Tommy John—whose 26 big-league seasons are second most among pitchers in the so-called modern era—died Saturday at 83. But Tommy John Surgery lives on at 52. The innovative elbow reconstruction pioneered by Dr. Frank Jobe (who died in 2014 at 88) still is saving countless ballplayers’ careers.

If induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame really is about Forever, acknowledging individuals who put a permanent imprint on the sport, why is neither man enshrined in Cooperstown? I’m all-in with Mark Whicker’s Tommy John appreciation in his “The Morning After” Substack, recommending “a shared plaque” at the Hall “with John and Jobe as an entry.”

It is possible that more people out there are aware of Tommy John Surgery than the man first subjected to it. The procedure—replacing a torn ulnar collateral ligament in the pitching elbow with a tendon harvested from elsewhere on the patient’s body (in John’s case, the right wrist)—reportedly has been performed on 40 major-league pitchers just this season, and in excess of 2,600 MLB players since its original, eponymous victim. That’s a lengthy roll call of the patients of Jobe.

In 2013, John and Dr. Jobe were invited to Cooperstown during induction weekend and appeared together during a brief press opportunity. There was some irony to the fact that Tommy John Surgery might have been considered a form of performance enhancement at a time when baseball was up to its eyebrows in the nefarious aspects of augmentation.

Among the eligible former players on that year’s Hall ballot were Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio, and Sammy Sosa—all of whom had been tainted by, or accused of, doping. And for the first time in 48 years, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America—with their St. Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates function—had barred the gates to all.

“There’s a myth out there that after Tommy John Surgery, you can pitch better than you did before,” Jobe said during that appearance. “Well, that’s not true. All it does is put it back to where it was and, if they have a good rehab program, they may pitch better than they did just before they got hurt, when they were beginning to go downhill. In their mind, they think, ‘I’m better than I ever was.’ But they’re not.”

John was 31 years old, 12 seasons into his big-league career when he tore the ligament in his elbow in 1974, and Jobe gave him roughly a one percent chance of returning to the mound after the then-experimental operation. “He said, ‘You don’t need surgery; you’ll be fine,’” John recalled Jobe telling him. “He said, ‘You can play catch with your kids and throw batting practice to your kids, but you’ll never be able to pitch major league baseball again.’

“I wanted to pitch major league baseball.”

So Jobe grafted the tendon from John’s other wrist, while admitting he wasn’t sure if the transplanted tendon would be rejected as a foreign body “or would wear out and break loose. That’s why I told him he had only about a 100-to-1 chance.

“This was the age,” Jobe related during that 2013 Hall of Fame weekend, “when surgeries were just being developed for athletes. And they weren’t life-saving.”

But John pitched another 14 seasons, three times winning at least 20 games.

“I didn’t do another one for two years,” Jobe said, “and then when he was pitching pretty well, we had Brent Strom [a journeyman who was the second player to have Tommy John Surgery] come in. So I did another one, and another year went by and Tom Candiotti came in. He was just a Single-A player at the time, and I had to decide whether this should be done on everybody that has a torn ligament, because you can live without it. Or should it be done just on major league players?”

Candiotti, a knuckleballer, convinced Jobe he was a big-league “prospect.” And post-surgery, he indeed spent 16 years in the Majors with five teams. “So I fixed a prospect,” Jobe said.

So a torn ulnar collateral ligament had become a curable disease. Victims regularly proceeded apace with their careers. But even John worried, years later, about a downside, that the operation’s availability could eliminate reasonable caution in young pitchers and their parents, and the “epidemic of kids from 12 to 17 pitching year-round can mean “they’ll probably be seeing a doctor down the road to do Tommy John Surgery.” A large percentage of those procedures now are done on high school, college, minor league and amateur pitchers. And Jobe agreed: “That’s a sad thing.”

Still, in the right hands (elbows?), the John-Jobe collaboration was Hall of Fame stuff.