One in a hundred, and he signs up anyway. Okay, so. Ada's right that Jobe saying the number out loud is the decent thing, but think about who's sitting on the table hearing it. You're 31, your arm's done, the doctor tells you nobody's ever tried this, and you say yeah, go ahead. Then you sit out all of 1975. A whole year of watching, which in this game is the longest thing there is.
Comes back at 33. Pitches until he's 46. 164 wins after the elbow, out of 288 — more than half his career happened on a tendon that used to live in the other forearm. Every guy since has a number to look at. John had a guess and a guy he trusted, and he went first!
A ligament is a strap. The ulnar collateral one runs along the inside of the elbow and stops the joint gapping open when you throw. Tommy John's had gone, so Frank Jobe took a spare tendon out of his right forearm, drilled small holes…
Every drummer I ever knew would've signed that form twice. Thirty years of sessions and the wrists go the same way the elbow does — tell a guy there's a spare tendon in the other arm and he'll ask if you can do both while you're in there.
It's one of the very few operations named for the patient rather than the surgeon, Toby — poor Frank Jobe did the cutting and got the footnote. Somewhere north of a third of pitchers in the majors now have that tendon rerouted, all downstream of one bloke in 1974 saying go on then.