Sometimes, the pinnacle of athletic achievement does not come with the bases loaded and the pennant on the line. Sometimes it comes in the regular season, on the road, when a left-hander trots out of the Tampa Bay bullpen and overcomes incalculable odds.

That is how it was in “The Rookie,” the film about Jim Morris, a high school teacher and coach who reached the majors in 1999. And that is how it was on April 25 for Jonny Venters, who returned to the majors after a 2,027-day absence, with an elbow that had undergone three Tommy John surgeries.

“It felt like I was making my debut again,” Venters said. “I had all the same nerves and excitement and anxiety.”

Venters retired the Orioles’ Chris Davis on a grounder in Baltimore that night, and has since tossed scoreless innings in Boston and Detroit. He once pitched like this with regularity, as an All-Star for the Atlanta Braves in 2011, when he led the majors in appearances with 85. He missed two weeks with an elbow impingement the next July but helped the Braves reach the playoffs and pitched in the 2012 National League wild-card game.

That was Venters’ final appearance in the majors until last month.

He underwent his second Tommy John surgery in 2013; his first was in 2005. Fifteen months into recovery, in 2014, Venters tore his rebuilt ligament again and needed a third Tommy John procedure. The Braves released him after that.

The 2015 surgery cost Venters a third full season. In 2016, after five appearances for a Tampa Bay Rays’ Class A team, he needed another elbow surgery to reattach a ligament. While that operation was not officially Tommy John surgery, it sidelined Venters for the rest of that season.

“For him, since 2012, it’s just been setback after setback after setback,” said Braves reliever Peter Moylan, a teammate of Venters in Atlanta. “He’s had to fight and fight, and then it happens again.”

Moylan has dealt with similar medical misfortune: two Tommy John surgeries, a shoulder operation and three back surgeries. Moylan was a player-coach in the minors for the Braves in 2015 before re-establishing himself on the mound. To even have a chance after multiple breakdowns, he said, a pitcher cannot worry about recurrence.

“If you’re tentative and you’re not throwing the ball the way you should, then you’re not going to have the stuff to get back to where you need to be,” Moylan said. “You can’t throw 80 percent and get back to the big leagues. You’ve got to go all out and see if it’s going to work.”

For Venters, it just never seemed to work. Even last season, when he pitched at four levels in the Rays’ farm system, he worked only 231⁄3 innings. But the Rays kept giving him chances and Venters kept his perspective. He lived with his wife and three children near the Rays’ complex in Port Charlotte, Florida, reported for rehabilitation work in the morning and returned to his family at night.

“There’s a lot of people going through a lot worse things,” Venters said. “I’m trying to play a game for a living.”

For Venters, 33, a major league career was unlikely all along. He signed as a 30th-round draft choice in 2003, out of Indian River Community College in Florida, and took seven years to reach the Braves. He nearly gave up after the 2016 surgery, he said, but persisted because of support from his family — and a lack of more appealing career options.

“I actually had a lot of time to think about that, but this is all I’ve ever known,” Venters said. “I thought about coaching. That would be a possibility. But there was never anything that I wanted to do other than this, to be honest with you. It’s all I know. There was no real great backup plan. There was a little bit of desperation in there, too. Backed into a corner.”

At his best, Venters frustrated hitters with a hard, sinking fastball at around 95 mph. He has lost 2 or 3 mph since his All-Star peak — “My stuff’s not as life-y as it used to be,” he said — but he still throws hard enough, with enough moxie, to compete. According to FanGraphs, Venters is believed to be only the second pitcher with three documented Tommy John surgeries to return to the majors, after Jason Isringhausen.

“It surprises me that anybody would have that perseverance, to go through what Jonny went through,” said Brian Snitker, the Braves’ manager, who coached for Atlanta when Venters played there. “He needs to write a book or hire himself out as a motivational speaker or something. And now his boys are old enough to know what went on and see Dad pitch. So that’s really cool, because he’s such a wonderful kid.”

Venters and his wife, Viviana, had only one child when he last pitched in the majors. Now they have three: their sons, Wyatt and Walker, and a newborn daughter, Evie. The boys, at least, may be old enough to remember their father’s major league career, however long it continues.

The marks on Venters’ body are evidence of a hard-won victory.

“It’s the same scar, but it’s a little bigger now, it’s longer and a little fatter,” Venters said. “I have some scars over my legs where they took ligaments and put them in my elbow, too. But it’s starting to look a little bit more normal now.”

Sometimes the normal can be extraordinary.