No one could have envisioned this. Not back in 1974, when Tommy John and Brent Strom were the first two pitchers to have the UCL reconstruction and repair operation later named after 288-game-winner John, who won 172 games after the revolutionary surgery.

Even 25 years ago, it wasn’t like this. At that time, Dodgers rehabilitation director Ron Porterfield says “We could pretty much guarantee that without complications we could get a pitcher back to where he was before the operation. But that meant if he were on the Double-A level, that’s where he’d get back to. Now, with the advances in surgery and technology, what doctors do today with the proper rehabilitation and time — which is closer to 15 or even more months than the 12 that gets thrown around — pitchers can come back even stronger than before.”

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That may be tested further in coming years, as the lockout brings another jammed-in schedule, on top of the COVID-19-induced conditions of the past few seasons. Pitchers are still struggling to find a sense of normalcy, their routines disrupted once again. We find ourselves in the strange position of not wanting to be so confident in the power of the remedy that we ignore how serious the problem actually is — but at the same time it’s hard to discount just how effective Tommy John surgery has become when the evidence is all around us.

For example, on March 19, Justin Verlander took the mound against real competition for the first time since July of 2020, coming off the Tommy John surgery he had in October of that aborted season. He threw two hitless innings against the Cardinals, sitting 95 MPH. Verlander turned 39 in February, has won 226 games, two Cy Youngs and an MVP, thrown 2,988 regular-season innings, started 30 postseason games (good for 187 2/3 innings) and wants to start on Astros opening day.

Want another example? Porterfield could talk to Walker Buehler, whom the Dodgers drafted out of Vanderbilt with the 24th pick in 2015 knowing he likely needed surgery. Less than two months after that draft, Dr. Neal ElAttache performed the operation. Two years later, Buehler made his major-league debut. He is now 27 years old, 40-13, with a 2.47 ERA for the Dodgers, a Cy Young-in-waiting.

Or look at the Red Sox pitching staff. They open the season in Yankee Stadium with a rotation featuring Nathan Eovaldi, Nick Pivetta, Rich Hill, Michael Wacha and possibly Garrett Whitlock; only Pivetta and Wacha have not had the surgery. The bullpen? Possibly composed of Whitlock, Ryan Brasier and Kutter Crawford, all T.J. survivors. They expect Chris Sale (who underwent the surgery in 2020) back from his painful rib injury by the end of May, James Paxton by July and rookie fireballer Bryan Mata around the All-Star break. “Sale, Paxton and Mata would be like three impact trades,” says one member of the Boston front office. Sale is well off his 2020 operation, while Paxton and Mata had their operations in 2021. It is very early, but Alex Cora and members of the pitching development program seem confident that Paxton and Mata are throwing well enough that both can contribute down the stretch.

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Eovaldi is the rare pitcher to have undergone two Tommy Johns, one in high school, one in 2016. Porterfield, who rehabbed the 2016 surgery for the Rays, says Eovaldi’s arm “works differently from almost anyone I’ve ever known.

“I wasn’t worried about having a second one,” says Eovaldi. “I believed that if I worked hard, did what I was told to do, I’d come back.”

In 2018, Dave Dombrowski traded Jalen Beeks — who now is coming back from surgery — for Eovaldi, who saved Boston’s staff in Game 3 of the 2018 World Series by going from the 12th to the 18th innings before giving up a home run. It was a performance his teammates felt was so valiant that after the game, while talking about Eovaldi, Rick Porcello’s eyes welled up. Last season, Eovaldi was Boston’s number one starter as the Red Sox got to the ALCS, throwing a career-high 182 1/3 innings, led the league in games started, finished fourth in Cy Young balloting and carried a place of leadership in the clubhouse. Every year since the surgery, he has altered his pitch repertoire and tempo and gotten better. He was a two-pitch pitcher in 2016. Today he throws five and sometimes even six different pitches. Command difficulty is more of a sign of arm issues than velocity decreases. Last season, his strikeout-walk numbers were 195-35.

