TOMMY GETS HIT BY COVID
Ex-Yank pitcher John has coronavrius, but says ‘I feel good’
Former Yankees star Tommy John said he is fighting a winning battle against COVID-19 and hopes to make a full recovery.
The retired MLB pitcher, 77, confirmed his diagnosis to the Daily News in a phone interview from his Indio, Calif., home on Wednesday.
“I feel good,” John said. “I’ve been making a gradual improvement. It hasn’t been bad although I did tell my doctors that if we’re supposed to go through life with blessings than why have I had to do all this stuff to get rid of this.”
He downplayed the severity of his condition, telling The News that at no time did he suffer any of the severe symptoms of the dreaded disease.
The two-time, 20-game winner for the Yankees said he first tested positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 13.
The Daily Beast, citing an interview with his girlfriend Cheryl Zeldin, first reported John was first taken to the hospital on
Dec. 13 a day after his motor skills began to suffer. Two more hospitalizations followed, she said, including when his oxygen saturation dropped.
John, however, told the Daily Beast he can’t be sure those conditions were the result of COVID-19. The four-time MLB All-Star, who was recently hospitalized after a fall, spoke from the California medical center Tuesday and said he was on oxygen at the time, but didn’t feel he needed it.
“I’d leave right now if they’d let me walk out,” John told the outlet.
The lefty-throwing John won 288 games (26th on the all-time list) across 26 MLB seasons, eight of which came with the Yankees. He won 21 and 22 games respectively for the Yankees in 1979 and ’80 and was an All-Star both seasons. He pitched for six teams during his career, which lasted from 1963 to 1989.
His name is synonymous with a surgery to repair the ulnar collateral ligament in elbows, an operation that he received during his career that is now commonly referred to as “Tommy John Surgery.”
Despite his diagnosis, John was most concerned about the loss of some of baseball’s all-time greats in 2020, only one of which (Tom Seaver) was partially the result of the coronavirus.
“For a while there it seemed as there was someone every other week,” John told the News. “So sad, so terrible. But we’re all getting up there in age now.”
Despite lacking support for the Hall of Fame from various Veterans Committees, John is at peace with his place in baseball history.
“If and when I breathe my last breath,” he said, “I’ve had a great life.”
The former pitcher’s son, a chiropractor named Tommy John III, frequently denies the legitimacy of the coronavirus pandemic online.
“This was never a pandemic,” John III tweeted in October. “You don’t have to be sacred to admit or believe that. Ur not alone. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done or what you used to believe or what you were entrapped into thinking. Start new.This is not a pandemic. The light is growing.”
His father didn’t appear to have that same sentiment, according to the Daily Beast, but said during that interview that he’s “not a vaccine type person.”