Frank Jobe

After World War II, Frank Jobe followed the proverbial American dream: college, medical school, marriage, and a family. Even though he said he never planned it that way, he pursued a career that helped make the world a better place — particularly the world of baseball, as the developer of the procedure known as Tommy John surgery.

The first chapter of Dr. Jobe’s story begins against the backdrop of a small farm outside Greensboro, North Carolina, during the Great Depression: The two-story Jobe home, shaded by cedar trees, sits against a backdrop of rolling hills and fields where a few cows graze. Jobe’s mother milks cows twice a day and churns butter by hand. The family garden usually boasts an abundant harvest of tomatoes, which in addition to his mother’s butter, his postal-worker father sells to help pay for his son’s education.1 When chores are finished, sometimes Frank and his father play catch. The younger Jobe, who is ambidextrous, broke an arm when he was in third grade, so while he is pretty good at receiving a baseball, he doesn’t hit well. During baseball season, he and his dad listen to the New York Yankees broadcasts on radio and talk about Babe Ruth.2 That was about the extent of young Frank’s interest in America’s pastime.

Born July 16, 1925, the only child of Lacey and Alma Jobe, Frank grew up as part of what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” The Great Depression of the 1930s may have affected the Jobe family less than people in other parts of the country because their farm provided food, Lacey had a steady government job, and the Greensboro area in general was not as affected as other areas, thanks in large part to the textile industry and its rural location.3

When Frank was ready for eighth grade, his parents enrolled him in a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school in Collegedale, Tennessee. After high school, he went directly into the Army, joining many others of his age who felt compelled “to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled.”4

“I didn’t think of anything else,” he told sportswriter Tom Hoffarth in 2012. “I thought I’d decide (on a career) once I got out.”5 And that’s what he did.

Jobe registered for the draft in 1943 as a non-combatant. Thanks to good typing skills, while in basic training he became a clerk in the medical division at Camp Barkeley, Texas.6 According to a Jobe family member, when Frank learned he could receive an additional $50 a month by signing up for the 101st Airborne Division, the legendary “Screaming Eagles,” he volunteered, joining the 326th Airborne Medical Company.

Jobe arrived in England prior to D-Day in June 1944. Three months later he saw action in the Netherlands in Operation Market Garden. Staff Sergeant Jobe, a medical supplies clerk, entered Holland crammed into a Waco Hadrian combat glider transporting trucks, trailers, and medical personnel to treat combat casualties.7 They began arriving as fast as the 326th could set up aid stations for doctors to perform emergency surgeries, remove shell fragments, and set broken bones.8

Following the unsuccessful Operation Market Garden, the 101st moved to Elst for a few weeks, working from a TB sanatorium, a convent school, and a monastery until around the end of November when the 101st went to France for a brief rest, and to assimilate replacements for the 2,118 casualties suffered in the operation.9

The doctors Jobe worked with must have seen something special in the young soldier who didn’t wince at the sight of blood or cringe over gruesome amputations. Doubtless, other characteristics of his personality and work ethic impressed the doctors, too, and they questioned him about his plans after he returned to the States.10 Among others, Dr. Charles Van Gorder, whose story is chronicled in The Greatest Generation, thought Jobe would make a good physician.11

But thoughts of a medical career would need to wait. The German offensive, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge, began on December 16, and the 101st was sent to Belgium on December 17 to hold the town of Bastogne. Amid freezing weather, the 326th Medical Company set up a station just northeast of Bastogne on December 18, only to be overrun by units of the German Panzer Lehr Division the next night, injuring personnel while capturing all of the surgical team, most of the medical clearing station, equipment, and transportation. The Germans ordered the Americans at gunpoint to gather their wounded, load everything onto their vehicles and fall back into the enemy positions.12

Jobe and a buddy looked for any opportunity to escape, and as soon as they saw a German guard not paying close attention, they jumped from the German vehicle and took off running as fast as they could with bullets flying all around them. Scrambling down a bank, they forded an icy stream and hid in some bushes along a road until they jumped onto a passing American Army truck.13

By the time Jobe’s Army stint was over in 1946, he had been awarded a Bronze Star, a combat medic badge, a one-star Glider Badge, the 101st Airborne Division award, and the Dutch Government award also for the 101st. Returning home, he enrolled at Southern Missionary College — with help from the G.I. Bill — on the same Tennessee campus where he had attended high school. He later transferred to La Sierra College, now La Sierra University, in Southern California. If a full class load was not enough for the senior pre-med student, Jobe also edited La Sierra’s weekly student newspaper, The Criterion, an experience that would prove valuable in later years when he wrote and co-authored a number of books and articles.

