In 2013, Neal ElAttrache was in Cooperstown when the Baseball Hall of Fame honored Dr. Frank Jobe, the man who performed what we now know as Tommy John surgery.ElAttrache, another one of the top orthopedic surgeons in the country, was there on Jobe’s behalf. On stage for a Hall of Fame weekend awards ceremony at Doubleday Field, ElAttrache gave a few remarks about his mentor and the pioneering operation he performed. Back at his table, ElAttrache and his wife sat with royalty. There was Jobe, Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax and esteemed manager Tommy Lasorda.Midway through the ceremony, ElAttrache’s wife leaned over. She was curious about the other man at the table, the one who seemed to know so much about the revolutionary surgery that had led them all to this occasion.“Who is he?” she said.ElAttrache replied: “That’s Tommy John.”John, the first person to ever undergo a reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament, died Saturday at age 83. In the days since his death, amid baseball’s injury epidemic, John’s legacy has received renewed attention from all around the baseball world that so often utters his name.“It’s hard to find an operation that has had the effect that the Tommy John operation has had in sports medicine,” ElAttrache told The Athletic. “It’s just remarkable.”That night in Cooperstown, Jobe turned to Koufax and repeated a joke the two traded with each other for years. Although lighthearted in nature, the words reinforce just how monumental Tommy John surgery is for the sport and its posterity. Koufax famously retired after only 12 MLB seasons, hampered by arm troubles in a time before MRIs. Koufax was never officially diagnosed with a torn UCL, but that was always Jobe’s hunch.“Frank Jobe apologized to Sandy at that table,” ElAttrache said. “He said that if he would have been smart enough to think of that operation a few years earlier, Sandy would have still been pitching.”Instead of Koufax, John was the one who became most famous for an injury that now sits at the crux of so many baseball debates.John’s name is still uttered almost every day in major-league clubhouses. He is perhaps even more famous in the world of sports medicine.“If you look and try to measure it with regard to salaries saved, replacement costs saved, careers saved, I think the only thing that would rival (Tommy John surgery) in sports would maybe be an ACL reconstruction,” ElAttrache said.Who should win NL MVP?Joe CrisalliElAttrache these days is among baseball’s most renowned surgeons. He has operated on the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Gerrit Cole and Tarik Skubal, among many more.ElAttrache was first a disciple of Jobe, the man who presented John with the idea of an experimental surgery back in 1974. Depending on the version of the story, Jobe expressed that the odds of success might be 1 in 100, or at least less than 1 in 10.John signed up anyway.“(Jobe) didn’t give it a big chance of working, but he gave Tommy no chance of being able to return to pitching the way he was,” ElAttrache said. “I think (John) thought for a second, ‘If I don’t have this operation done, I guess I’m going back to Terre Haute, Indiana.’”