Performance gains from Tommy John surgery still up for debate

FOR THE BETTER? Many baseball pitchers, including Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals, have undergone Tommy John surgery in their arms. While the operation can extend careers, researchers differ on whether the players pitch as well as they once did.

Geoff Livingston/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Nathan Seppa

March 30, 2015 at 9:00 am

Major League baseball pitchers who undergo two Tommy John surgeries have shorter careers — by nearly a year on average — than similar-age pitchers who haven’t had the operation, researchers find. For the surgery, surgeons replace the damaged ulnar collateral ligament in the arm with a tendon taken from elsewhere in the body to reverse a career-ending injury.

After two surgeries, pitchers walked more batters and recorded fewer wins than same-age pitchers who didn’t have surgery, researchers from the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit reported March 24 in Las Vegas at a meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. The same researchers reported in 2014 that 87 percent of major league pitchers who underwent a first-time Tommy John operation returned to the big leagues. That fell to 66 percent after a second surgery, and performance declined after both surgeries.

But the matter isn’t settled. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found in 2014 that pitching improved after a first surgery. Both research groups reported that pitching declined during the year before surgery.