Not Ready to Give Up : Tudor Is Trying to Come Back After Surgery

It might have been on his second pitch to Oakland A’s slugger Jose Canseco. Or the third. Four months later, John Tudor still isn’t sure.

What he knew beyond a doubt, however, three Oakland batters into his World Series start for the Dodgers, was that something was wrong, terribly wrong, with his left elbow. Which is why, when the first inning was over, Tudor summoned Dr. Frank Jobe to the Dodgers’ clubhouse.

Tudor said he was in terrible pain.

“You’ve got to give me a shot,” Tudor said. “Anything to stop the pain.”

Jobe refused. And John Tudor went back to the mound.

“Maybe if it had been a regular game, I would have come out,” Tudor said. “But I was at a point where I said, ‘Screw it, I’ve got to try and see what I can do.’ I wanted to prove to myself I couldn’t do it.”

So, with a blown-out elbow, Tudor struck out Mark McGwire of the A’s. Only then did he admit to himself it was over. He kicked the air and strode off the mound, clutching his useless arm.

“After that, it would have been just an exercise in futility,” he said.

Four months later, it has become an exercise in patience for Tudor, who is here in spring training to attempt, at 35, a comeback from major reconstructive surgery on his elbow performed only days after the Dodgers won the World Series. That was just one of three operations Tudor underwent in the off-season. He had arthroscopic surgery on his left shoulder and also had screws removed from his right leg, which he had broken almost two years earlier.

When Tudor tossed lightly from a practice mound here Friday--not the full 60 feet 6 inches, but about 40 feet--it was only the sixth or seventh time he’d picked up a baseball since last season. Team officials are projecting July as the earliest Tudor could resume pitching.

“That’s the date in doctors’ minds, but most doctors haven’t been athletes,” Tudor said.

“In my own mind, I’m going to be ready when I’m ready. That’s the best answer I can give. I can’t put a date on it, because I don’t know how it’s going to respond. Doctors can put out a timetable, going on statistics, but somehow people are always able to beat statistics.”

And Tudor is no stranger to pain. This is the third straight off-season he has spent rehabilitating one ache or another--a sore shoulder in 1986 and ‘87, arthroscopic knee surgery in ’87.

“A lot of people go through life with a lot more pain than I do,” Tudor said. “And I get reimbursed pretty handsomely to put up with what I put up with.”

It never occurred to Tudor, a Dodger only since last Aug. 17, when he was acquired from St. Louis for Pedro Guerrero, to refuse the so-called Tommy John operation--in which a tendon from his right forearm was removed and used to reconstruct the elbow--and call it a career.

“I just needed to find out how long it was going to take for me to recover from it,” Tudor said. “If (Jobe) told me I wasn’t going to pitch for a year, then I may not have gone through with it. Then again, I may have.

“But I knew I had to do it for no other reason than that I could have somewhere near a normal arm for the rest of my life. There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t have been able to do if I hadn’t had it repaired, because there was nothing holding the joint together.

“It hurt me to brush my hair or wash my hair because of the pushing--it was separating the joint.”

Tudor can’t say for sure how he first hurt his elbow, only that it happened last spring, when he was working his way back from an operation on his shoulder.

“I think I may have tried to get ready too fast,” he said. “I really don’t know if I hurt it overcompensating for my shoulder or if I hurt it swinging (a bat), because that’s when it really hurt the most.”

Tudor didn’t miss any starts for St. Louis last season, but the elbow hurt off and on. He went about 10 or 12 outings until it bothered him so much that he had a cortisone shot, then he went three more starts before having another shot. For the next several starts, the pain was gone. When he awoke the day after his last outing for the Cardinals, a 1-0 win over Philadelphia, the pain had returned. Three days later, he was traded to the Dodgers.

Did the Cardinals know he was damaged goods when they swapped him for Guerrero?

“As far as they were concerned, my days were probably numbered, but as far as they knew, I didn’t have any problems at the time. The trainer probably knew, but when I complain about a sore arm, it’s like, ‘What’s new? Today’s Tuesday, why shouldn’t it be sore?’ ”

It became a running joke that when Tudor said he had a sore arm, his teammates told him he would have a good game. But Tudor wasn’t laughing two innings into his first start for the Dodgers, when his elbow began to ache again. He made nine starts for the Dodgers, going 4-3 with a 2.41 earned-run average, but lasted just 1 1/3 innings in his last start Sept. 30 against the Giants.

He gritted his way through five innings of Game 4 of the playoffs against the Mets, but then four batters into Game 3 of the Series, his season was over.

“They kept telling me it was tendinitis or this or that,” Tudor said. “But when Dr. Jobe went in there, he told me it looked like (the ligament) had been torn two or three times. Partially torn probably, then completely torn that last game.”

It had been tough enough for Tudor to be torn away from the Cardinals, a team he had pitched into the World Series twice in 3 1/2 seasons. He had become a Dodger only reluctantly and had hinted that perhaps he would not remain one for long. The trade, however, did not come as a total shock. The Cardinals’ zeal in signing him to a new contract last summer--as opposed to waiting until the end of the season, as with other players--tipped off Tudor that he might be headed elsewhere.

When Tudor didn’t join his new teammates to celebrate winning the National League Western Division title last September, some saw that as a barometer of his alienation. That was hardly the case, he says now.

“I just didn’t think it was right,” he said. “Maybe I was wrong, the way I felt at the time, but I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful. I was just showing them the respect they deserved from me.

“I hadn’t been here, and they would have won without me. I said at the time that I planned to play a bigger role from then on, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”

It was unfortunate, too, that the injury deprived Tudor of an oppurtunity to vindicate himself for the two biggest defeats of his career--the Game 7 loss to Kansas City in the 1985 World Series, after which he punched an electric fan and cut his hand, and a Game 6 loss to the Minnesota Twins in the ’87 Series, which the Twins then won in Game 7.

He had three other Series wins, but they were eclipsed by those losses. The memory of those games, he said, may have caused him to attempt to last longer than he should have against the A’s.

Any ambivalence he might have had about being a Dodger has long since evaporated.

“I like this ballclub,” he said. “I like the makeup, the psyche of this team. They really showed me a lot last year.

“They didn’t have to show me anything, but they showed me a lot. They played with a lot of heart, a lot of guts. It was really a fun team to be around.

“I enjoyed playing in St. Louis, with the guys there, and by no means am I trying to rap them, but (the Cardinals) never played with the kind of intensity this team played with. . . . This team heard so much about the things they couldn’t do, they just decided, ‘We can do it.’ ”

And with a similar attitude, Tudor plots his return to pitching.

“I’d just as soon be ready right now, but I’m trying the best I can to take it in stride,” he said. “When my arm tells me I can’t do it anymore, I’ll back off, but until then, I’ll keep stepping forward.”

Dodger Notes

Fernando Valenzuela, who is coming back from shoulder problems, pitched from a practice mound. “My arm feels strong,” he said. “No pain. A little tired, but my arm feels strong.” Valenzuela even threw a couple of screwballs, “Good rotation,” he said with a big smile. . .The Dodgers signed infielder Tracy Woodson and outfielder Jose Gonzalez to one-year contracts.