn’t have as many wins as I had in the postseason either.
At the end of the day, I did what I had to do to sustain the run and deal with my injuries, and I realize there were consequences to the way I approached it. But at the same time, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t change a single thing. Make no mistake about it, I would have gone to the postseason every year if given the opportunity, even if it meant shortening my career. In the end, I was a unique pitcher who had some amazing opportunities and I was never going to let the pain in my elbow deprive me of the opportunity to pitch in the postseason.
Well, until 2000 anyway.
My elbow was basically destined to be a victim from the beginning. From the velocity of the pitches I liked to throw to the unique ability I had to torque my shoulder, which in turn put enormous pressure on my elbow, my elbow was simply not going to be able to withstand everything.
From 1992 to 1998, I could feel the trouble brewing in my elbow. The pain wasn’t severe to the point where you’d see me grimace a lot; that really came later. This was a gradual buildup, a gradual progression over time, as my ulnar collateral ligament grew more and more inflamed. It came to a point where I just knew when I got ready to release the ball, I was going to feel a nice sting; my elbow was going to let me know that I’d just thrown a pitch.
Finesse pitches always hurt me more than the velocity pitches. I would always feel it more when I threw a slider, a curveball, or a changeup, because those pitches required me to put that little spin on the ball with my fingers. It was that fine movement, similar to turning a doorknob, that would trigger the pain in my elbow. So, with that said, I would oftentimes choose to use velocity to work around the pain, choosing to just throw fastballs instead.
There’s also a lot to be said for the adrenaline I felt during a game. I certainly was blessed with a high pain tolerance, but I was perhaps also blessed with an abundance of adrenaline. I always found that once I got heated up in the moment, I could sustain a lot of discomfort. It was when I had to sit down and cool off and wake up the next day that things got a little difficult. Everyday movements like putting a golf tee in the ground, or even using my right hand to grab the bill of my baseball cap and adjust it—those things would kill me. I know it seems a little crazy, but even when those things were unbearable, I could still throw a baseball 94 mph because I could overcome that little intricate movement during the game.
As I continued to pitch, my elbow continued to deteriorate, and my symptoms followed suit. There came a point in 1994 where I woke up in Denver and I could not even fully extend my elbow; it was basically locked in this ninety-degree angle. Of course, I tried to figure out a way to pitch with it, but eventually the team had to scratch my start and send me back to Atlanta to see Dr. Chandler. I was actually incredibly fortunate to have this happen the day before the strike that year, so I was given the gift of time to address the issue. Dr. Chandler told me it was likely that my elbow was suffering from bone chips and bone spurs and he recommended surgery to go in and remove them. But early on in the strike, when there was this sense that there still might be a chance to resume the season, I was against surgery. I applied myself to figuring out whatever I could do to try to work with my elbow and get it back in shape to play again, but things didn’t look promising. Dr. Chandler would drain fluid off of it, up to 15 cc’s at a time, every other week, but it would just keep filling right back up. Fortunately for me, the strike eventually canceled the rest of the season and the postseason, so I elected to go forward with my first elbow surgery to clean up my bone chips and bone spurs. Thanks to the strike, I was able to have surgery in what would otherwise have been the middle of the season, allowing me enough time to heal and recover and not miss any time the next season. As a fan of baseball, I hated the work stoppage, but I have to admit the timing of the strike could not have been better for my elbow.
In these early years of dealing with my elbow woes, some people thought that I was a hypochondriac—that the pain was just in my head. It was a label that I grew out of over time, thankfully, and rightfully so, because I was by no means a hypochondriac. But I knew my Achilles’ heel was always what everybody saw. Let’s face it, when you’re watching s
omeone throw the ball ninety-three or ninety-four miles an hour, it can be hard to believe there can be anything wrong with him. And honestly, if I had been on the other side, I probably would have been saying the same thing. And that’s frustrating because I knew I felt it and I knew it was real. In a way, I always felt reassured when the doctors opened me up, and went in and did surgery and told me what they saw, because it reaffirmed the truth of what I was feeling and what was causing it.
I would eventually have one more surgery performed to remove bone chips and bone spurs. It was after this second procedure, performed in December 1997, that Dr. Chandler started really explaining to me that these bone chips and bone spurs that my elbow was producing were a precursor to an underlying problem: My ulnar collateral ligament was compromised. What I really needed was Tommy John surgery.
When I heard the words Tommy John surgery, all I heard was “one year out of the game.” I didn’t know how I would recover from surgery at this point, almost a decade into my career, and I wasn’t interested in finding out until it was absolutely the last option. Sure, my UCL was probably partially torn, but plenty of pitchers had pitched with a partially torn UCL before. Nolan Ryan for one. And here’s the thing: I could still throw the ball ninety-three or ninety-four miles an hour. I wasn’t about to take an entire year off to have surgery just to be pain-free if I could still throw ninety-four. As long as I could still be effective, I could care less about the pain. In my mind, it was only time to have surgery if I could no longer contribute to the team.