by John Smoltz
Toward the bitter end in 1999, there were days when the pain was so great that I was very limited with my pitch selection. The fact is, I couldn’t repeat a slider too many times when my elbow was really inflamed. At times, there was a pretty narrow lane that I stayed in in order to compete, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t win. When I got out on the mound, my elbow was not going to be an excuse; I was going to pitch until they took the ball from me. I don’t claim to be tougher than anybody else, but when it comes to competing, I always found a way to get my mind off the pain and a way to get the job done.
I would sometimes get criticized for the way I pitched a baseball game, by certain broadcasters or members of the media, but they didn’t know what was really going on. They had no idea that there were things I couldn’t physically bear to do on the mound. It would have been nice to be able to defend myself or even explain myself, but I wasn’t about to say anything. If a hitter had known I was vulnerable, if the other team knew I was limited in what I could do, it certainly would have affected my game and my effectiveness. The people who needed to know—my trainer, my doctor, my pitching coach, my manager—all knew. But nobody knew on the other side.
The 1999 season would prove to be the most painful. Eventually it got so bad I couldn’t even come over the top anymore to release the ball as I had always done. I had finally reached the point where I wasn’t able to override the pain with velocity, and this is where I really had to get creative. I basically had to reinvent myself as a pitcher to work around my elbow.
I finally went to Leo Mazzone, the Braves’ pitching coach, and told him I had to do something else and I wanted to try dropping my delivery down and throwing more sidearm. Leo gave me the green light and I got to work on my latest great idea.
As it turns out, I had one side session in which to work on it before I took the mound against the Houston Astros. A side session, by the way, is a short workout done between starts in the bullpen—we’re talking maybe forty, sixty pitches max. Anyway, I just started messing with it, inventing pitches, throwing from different angles, really just using my imagination and figuring out what might work. At the end of the session, I turned to Leo and said, “At least it doesn’t hurt, I gotta go with it.” And he goes, “Go ahead.” Thank God I had a pitching coach who was obviously extremely tolerant with me and all my new ideas.
So here I am, about to make my next start and about to throw with this low three-quarters delivery in a game for the very first time. Now, obviously the Astros had no idea I had been working on this and I will never forget throwing that first pitch to Craig Biggio. I blew one right past him and he just stood there with his bat on his shoulder and looked at me like “You gotta be kidding me!” He turned around to look at the dugout as if to say, Where’d this come from?! I pitched the whole game with this new arm slot, going seven innings, allowing eleven hits but only two runs. I had found another way to adjust and be successful, and I ran with it the rest of the season, making ten more starts down the stretch. My 3–3 record really doesn’t capture how well I was pitching with my low three-quarters delivery, but what does is my ERA. When I started the game against the Astros, it stood at 3.57, but from that point on, with only two slight upticks, it was headed in a steady slide, bottoming out at 3.19 for the season.
When we ended up making the World Series in 1999, I didn’t get a chance to pitch until Game Four, when we were already down three games to none to the New York Yankees. I wanted so badly to notch a win for our team, and maybe change our fate, that I just decided, The heck with the pain, I’m coming over the top again. So I did.
It was a gritty performance, but I still managed a quality outing on the biggest stage of baseball, striking out eleven and giving up six hits and three earned runs in seven innings. Unfortunately, we only managed to put up one run, and we would eventually lose the game and be swept out of the Series—a Series that was much closer than we get credit for. It turned to be the only elimination game I ever lost. I put everything that I had in the game to try and keep it going, but you just have to tip your hat to the Yankees.
After that game, I had to take a hard look at what my next year in baseball was going to be like. In my assessment, I couldn’t go through another year like I just went through, but I had already made the determination in my mind that I wasn’t going to have Tommy John surgery. So the question was “What’s the next best thing for me?” The next thing for me, as I saw it, was going to be the knuckleball.
I had flirted with the knuckleball at times during 1999, and while it showed promise, I knew it wasn’t ready for me to rely on as a permanent part of my pitch selection. At this point in the off-season, that was about to change. My thinking was, if I could pair a really good knuckleball with my still-good fastball (which I could still throw with limited discomfort), I just might have an effective combination.
So with that said, I spent hours and hours at an indoor facility near my house, beating up a poor catcher, and throwing knuckleball after knuckleball after knuckleball. It was frustrating, it was painstaking, but I felt confident that with enough time and attention I could really develop a major league knuckleball.
When spring training rolled around, I told my manager, Bobby Cox, and pitching coach, Leo Mazzone, “Look, I have no other options; you are going to have to bear with me, but I am going to work all spring on knuckleballs.”
When I told the catchers about my new pitch, I warned them it was nasty. I told them they better go get bigger gloves and they all laughed; they were generally amused by me and my new idea right up until I threw my first knuckleball of spring training and promptly plunked Eddie Pérez in his opposite arm. He never even got a glove on it. They weren’t quite so amused after that. Like I said, it was nasty, and I needed to practice.