“We’re really at the point that there isn’t much risk in the operation,” says one organizational director. “As long as the pitcher takes care of himself, is diligent following a program, is patient no matter how good it feels at the six-month mark, he can come back, often better than before. The rehabilitation is really just like walking a dog, only he has to constantly remind himself that he is the dog being walked. Noah Syndergaard got a little ahead of himself last season and suffered a setback, but the Angels were so confident in his two innings post-rehab that they’re paying him $21 million. Tyler Glasnow had his TJ last August, and I’ll bet he comes back in 2023 and is in the race for Cy Young.”

But perhaps the most telling stories about modern elbow surgery science come from young pitchers like Gunnar Hoglund. Hoglund hurt his arm last spring, but the Blue Jays took the Ole Miss ace with the 19th pick, and he signed for $3,247,500.

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“We did a lot of background research on his work ethic and makeup as well as the medical information and were comfortable with picking him,” says Toronto scouting director Shane Farrell.

So were the Athletics.

They acquired Hoglund in the Matt Chapman trade, just as they had acquired J.T. Ginn from the Mets in the Chris Bassitt trade. Ginn was a similar draftee — 2020 second-rounder out of Mississippi State taken despite an arm injury, and thus far has made 18 post-operation minor-league starts totaling 92 innings. One scout this spring mentioned Justin Wrobleski, a left-hander from Oklahoma State who had the operation before the draft. The Dodgers took him in the 11th round and are already convinced that he will realize the talent that before the operation had him being a high-round pick.

In this college season, two of the best draft-eligible pitchers have had the surgery. One is Peyton Payette of Arkansas, often compared to Buehler. The other is Alabama left-hander Connor Prielipp. Both will be drafted. The medical reports will tell drafting teams how complicated a rehab each faces if they select Friday night starters from the best conference in the country.

Since Dustin May had his Tommy John surgery on May 5 last year, the Dodgers can’t count on his being ready to pitch in August and September, but they do have Tommy Kahnle and Caleb Ferguson coming back off 2020 surgeries. John was 84-81 and 28 years old when the Dodgers traded Dick Allen to acquire him before the 1972 season. No one could have dreamed that these Dodgers will be hoping that his namesake surgery will get them a premier pitcher back for the stretch run, one of 115 TJ Surgeries performed on pitchers in 2021, and more than 2,100 since the original operation.

With a spring training so truncated that clubs know there are going to be a rash of pitching injuries between now and May 15, one GM this past weekend said “there’s a lot of talk about going from 26-man rosters to 27 or 28 until May 1. We may be headed into our opening day with our starters fortunate to be able to pitch five innings.” Within the next hour, two other GMs said they expect that the first time through the rotation their starters likely will pitch four innings.

The sciences of surgery and rehabilitation are ever-evolving and improving. But that doesn’t mean we can rely on those advances to get these young arms through what is going to be yet another abnormal spring. April, historically, has been the month with the most injuries. Another shortened spring training threatens to make that even worse. The extra roster spots are a step in the right direction. But this spring, every manager and general manager needs to remember that they are working with fragile tools, easily broken, and not to take that lightly just because they can now be easily repaired.

A half-dozen hours after the Twins had come to terms with Carlos Correa, Rocco Baldelli talked about how “it’s very tough to win today without premium players.” He pointed out why it made sense for the Yankees to sign Gerrit Cole, so with Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton they have three. Max Scherzer with what could be slightly limited innings from Jacob deGrom gives the Mets something close to the Randy Johnson-Curt Schilling tandem in Arizona’s heyday. Starling Marte, arguably the most underappreciated star in the market, gives the Mets a go-to star alongside Francisco Lindor.

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“To contend and to win, a team needs premium players, especially if those players have been there and won,” says Baldelli. “That’s what Carlos Correa bings here. He’s a great player, and he’s performed on the big stage. He’s hugely important to us for a lot of reasons. He helps Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano. We’re a different team.”