Receiving his bachelor’s degree from La Sierra in 1949, Jobe went on to medical school at nearby Loma Linda University, completing clinical studies at White Memorial Hospital and Los Angeles County Hospital, and receiving his M.D. degree in 1956. To pay off school bills, he practiced general medicine for three years, doing everything from delivering babies to removing tonsils, performing autopsies and taking emergency calls. He developed an interest in orthopedics, and continued his training in a three-year residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

During his residency, Jobe made a positive impression on one of his teachers, Dr. Robert Kerlan, chief of orthopedics at Los Angeles County General Hospital and team physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Perhaps it was Jobe’s inquisitive mind, his unassuming manner and attention to detail that caught Dr. Kerlan’s attention, as well as the skillful way Jobe’s long, slender fingers performed every step of a surgical procedure with precise accuracy. When Kerlan asked him what he planned to do after completing his residency, Jobe didn’t have an answer. Kerlan invited him to see him when he’d finished. Three years later, in 1964, the doctors met in Kerlan’s office, and on a handshake formed a life-long partnership. Jobe began consulting with the Dodgers in 1964, the same year he performed his first surgery on a major league baseball player. He may have been a bit nervous about removing a bone chip from the elbow of Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres, but his new partner assured him he’d done a great job.14

In 1965 the doctor duo co-founded what is today’s prestigious Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic with a client list that grew to include most of Southern California’s professional sports organizations.15 Dr. Jobe officially joined the Dodgers’ medical staff in 1968, and would be the team’s medical director until 2008.16

In his first years of working with major league baseball players, Jobe had little more to offer pitchers with injured arms other than cortisone injections, rest, ice, and heat. At least these were more effective than the “treatments” in the early days of medicine, which he described in a 2007 interview. There was a time when a sore joint was blamed on an infection in some other part of the body, such as abscessed teeth. A player could have all his teeth pulled, but still have a sore joint and never pitch again.17

Pitching sensation Sandy Koufax was among the Kerlan-Jobe Clinic’s first Dodger patients in the 1960s. The doctors did all they could to keep him on the mound, but injections, rest, ice, and heat provided only temporary relief, which meant Koufax, his doctors and trainers had to be inventive. Among other things, the pitcher rubbed his pitching arm with a foul-smelling salve containing capsicum — the substance that makes hot chili peppers hot, and dulls the part of the brain that senses pain.18 His trainers even made a special rubber sleeve from an inner tube for him to wear while soaking his arm in a bucket of ice.19

Like many other major league pitchers of his time and earlier, Koufax toughed it out as long as he could, but ultimately, the sore elbow got the best of him. Just 30 years old, he pitched his last game on October 6, 1966.

Jobe yearned to do something to fix injured elbows and give athletes like Koufax the opportunity to continue their careers.20 As he considered possibilities, he looked at the work of Dr. Herb Stark, who had repaired an injured hand by grafting a tendon from elsewhere in the patient’s body. He also knew the work of a specialist who grafted tendons to stabilize ankles of polio patients. However, he did not know whether a tendon transplant would work in an elbow. Stark suggested that a pitcher could get along just fine without a little-used tendon extending from the hand down the inside of the wrist, the palmaris longus. But, would the tendon stay in place in the elbow? Would it receive blood vessels? Would it, with extensive rehabilitation, learn to be a ligament? Those questions could not be answered until someone actually went through the surgery and rehabilitation. The revolutionary untested procedure was all Dr. Jobe could offer in 1974 to Dodgers star pitcher Tommy John, who desperately wanted his throwing arm back.

