Free The Arm by Jeff Passan

numbness, John used athletic tape to bind his left pinky to his ring finger. He picked up a ball with his right hand, jammed it into his slowly cooperating clawed hand, and fired against the closest thing he’d seen to a batter in months: a wall.
    Every Monday, the routine started again. “My reasoning,” John said, “was if God took Sunday off, Tommy John can, too.” John’s arm felt the worst when he threw the day after his day off. The other six days he worked, him and the wall, him and his wife, him and anyone who wouldn’t laugh when he threw a ball. Stamina built over time, particularly as the nerve surgery worked its magic, unfurled his claw, and allowed him to squeeze Silly Putty and complement his shoulder exercises with forearm-muscle building. Ten or fifteen minutes of throwing grew into sessions two and three times as long. It bore no resemblance to the manicured rehab protocols today, most of which mirror one another with slight variations. Tommy John simply embraced the conventional wisdom of the time, as imparted by his old pitching coach, Johnny Sain: the more you throw, the healthier you get. Little empirical evidence exists today to back that claim, though John continues to believe it. The return of his arm—the real return—was enough for him.
    It happened on July 8, 1975, in Pittsburgh, with the temperature and humidity both in the eighties. John went to the bullpen with catcher Mark Cresse and settled into his typical rhythm: pitch, catch, pitch, catch, pitch, catch, metronomic in its efficiency. The heat loosened up his arm, and Cresse started to pushJohn. “Add a little more speed,” he said. So John did. For more than forty minutes, John threw Cresse sinkers. They resembled the ones he had thrown all those years leading up to the Breeden at bat. “I finally felt good,” John said. “I was following Dr. Jobe. My body was telling me what I needed.”
    He threw for forty minutes again the next day. “I was very tentative starting out,” John said. “I’m throwing, and the more I throw, the more I sweat, and the better my arm feels, and [Cresse] says tonight was better than last night.” He followed with another forty minutes on the team’s last day in Pittsburgh, and a few days later, on the Sunday before the All-Star break in St. Louis, John asked his manager, Walter Alston, to let him throw batting practice. John looked good, good enough that he scrapped his plan in case the surgery didn’t work: asking his old teammate Hoyt Wilhelm to teach him the knuckleball. The initial failure was evolving into a success story, though John never deluded himself into thinking he was safe. He was a lab rat, and lab rats weren’t expected to survive.
    At the end of the season, the Dodgers sent John to the fall instructional league, usually the domain of young prospects. On September 26, one year and one day after Jobe opened up his arm and did something no man ever had done before, Tommy John was back on a mound facing batters. The first was Danny Goodwin, the only player ever chosen number one overall in two drafts. On his third pitch, John dropped a curveball in for his first strike in over a year. He cruised through three innings on just thirty-six more pitches. Over the next twenty-eight days, John started seven games and threw thirty-seven innings. The rat lived.
    The Dodgers asked John to go to the Dominican Republic and play winter ball, but Jobe refused to let him. Months of throwing six days a week had taxed John’s arm, and Jobe didn’t want to overwork it any more, especially after instructional-league games in which John had thrown with maximum effort.Nothing guided Jobe’s choices other than instinct. In a sense, Jobe had even more riding on John’s recovery than John himself. Jobe knew UCL reconstruction was a legitimate solution for fixing a catastrophic injury, and he didn’t want to jeopardize