Take a good, long look at Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Todd Coffey’s elbow. Notice how it looks like a perfectly normal elbow, and not like something from your nightmares?

Coffey tweeted a picture of what his elbow looks like now, immediately following Tommy John surgery. For those of you who might not be familiar with Tommy John surgery, it’s a surgical graft procedure in which a ligament in the medial elbow is replaced with a tendon from elsewhere in the body and they add a bunch of braces and sew it up to look like the ass-to-mouth-end of a Human Centipede.

That picture has been included after the jump, because I don’t want you to scroll down the main page looking for Kate Upton galleries and start throwing up everywhere.

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John Lackey has decided to follow up divorcing his wife for having a double mastectomy with an unexpected act of chairty; he’ll be improving Boston Red Sox rotation by having Tommy John surgery and sitting at home for the entirety of 2012.

From Joe McDonald at ESPN Boston:

Lackey recently received an MRI and was examined by Dr. Lewis Yocum in Los Angeles, and it was decided the pitcher would undergo the procedure. A date for the surgery has not been set.

“John Lackey pitched through circumstances this year that I don’t think any of us can fully understand, and he got beat up for it a little bit,” Cherington said. “This guy was dealing with stuff both on the field and off the field that were very difficult, and he showed tremendous toughness pitching through that.”

It’s true. Lackey worked through a year of his tough $82.5 million contract to post a scrappy 6.84 ERA with a gutsy 6-8 record. Fun fact: he’s the third Sox pitcher to have Tommy John surgery this year, following in the footsteps of former sort-of-ace Daisuke Matsuzaka and lefty reliever/upscale housing complex Rich Hill.

The news of Lackey’s departure comes as a blow to Yankees fans, but hopefully he’ll return strong in 2013 with his 35% fastball intact.