John’s arm problem actually started while he was a teen, especially after he moved from the Little League field to the normal size baseball field.21 Later, when he played for the Chicago White Sox in the 1960s, the ailment was written off as “epicondylitis,” a “fancy term for a sore elbow.”22 The problem continued after he was traded to the Dodgers, until X-rays revealed a couple of floating bone fragments in the muscle. Injections of cortisone and Novocain kept him in the game until September 23, 1972, when he jammed his left elbow into the ground while sliding into home, dislodging the bone chips from the muscle and into the elbow joint. Five days later, Jobe and Kerlan removed the chips, and although John was out for the rest of the season, he was back in good form the following two seasons. By mid-season 1974, he held the best pitching record in the National League, 13-3.23 Then the unthinkable happened just before the All-Star game.

In the third inning of a game against Montreal at Dodger Stadium, John felt a strange pain in his first pitch to Expos first baseman Hal Breeden. He said it was as though his arm wasn’t there. If his first pitch was strange, the second was disaster. A slamming sound came from inside his elbow and he said it felt as if his arm had come off. He walked into the dugout and straight to the clubhouse, where Jobe showed up within minutes.24

The doctor’s initial diagnosis was a torn ligament, and after studying the X-rays, Dr. Stark agreed. Without today’s advanced diagnostic tools of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computerized tomography (CT), in 1974 arm surgery was the only way to know for certain whether the ligament was just strained or pulled completely off the bone. Jobe told the pitcher to rest for a couple of weeks, start back slowly and see if the arm improved.

Doubtless, “arm surgery” are among the scariest words a pitcher can hear. However, with every passing week, and seeing no improvement, John became desperate to do something, anything, to get his arm back. While surgery came with no guarantees, not having surgery guaranteed him a zero chance of ever pitching again. John was ready, “no matter how arduous, no matter how tedious.”25

Only by opening the elbow could Jobe determine the extent of injury, and he foresaw three possibilities:

• If the ligament had a slight tear, it could be repaired, and after a short rehab, John could pitch again.
• If the ligament was torn off at both ends, it could be stapled to the bone, it would grow back and after a little longer rehab, John could pitch again.
• If the ligament was torn in the middle, Jobe had nothing to offer except that experimental procedure he’d been thinking about for a long time – ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction.

He wasn’t even sure he should mention it to John, but the pitcher insisted that he do something.26 The procedure involved removing the tendon from John’s right arm and transplanting it into his left elbow. All Jobe could promise the pitcher was many months of difficult rehabilitation. On a wild guess, he gave John about a one in a hundred chance he’d ever pitch again.27 Three little words convinced him that his patient was mentally prepared for what lay ahead: “Let’s do it,” John said.

On September 25, 1974, working with Stark and other colleagues, Jobe discovered his worst fear. The ligament was torn in the middle. In a history-making surgery that took around three hours, he removed about six inches of tendon from John’s right arm, drilled holes into his left elbow, threaded the tendon in a figure-eight pattern, anchored it tight, and sewed up the incision. Whether it would work, of course, was anybody’s guess.28

Waking up in the recovery room a short time later, John reached for his right arm and instantly knew what had happened. “A dark chill went down my spine and my stomach sank,” he wrote. “They did the transplant. I thought for sure my career was over.”29

Unfortunately, John’s recovery did not initially progress the way he and his doctor had hoped. Scar tissue growing over the ulnar nerve caused his left hand to curl like a claw, and by mid-December, he had completely lost use of it, necessitating another trip to surgery to scrape away the scar tissue and reposition the nerve. While Jobe pronounced the second surgery a success, he continued to withhold judgment on John’s return to the mound. 30

When the cast came off for the last time in January 1975, the pitcher gazed at a thin arm with atrophied muscles. “The skin hung down, all loose and white, and my clawed hand looked positively skeletal,” he wrote. Jobe told him not to be concerned how it looked, but to focus on rehabilitation, which he did.31 John returned to the mound on April 16, 1976, and threw four shutout innings before giving up three runs in the fifth.32 He won his first post-surgery major league game on April 26, 1976, and went on to finish his career in 1989 with more wins (164) after surgery than before (124).

