The way I see it, Tommy John surgery arrived 10 years too late for Tom Cheney.
Cheney was a right-handed pitcher from Georgia whose big league career can be encapsulated into a single game he pitched for the Senators on Sept. 12, 1962.
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The place was Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, a meaningless late-season matchup with the Orioles. Washington already had clinched last place. The second-year expansion club would lose 100 games and finish 111⁄2 games behind the ninth-place Athletics.
Cheney had come over from the Pirates in late 1961. Though still in his 20s, Cheney’s bald head inspired the nickname “Skin,” and he was fine with that. He had a big-league fastball, and a plus-breaking ball that was his strikeout pitch.
Barely 4,000 people were there that night as Cheney set a major league record that still stands, whiffing 21 batters in a 16-inning complete game. He had only 13 strikeouts after 9 innings, but seemed to get sharper as the pitch count rose to an astonishing 228. The Senators won the game 2-1 on a home run by first baseman Bud Zipfel.
It’s easy to sit back and say it was that effort that hastened the end of his career. He was done by age 31, and finished at 19-29 with a 3.77 ERA in all or parts of eight seasons.
But Cheney didn’t think that one game was the tipping point. He died in 2001 at the age of 67 from complications of Alzheimer’s. Some years before then we spoke at length about what happened.
Cheney started 1963 like he’d win the Cy Young Award. He won his first four starts, allowing just a single earned run in 36 innings. In his fifth start, at Chicago, he took his first loss, allowing four earned runs in four innings.
“Something didn’t feel quite right when I released the ball,” he told me, “but I’d had that feeling before.”
Sound familiar?
His next start was another loss, and the discomfort continued. On May 15, at home against Baltimore, he threw a pitch and felt a sharp pain near his right elbow. The pain subsided, and he stayed in the game, but he knew something was wrong.
Gil Hodges took over as manager the following week. Hodges, a career NL man, felt NL players were superior to their AL counterparts. He brushed off Cheney’s report that his arm was ailing and kept him in the rotation. He finally went on the DL in August and was done for the season.
Cheney never got better. In 1964 he made 15 appearances and 6 starts before going back on the DL. He was out of the game entirely in 1965. After 5.1 innings in 1966, Cheney hung ’em up.
I couldn’t help but think of Tom Cheney when Stephen Strasburg grabbed his right forearm after that pitch in Philadelphia. Had sports medicine been further along in the 1960s, Cheney’s name would most certainly be known for more than just a single start in 1962.
Phil Wood is a contributor to Nats Xtra on MASN. Contact him at [email protected].