All the work I had put into perfecting a knuckleball unfortunately did not translate into one more season for me. I didn’t make it any further than my first spring training game. I never felt anything pop in my elbow, but about two hours after the game, the pain was unbelievable. I knew I had really done something when I couldn’t even bear to use a fork or rest my elbow on a table. The doctors did an MRI and the results were conclusive: My ligament was finally torn. The time for Tommy John surgery had arrived.
In my career, I think it’s safe to say I went as far and as long as I could in the effort to adapt and overcome discomfort and pain. Sometimes my adjustments worked and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes there were consequences to contend with down the road, but it was always my choice to continue to pitch. That’s just the way I handled it. As an athlete, you know that whenever you’re not feeling 100 percent right, the outcome could be something less than what you want. At that point you have two choices. You can adapt and overcome the pain, or you can shut it down. By shutting it down, you eliminate the chance that failure will happen, but you also eliminate the chance that success could happen.
I never ever wanted to shut it down and I was never interested in playing it safe. There’s obviously a time to be strategic and act conservatively, but if I had played it safe, I never would have experienced half of what I experienced in my career. I think if you get in the habit of playing it safe all the time, you risk suffocating yourself and the greatness that can come out of you. I think you can miss out on some things. No one wants to get knocked down, but sometimes you’ve got to get nicked and beat up a little bit before you can experience what lies ahead; it makes you tougher.
As it was, I think I missed the least amount of time that I could have missed with five surgeries. I missed all of 2000 after Tommy John; there’s no way to avoid that. But when you think about the big picture and five total surgeries, I really didn’t miss that much time.
The number one golden rule in baseball is you can’t make the club in the tub, but I think I might be the first exception to that rule. I had to invest a lot of time in the trainers’ room, way more than I would have liked, but it was essential to keeping me at the level I needed to be in in order
to pitch. On that note, I would be remiss not to recognize Dave Pursley, Jeff Porter, and Jim Lovell, the trainers for the Atlanta Braves during my time, for their patience with me. The time they spent with me was invaluable.
I honestly had to do things outside the box; I had to work very hard and incorporate nontraditional methods because I had a very nontraditional body. And I was incredibly fortunate to have a man like Dr. Chandler with me in this journey. His willingness to think outside the box as an orthopedic surgeon was crucial for me. I spent more time with him than with my family at times trying to solve this puzzle of a body.
Pitching through pain helped make me the pitcher that I was and it gave me the opportunity to experience some of the greatest moments of my career. I am absolutely serious when I say that I pitched some of my greatest games in some of my worst conditions.
The principles I used to push myself through adversity in my career are applicable in real life in many ways, whether you are trying to start a new career, get out of debt, or even run a 5K for the first time. I think most people can get started down the right road, but then it seems like the natural tendency is to give up at the first sign of trouble, or the first taste of failure. It’s really easy to convince ourselves that once we’ve reached a certain point, we aren’t capable of going any further. I think my pitching career stands as proof that those limits are mostly in your mind; we all have that capacity to surprise ourselves and attain or achieve things we never thought were possible.
Chapter Six
BULLPEN BUSINESS
I guarantee I would never have made it back to pitching after shoulder surgery if I hadn’t spent my entire career figuring out ways to push through pain, adapt, and overcome. The rehab process from shoulder surgery was so long and so tedious that I don’t know if I’d have been able to overcome everything quite as well as I did if I hadn’t approached things the way I did.
As I said, rehab can be a grind. Even the most motivated people can get bored doing the same stretches and exercises over and over again. I know I did, so I tapped into the creativity I honed during Michigan winters and tried to always find ways to keep things fun and interesting. When it came to rehab, I just did things that made sense to me. And whenever I could work in doing something I loved to do anyway, it was a huge bonus. Maybe I did things that were a little bit aggressive, but I was always in tune with my body.
Perhaps one of the more unorthodox parts of my rehab program after shoulder surgery was fitting in time to mow my lawn. I stumbled upon mowing as a recovery technique sort of by accident. I happen to be one of those guys who just loves to ride around on a tractor and cut the grass. I don’t know why, I just enjoy it. So for me, I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to finally be healed enough to be able to get up on my lawn mower for the first time. Not only was it nice to get out and do something I enjoyed doing, but it was a relief to feel useful and productive for a change. I pride myself on taking care of my family and my property, and early on after surgery, I could barely change a lightbulb. I soon realized, though, that mental gratification wasn’t the only thing I stood to gain from mowing.
When I gripped the steering wheel the first time after surgery, I could feel this trembling motion travel up my arm and into my shoulder. I really can’t tell you what it was doing for me, but it just felt good and it felt like it was doing something for me. It takes me seven and a half hours to mow my entire lawn, and sometimes, during the summer especially, it can be hard to keep up with it. Rest assured that this was never the case during my rehab. And that constant vibration, that little pulsating motion—I’m convinced that it helped me heal.
Another part of my rehab program that would probably be considered a little unusual was my actual throwing progression. While it’s absolutely true that every single thing I did during rehab was done with the intention of getting me back to being able to throw a baseball, I didn’t actually work on throwing a baseball before I had already worked on throwing a football. In my mind, throwing a football was actually a natural precursor to throwing a baseball. You don’t use your whole range of motion like you do when you throw a baseball and you can just toss it nice and easy and still get that movement in your shoulder. And I love to throw a football anyway, so this was a no-brainer addition to my recovery plan.
