Next time just hold the ball

Pitcher Tommy John commits only 49 errors during his 26 seasons in the major leagues.

That’s not bad at all.

What is bad, though, comes 36 years ago today as John, then with the New York Yankees, accomplishes an ignominious feat that no other player does in the first 156 seasons of pro baseball as he commits three errors on one play.

The gaffes come with one out in the top of the fourth inning against Milwaukee in a 1988 game at Yankee Stadium.

John first mishandles Jeffrey Leonard’s soft grounder down the first-base line for error No. 1, which John follows up with a pair of throwing errors to allow two more runs – including one by Leonard – to score.

Two runs on three errors by one player in a span of just 10 seconds from the time John first touches Leonard’s grounder to the time he whizzes one throw past first baseman Don Mattingly and then another past catcher Don Slaught on the relay home trying to keep Jim Gantner from scoring the first run.

Mind you, this hardly impacts the seemingly ageless, 45-year-old John, who pitches the first eight innings of what turns out to be New York’s 16-3 beating of the Brewers before a Wednesday night crowd of 28,869 in the Bronx.

The victory is the 285th of 288 in John’s Hall of Fame-worthy career.

“It happens,” John later tells radio broadcaster Gary Waleik of his miscues from 36 years ago tonight.

“That’s part of the game. That’s why we play the game. And that’s why people watch the game, and that’s why they pay to go in, and that’s why they can boo you.”

Naturally, the quick-witted John finds a way to turn his on-field mishap into off-season standup material.

“It gave me a lot of stuff during the winter when I would go out and I would do speaking engagements and stuff,” John says. “It gave me fodder so people would laugh.”