One August morning in 2022, while standing alone on the Oakland Coliseum grounds, Daulton Jefferies collapsed onto the grass and wept.
For a solid 45 minutes, the pitcher shed tears. Six years after being chosen in the first round of the draft and just days after his 27th birthday, he contemplated abandoning baseball altogether — a notion he had never entertained, despite facing numerous setbacks due to injuries.
Jefferies had made eight starts for the Athletics that season and sensed that something was gravely wrong with his right elbow – once again. Having undergone a Tommy John surgery in 2017, he soon realized that another surgery was imminent.
“I needed a good cry,” he recalled. “Sometimes, you just need it.”
Throughout the history of baseball, elbow injuries have plagued pitchers, and damage to the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) used to spell the end of a career. However, this narrative changed 50 years ago when Dr. Frank Jobe successfully reconstructed the UCL of Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander Tommy John, thereby salvaging his career.
Since then, over 2,200 professionals have undergone the surgery.
With success rates being so high, Tommy John surgery has become almost routine, and individuals like Jefferies have shown resilience in enduring the arduous recovery process more than once. Yet, when one’s livelihood is at stake, the physical challenges, stress, and feelings of isolation can be profoundly daunting.
For Jefferies, all these emotions came to a head on that fateful day in 2022 — a day he describes as “probably the loneliest I’ve ever been.” His arm had been in pain for over a year, and his season had already been cut short in June due to another procedure to address thoracic outlet syndrome.
“I thought about retirement for the first time,” he confessed.
In September, just a month after Jefferies experienced his emotional breakdown on the field, he underwent a second elbow ligament reconstruction.
Now, this spring, Jefferies finds himself back on a major league mound, vying for a spot on the regular-season roster. Having signed a minor league contract with the San Francisco Giants in December, he is no longer solely focused on rehabilitation.
He has already made appearances in three big league spring training games, allowing two earned runs and seven hits while striking out eight batters with just one walk over seven innings, resulting in a 2.57 ERA.
“Everything is going well, I couldn’t be happier,” Jefferies remarked. “Living the dream.”
The hope is that at some point this season, Jefferies will return to the Bay Area, where he previously excelled at the University of California-Berkeley before being drafted by Oakland. With the opportunity to continue playing in proximity to his Central Valley hometown in California, Jefferies considers himself “the luckiest guy ever.”
“It would be reasonable to say, ‘I’m going to move on to the next thing at this point,’” noted Giants President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi. “But the guys who want to keep going, who have the determination to keep going, you figure you’ll bet on them because they’ve been through so much already.”
