Tommy John died today, which reminded me of a story he once told about the cast from the surgery that bears his name. I met John a while back on Capitol Hill one day when he was speaking to a bunch of Congressmen who were baseball fans. He didn’t know me, and had no reason to know I was there, so he told this story by coincidence. After he’d had the surgery now named for him (“Tommy John Surgery”) in 1974, he met up with the Dodgers, who happened to be in Pittsburgh at the time. He wanted to sit on the bench with his team, but was told that he needed the permission of the opposing manager since John was wearing a huge cast on his left arm. So he asked my grandfather, Danny Murtaugh, who was managing the Pirates. "That's fine, but I have two conditions," Murtaugh said. "First, if there's a fight on the field tonight, you can't go out there and start clubbing my ballplayers with that cast you've got on your arm. Second, you've got to let me sign the cast." And it turned out that it was the only non-Dodger signature on the cast for the recovery from the most famous surgery in baseball history. RIP, legend Tommy John