Fearing that John’s success might be a fluke, Jobe did not perform another tendon transplant in a pitcher’s elbow for about two years.33 Over time, ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, now known as Tommy John surgery, became a common procedure. Asked how it acquired the player’s name rather than the pioneering surgeon’s name, Jobe had a plausible explanation. When talking to other potential surgery candidates, doctors would explain it’s “like what we did to Tommy John.” And, they understood.34 Jobe also attributed it to an easy-to-remember name. “It’s such a nice name, Tommy John. It rolls off the tongue very nicely.”35 But that was not the case for the second revolutionary surgery Jobe introduced for injured pitchers.

Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser’s right arm and shoulder finally paid the price of overuse in the spring of 1990. At first, he refused to think it was anything he couldn’t resolve with hard work. Pitchers always have sore arms in the spring, he reasoned. Joking with his teammates about not wanting an MRI, he claimed those letters stood for “Maybe Really Injured,” or “May Require Incision.” Unfortunately, his pain grew increasingly worse, until he could not pitch more than four or five innings. He knew it was no joking matter.36

Two years earlier, he had won the 1988 National League Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player awards in the playoffs and World Series. But on April 25, 1990, in a game against St. Louis that would have been his 100th career victory, Hershiser struggled with control, allowing five runs and his first four walks of the season in a 5-1 loss.

Realizing he was hurting the team as well as himself, he was finally ready for an MRI.37 When Jobe said Hershiser’s unstable shoulder was due to stretched-out ligaments and that he needed surgery, Hershiser didn’t require another opinion. “His reputation preceded his advice,” the pitcher said on the 25th anniversary of his famous operation. “I didn’t need anybody else telling me what was wrong with me and how to fix it.”38 Nor did he wish to delay.

The next day Jobe performed anterior labrum reconstruction, a procedure that involved tightening the ligaments in Hershiser’s shoulder, splitting the muscle around the shoulder joint, and using scar tissue to create a new ligament. He had done it on others, including NFL quarterback Jim McMahon and golfer Jerry Pate, but never on a major-league pitcher who wanted to regain his ability to throw 90-mile-per-hour fastballs. Even though this was the first time this kind of shoulder reconstruction had been done on a major-league pitcher, the doctor was confident that Hershiser would return to the mound in about a year.39

Post-surgery rehabilitation was painful and intense, twice a day for 396 consecutive days.40 Hershiser started throwing off a mound in September, kept working at it all winter, and by spring 1991 was looking forward to the start of the season. After a brief setback that forced him to quit throwing for a couple of weeks, he returned to the mound in his first minor league game 13 months after surgery. On June 9, 1991, Hershiser picked up his first post-surgery win — the 100th of his career. He had the ball mounted on a trophy and gave it to his doctor. Like Tommy John, Hershiser had more wins after surgery (105 in the following 10 seasons) than before (99).41

That kind of success led some to think the surgeries made John and Hershiser stronger pitchers. In fact, some “misguided parents of pitching aspirants have inquired with doctors about putting their perfectly healthy sons under the knife in hopes of improving their velocity.”42 Of course, Jobe said no. The common denominator in a pitcher’s success in getting back into the game after ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction or anterior labrum reconstruction is the individual’s commitment to months of strenuous boring rehabilitation.43

While arthroscopic advances have tweaked the shoulder reconstruction procedure Jobe did on Hershiser in 1990, not much has changed from the 1974 surgery he did on John’s elbow, except that it is now done in about an hour instead of three or four. “That tells you he was right on the mark in regards to what he was trying to do,” said Stan Conte, Dodgers director of medical services.44

“He would tell you he was making this up as he went along, based on good science, but it took a huge amount of guts to put himself out there, where failure would have been shown to everybody. He was willing to do that to try and get the player back out on the field.”45

Frank Jobe may best be remembered as the doctor who pioneered surgical procedures that saved the careers of hundreds of major league baseball pitchers, but he was personally most proud of his work to keep people from needing surgery in the first place. His familiar arm and shoulder exercises for pitchers (still well known as the Jobe Exercises), books and articles, research, teaching, and a biomechanics laboratory bear testament to his dedication to keeping athletes as well as others out of an operating room.

