John Smoltz has Season-Ending Surgery: Is this the End of an Era?

John Smoltz was a young fireballer buried in the minor-league system of the Detroit Tigers in the summer of 1987, when Bobby Cox, then the Braves' general manager, elected to send Doyle Alexander to Detroit, with Smoltz as the only player coming from the Tigers' organization to Atlanta.  

Sure, the trade worked out exactly as planned for Detroit—Alexander went 9-0 down the stretch with three shutouts, matching in 11 starts his career high for an entire season.

However, beginning with Smoltz's major-league debut for Atlanta, not quite one year later, that trade seems to have worked out fairly well for Cox and the Braves as well.

Smoltz has been the one constant through almost the entire time I've been aware of the Braves. I sort of remember the days before he came along, but the first game I can remember attending at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in any sort of detail was a contest with the Mets in 1990, the summer I was seven years old.

When I look back upon that game, it represents, in my mind, the changing of the guard between the 1980s Braves and the 1990s Braves in a nutshell. Smoltz was the starting pitcher. He fell behind 3-0 early, but Dale Murphy homered to make it 3-2, then David Justice hit a pinch-hit home run to tie the game.

Jim Presley won the game with another solo homer after Smoltz was out of the game, for a 4-3 victory. Less than a month later, Murphy was sent to Philadelphia, clearing the way for Justice to begin grabbing headlines as Atlanta's starting right-fielder and cementing his case for Rookie of the Year honors.  

That summer, even though it was seen at the time as just another year gone to waste, wallowing in last place, it set the stage for what happened next.

Bobby Cox took over as field general. Justice established himself in right field, and Ron Gant did likewise in center. Mark Lemke and Jeff Treadway were emerging in the middle of the infield, and Greg Olson played solidly behind the plate. Oh, and three young starting pitchers—Steve Avery, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz—were in the rotation together, and all three were poised for a breakout season.

In a way, you could say that John and I grew up together. As I matured, I watched him mature from a young, easily frustrated but talented strikeout artist, to a dominating Cy Young award winner, to the guy he's basically been for the past 10 years—a pitcher with dominating stuff, but a tragically fragile arm.

I was amazed at how good he was down the stretch in '98, despite changing to a sidearm delivery, and distraught when he had to miss the entire 2000 season. My mom was calling for him to retire, but I knew we hadn't seen the last of the highly competitive Smoltz.

I was there, just home from my first year of college, with my dad on May 17, 2001, when Smoltz tried to make his comeback as a starter, and it just didn't work out. He threw 96 MPH fastballs, but nothing seemed to hit its intended target. I could see that something wasn't quite right, and I was crushed all over again.

However, that didn't last long, as we all watched Smoltzie transform into the most dominant and unhittable closer in the game. I had the privilege of watching a game he closed from the field level along the third-base line once, and let me tell you, it was completely understandable the way the opposing hitters flailed around and looked silly against his 97 MPH fastballs and deadly 88 MPH breaking balls.

In '05, I was excited for him to make his return to the rotation, and his 15-strikeout performance in his second start did not disappoint. I was driving back to school that Sunday afternoon. I stopped for lunch on the way, but I used the drive-thru and ate in the parking lot just so I didn't have to miss a moment of the radio broadcast.

I got back just in time to watch the bullpen implode and lose the game. It's just too bad we couldn't have cloned Smoltz and made John No. 1 a starter and John No. 2 the closer. I was actually amazed that Smoltz managed to pitch relatively pain-free for about two-and-a-half seasons as a starter.

I hope we haven't seen the last of John. He and Glavine are the only remaining links to the old days, reminding us how grateful we should be for those 15-straight years of success.

If we have, I guess I'll have to find a way to put myself at peace with it. He has had an excellent career, full of great moments that should land him in Cooperstown.

I hope that somehow, Smoltz, Glavine, and Maddux end up retiring in the same year, just so that they all become eligible for the Hall of Fame at the same time. They ought to be inducted as a unit, with a big, family-sized plaque rather than three, small, individual ones, because their contribution together was indeed worth more than the sum of its parts.

Even though Glavine and Maddux deserve to be inducted the moment they hang up their spikes, if one of them retires this year while Smoltz sticks it out for yet another comeback, some part of me hopes that enough writers have a sense of poetic justice to wait one more year on Tom and/or Greg, and vote them all in together, because I would have to find a way to be at their induction. Is that greedy? Maybe, but who could blame me?