The Twins traded for Sonny Gray partly to help Joe Ryan and Bailey Ober, and hope to acquire another veteran starter. The Phillies have the premier player who gives all he has in Bryce Harper, but Dombrowski has surrounded him with Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos to let Bryce run free, while retooling the bullpen with Corey Knebel.

Freddie Freeman was a perfect fit for a Dodgers team that expects to win every year. Boston needed another piece in a division with four high-level teams — which Toronto may be for the next five years — and paid market price for Trevor Story, who in an infield with Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, Bobby Dalbec and possibly Triston Casas at midseason has the potential for enough energy and offense to allow Alex Cora to keep his outfield defensively aligned and utilize the team’s depth.

Story has had elbow issues and is moving to second, but Boston thoroughly checked all medicals and like that Story brings a hard-nosed edge — why wasn’t he a safety at the University of Texas? — and tremendous pull power for Fenway Park. The Fenway crowds at last October’s playoffs seemed to be the youngest and wildest in a generation (or more), and the Story signing ignited interest and fomented a sense of purpose around these Red Sox. Bogaerts can opt out after the 2022 season, but in many ways he and Kiké Hernández are the leaders of the team, and there is an optimistic sense that Story can play six years at second and be a Ryne Sandberg-type.

The problem is that not every team can afford even one premier player. Of the last 30 world champions (1991-2021, because there was no world champion in 1994), roughly a third of them had top-three payrolls, including all five Yankee championship squads and three of the four Red Sox winners.

In those 30 years, five small-market clubs won it all, two of them in Miami. The ’91 Twins had premier players — Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Jack Morris. The ’97 Marlins spent at the trading deadline, and had Moises Alou, Gary Sheffield and Kevin Brown.

The 2001 Diamondbacks had the best 1-2 pitching duo since Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, the latter of whom won games in all three postseason series leading to the 2001, 2004 and 2007 World Series titles.

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The 2003 Marlins were close to an exception. Hall of Famer Pudge Rodriguez had a huge impact coming in from free agency, a 20-year old Miguel Cabrera was taking his first step towards Cooperstown, and two premium players, Mike Lowell and Derek Lee, hit 66 homers between them; Lowell was always a leader, and was a nominal captain on the ’03 Marlins and ’07 Red Sox.

The most glaring exception, though, was the 2015 Royals. “They were a different kind of team than anyone was used to playing in this era,” says Baldelli. “That ballpark is a tough place to play, tough to hit for power, and the Royals were running around the bases, scoring from first, always putting pressure. They could be doing nothing, then — boom! — they’d run off and score six or eight runs. They always played the game right. They weren’t a team with premium players the way we talk now, but they were really good.”

Alex Gordon was a Royals lifer. Kendrys Morales, always a huge clubhouse figure, especially for young players, had a great year. Eric Hosmer was special.

“But the big thing was that they were in the forefront of (having) a big powerful bullpen,” says Baldelli. Indeed, they had two starters with earned run averages under 4.00, Chris Young (3.06), Edinson Volquez (3.55). But Ned Yost figured it out, and Wade Davis was the best reliever in the American League and did not have a save. He was 8-1, 0.91, they won games in the seventh and eighth innings and held on with Greg Holland and defense.

That may not be possible today. The ballparks are by and large hitter-friendly. Few teams put the ball in play consistently, few teams run (which is curious because one constant topic this spring is how few pitchers know how to hold runners, how catchers have so many problems coming up throwing and how even mini-shifts create problems for middle infielders on steals).

How the game will evolve this season is hard to predict in the first week of spring training, which is a fast-forward month before Opening Day. Think April 7, Correa in Minneapolis, Story in Yankee Stadium, Freeman right above Alvarado Street. Get ready for Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Correa, Story, Javy Báez, Marte, Scherzer and Freeman to alter pennant races. And if deGrom, Jack Flaherty, Verlander, Sale, Stephen Strasburg, Paxton and Syndergaard, Mike Clevinger and May are healthy in August, we’ll have October in our scopes.

(Top photo of Verlander: Jasen Vinlove / USA TODAY)