Recognizing a responsibility to share their experience and findings with others, the doctors at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic established a sports medicine fellowship in 1973. This program, which provides intensive training and research opportunities in sports medicine, is one of the largest and most respected programs of its kind in the United States.46

Six years after the fellowship program started, Jobe undertook another project devoted to the study of sports-related injuries. He wanted to know the cause of injuries. To do this, he needed a laboratory equipped with computers, electrodes, high-speed camera, therapy pool, and gymnasium where he could study muscle movement involved in pitching a baseball, swinging a golf club and other activities. Housed at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood, California, his Biomechanics Research Laboratory enabled him to pioneer motion analysis on the act of throwing. Using electrodes and high-speed photography capable of taking 500 images per second, he could see which parts of the shoulder muscles were active at any point in a pitch, and from this information, develop exercise programs to prevent injuries from muscle overuse.

In 1989, ten years after the lab opened, Jobe reported that as a result of the studies done there, the number of rotator cuff injuries among pitchers had declined. “’We’ve gone from being a catastrophic caretaker to prevention of injury, and now we’re in the performance-enhancement area,’” he said.47

In 1984 Jobe published the first of seven books he would author or co-author throughout his career. Among these were:

• Play Ball! The Official Little League Fitness Guide, co-authored with Diane Radovich Moynes, 1984
• 30 Exercises for Better Golf, with Bill Bruns, 1986
• Operative Techniques in Upper Extremity Sports Injuries, 1995
• Athletic Forever: The Kerlan-Jobe Plan for Lifetime Fitness with Karen Mohr and Tommy Lasorda, 1998

He also contributed 24 chapters to other books and published more than 140 articles in medical publications.

To John, Hershiser, and the many other athletes, Jobe was more than an excellent surgeon who saved their careers. Hershiser called him a “friend,” a “kind soul,” and a “humble man,” and possessing a “very dry sense of humor.”48 Others called him “pioneer” and “the godfather of sports medicine,” noting that he had a “pleasant peacefulness” about him. As Vin Scully noted, Jobe was not touched by celebrity. His success made no outward impact on him.49

“He had a brilliant mind but never acted like he was the smartest guy in the room,” said Hershiser. “You’re talking about someone who could have walked around like they were God as he repaired and took care of everyone, but walked around like he was the lowest on the totem pole, and waited to be talked to and waited to be recognized.”50

Jobe may have been a loyal Dodgers fan, but he didn’t cheer only for the Dodgers. He cheered for the players he worked on, no matter what team. “Sometimes it just makes you want to cry watching those guys go on to great things,” he said.51

Jobe continued working well past the traditional retirement age of 65. In addition to his medical practice and serving as special advisor to the chairman of the Dodger organization, he was a clinical professor in the department of orthopedics at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. For 26 years he served as orthopedic consultant for the PGA, Senior PGA, and Champions Tours, and was named the emeritus physician for the PGA Tour. The American Orthopaedic Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1996. A few years later, in 2012, the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation awarded him its Dave Winfield Humanitarian Award. He was inducted into the American Orthopedic Society of Sports Medicine Hall of Fame, and the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Hall of Fame, as well as the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals. In 2013 he was honored in Cooperstown, New York, as part of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Weekend.

Frank Jobe died on March 6, 2014, in Santa Monica, California. He had been hospitalized not long before with an undisclosed illness. He was aged 88 and in his 50th season with the Dodgers. He was survived by his wife, Beverly (née Anderson), to whom he had been married for 54 years; his sons, Christopher, Meredith, Cameron, and Blair; and eight grandchildren.52

There were many accolades when the news of the pioneering surgeon’s death broke, but one in particular was simple and apt. Recognizing that many athletes in the past and the future can thank Dr. Jobe for finding a way to continue their careers, Dodger President Stan Kasten called him a “Hall of Famer in every sense of the word.”53

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by David Lippman and Rory Costello, and fact-checked by Rob Wood.

Notes

1 Doug Miller, “Frank Jobe’s Hall of Fame Life,” MLB.com. July 22, 2013.

2 Ibid.

3 Greensboro, North Carolina Convention and Visitors Bureau website (www.visitgreensboronc.com).

4 Tom Brokaw. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. 2005: xxvii.

5 Tom Hoffarth, “In honor of his latest honor, Dr. Frank Jobe deftly knifes his way through a non-invasive Q-and-A,” Farther off the Wall blog, January 7, 2012.