Throwing footballs also served as another useful measuring stick when it came to judging my progress. The first time I was healthy enough to even attempt throwing a football, I couldn’t lob it more than ten yards. I still remember standing there and just feeling depressed, really almost pathetic. I mean, ten yards is nothing.
But every day I kept working at it. From a distance, maybe it looked like a mindless game of catch with my trainer Peter Hughes, but it was really a mental and physical workout for me. I really concentrated on my mechanics as I threw and focused on rebuilding the muscle memory in my shoulder so I could naturally repeat a smooth, steady throwing motion.
As I got stronger, I was able to gradually lengthen out my tosses. Whenever I got some air under one, I would make Pete stay right where he caught it so I could come pace it off. Inevitably I would think the ball had traveled farther than it did. And inevitably I would soon be chastising myself: Thirty-eight yards?! Are you kidding me? Come on! Throwing was serious business to me.
I eventually reached my goal of being able to throw a football fifty yards, and I did take some pride in that, but it was still frustrating knowing I used to be able to really chuck it a lot farther. I’m really not exaggerating when I say there used to be a time in my life when I could throw a football seventy, seventy-five yards no problem. It’s just something I was always able to do. I’ve always been able to throw a baseball really hard and a football really long. Well, before surgery anyway.
When I was finally physically ready to throw a baseball for the first time, I’m not going to lie: There was a ton of apprehension. Mentally, I wasn’t quite prepared for the moment not to go well. I was so anxious; I remember just standing there just hoping that everything would feel all right.
When I rocked back on my right leg for the first time with a baseball in my right hand, I was struck by this almost overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. Once my weight had shifted back, my body just took over and knew what to do. As my arm and shoulder rose together and cocked back behind me, I half expected to feel something—pain or tightness—or God forbid, hear something—like snap, crackle, or pop—but there was nothing but the old feeling of my muscles working together in the way they always had. As I followed through and released the ball nice and easy, I just broke into a smile. It was in that moment that I truly knew I would be able to pitch again in 2009.
I never doubted that I wouldn’t make it back to pitching, but when you are recovering from a major surgery, it’s hard to predict how many setbacks you’re going to encounter along the way. The amazing thing is I never had an issue really, and it’s remarkable when you think about it, because the odds were practically insurmountable. Shoulder surgery for any pitcher would more than likely end their career. For me, at age forty-one, it was not only more than likely; it was practically a done deal.
It wasn’t the first time it really looked like my career might be over, and it also wasn’t the first time that things were headed in a direction that I never intended. The parallels between 2009 and 2001 would prove to be eerily similar, but thankfully odds and uncertainty were all things I had conquered before.
“I’m done. I quit. I just can’t do this anymore.”
It was June 9, 2001. The visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium. As the starting rosters of the Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees took the field to start the top of the fourth inning, I was certainly not where I thought I’d be at this moment in time. Instead of sitting in the dugout with my jacket slung over my right shoulder, trying to keep my arm warm as our guys came up to bat, I was slumped in my chair in the clubhouse, staring at my locker and hopelessly rubbing my right elbow. Having just finished ranting out loud about my lik
ely retirement, I sat there thinking, How the heck did I get here?
It’s not like I was suffering from short-term memory loss; I was certainly aware of why I was no longer in the game. My manager, Bobby Cox, had just yanked me after only three innings. It had been an uneven performance, to say the least. I had managed to squeeze in one lone good inning in between two dismal ones. I had thrown seventy pitches—although forty-one had been strikes—and given up six hits and four runs, all earned, thus inflating my ERA to nearly 6.0.
The third inning had gone so poorly that when Yankee catcher Todd Greene mercifully hit a routine fly ball to right field for the third out of the inning, even I knew what was coming. All I had to do was glance at Bobby as I strode off the mound and headed toward the dugout; I saw the look on his face and I knew my day was done. He was talking to me as I walked down the steps into the dugout, but I don’t remember actually hearing what he said. It was like I was temporarily deafened by my own frustration. I was so mad. No, I wasn’t just mad; I was literally fighting mad. I made a beeline for the door leading to the clubhouse, battling the impulse to take my anger out on anything in my path until I was out of sight of the TV cameras.
When I finally got to the safe haven of the clubhouse, I stormed over to my locker, ripped off my uniform, and threw everything on the ground. When my glove had the audacity to ricochet a good ten feet away, I stomped over, retrieved it, and violently launched it back toward my locker. Nobody had a radar gun handy at the moment, but I’m telling you, that thing had some juice on it. It was easily the hardest thing I had thrown all afternoon. As I watched my “Wilson heater” hurtle through the air, I felt a little better, almost relieved, but the feeling was oh so very brief. About the time I heard the satisfying thwack of my glove crashing into the back of my locker, I let out an involuntary sound of my own: the unmistakable yelp of pain. I instinctively grabbed my right elbow and slunk down in my chair, completely defeated.