A “gruesome forensics report” on Kerry Wood’s career
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007I just tore through an excerpt from My Right Arm by Buzz Bissinger about the tumultuous career of Kerry Wood. It’s a great Saturday morning read.
Bissinger shows that the downward trajectory of Wood’s career was, in hindsight, predictable and probably inevitable. He resists the temptation to highlight a specific moment in Wood’s career where it all fell apart, a temptation that many Cubs fans, myself included, gave in to during Dusty Baker’s reign of error.
Is there someone to blame for what happened to Kerry Wood? As in “Murder on the Orient Express,” everybody took a turn with the dagger. A high-school kid never should have thrown 175 pitches in a single day. Jim Riggleman never should have let him exceed 120 pitches eight times as a rookie, or brought him back for that one game in the 2003 playoffs. Dusty Baker, who allowed Wood to exceed 100 pitches 24 times in 2003, should have taken greater note of his injury history. Wood should have kept himself in better shape and paid more attention to his mechanics. But whether we like it or not, professional athletes are meant to be sacrificed, not preserved. And the most fatal dagger-thrust of all has been fate’s. Wood threw the way he did because that was the way he had learned how to pitch. And he continued to throw that way because for a brief moment it made him the most exciting pitcher in baseball.