6 Miller, “Frank Jobe’s Hall of Fame Life.”

7 Will Carroll, “Dr. Frank Jobe, Tommy John and the Surgery that Changed Baseball Forever,” BleacherReport.com, July 17, 2013. (https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1672080-dr-frank-jobe-tommy-john-and-the-surgery-that-changed-baseball-forever).

8 Major Albert Crandall, M.C., Report of Medical Department Activities in European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army Medical Department, Office of the Surgeon General, 1945.

9 Ibid. Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far, Simon and Schuster, 1974.

10 Miller, “Frank Jobe’s Hall of Fame Life.”

11 Ronald D. Graybill, A Journey of Faith and Healing, Los Angeles, California: White Memorial Medical Center. 2013.

12 Crandall, Report of Medical Department Activities.

13 Graybill, A Journey of Faith and Healing.

14 Miller, “Frank Jobe’s Hall of Fame Life.”

15 Kerlanjobe.com (https://www.kerlanjobe.com/About-the-Practice/Sports-Team-Affiliations).

16 Ken Gurnick,.”Jobe remembered as great doc, better person,” MLB.com, April 7, 2014.

17 Mark Langill, “Orel surgery: Dr. Frank Jobe’s other groundbreaking operation, 25 years ago,” Dodgers.com, April 27, 2015.

18 Carroll, “Dr. Frank Jobe, Tommy John and the Surgery that Changed Baseball Forever.”

19 Tom Verducci, “The Left Arm of God: Sandy Koufax was more than just a pitcher,” Sports Illustrated, August 29, 2014.

20 Carroll, “Dr. Frank Jobe, Tommy John and the Surgery that Changed Baseball Forever.”

21 Ibid.

22 Tommy John. T.J.: My 26 Years in Baseball. New York: Bantam Books, 1991: 97.

23 John, 136.

24 John, 143.

25 John, 145.

26 Hoffarth, “In honor of his latest honor.”

27 Valerie J. Nelson, “Dr. Frank Jobe, best known for Tommy John surgery, dies at 88,” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2014.

28 John, 146-147.

29 John, 147.

30 John, 150.

31 Ibid.

32 Steve Mancuso, “Broken Elbows: The Surgery,” RedlegNation.com, August 31, 2015.

33 Carroll, “Dr. Frank Jobe, Tommy John and the Surgery that Changed Baseball Forever.”

34 Hoffarth, “In honor of his latest honor.”

35 Ibid.

36 Orel Hershiser and Bill Plaschke. “The Agonizing Road Back — Hershiser Describes Fear, Pain of Surgery, Rehabilitation,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1991.

37 Ibid.

38 Langill, “Orel surgery: Dr. Frank Jobe’s other groundbreaking operation, 25 years ago.”

39 Ibid.

40 Hershiser and Plaschke, “The Agonizing Road Back.”

41 Eric Stephen, “Orel Hershiser, Stan Conte Remember Frank Jobe,”. SB Nation/True Blue LA, March 7, 2014.

42 Daniel J. Flynn, “He did more to revolutionize modern pitching than anyone. And he never stepped on a mound,” Breitbart.com, March 7, 2014.

43 John, 145.

44 Stephen, “Orel Hershiser, Stan Conte Remember Frank Jobe.”

45 Ibid.

46 “About the Fellowship Programs,” Kerlan-Jobe Institute website (https://www.kerlanjobe.org).

47 Mal Florence, “All-Star Doctors: Centinela Hospital Has Become Leader in Sports Medicine,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1989.

48 Stephen, “Orel Hershiser, Stan Conte Remember Frank Jobe.”

49 Steve Dilbeck, “Miracle Worker; Dr. Jobe Gives Players Back Their Arms,” Los Angeles Daily News, September 24, 1999.

50 Stephen, “Orel Hershiser, Stan Conte Remember Frank Jobe.”

51 Richard Goldstein, “Frank Jobe, Surgeon Who Saved Pitchers’ Careers, Dies at 88,” New York Times, March 6, 2014.

52 Nelson, “Dr. Frank Jobe, best known for Tommy John surgery, dies at 88.” Goldstein, “Frank Jobe, Surgeon Who Saved Pitchers’ Careers, Dies at 88.”

53 Rob Neyer, “Making room for medical pioneer Dr. Jobe in Cooperstown,” Foxsports.com, March 7, 2014.