Kerry Wood

**Yes, I know this is a few days late.  Shut up.**

Kerry Wood retired last week after getting one more strike out (for an even 1,582 on his career) in a losing effort to the White Sox.  I've sometimes been rough on Wood since he returned to the Cubs from his brief sojourn to Cleveland and New York.  But even when he was cradling an 8.34 ERA and blowing easy saves, part of me knew this was the natural result of another formerly brilliant young pitcher whose form was never properly adjusted to preempt injury because pitching coaches (like Larry Rothschild) never like to fix what doesn't appear to be broken.  Until it is. 

He and Mark Prior were the collateral damage of the 2003 NLCS.   Both had phenomenal arms and near-limitless potential, but too much pressure on increasingly strained shoulders did them in.  I've always thought that Prior had it worse in many ways--the man on the mound for The Bartman Game endured the baseball version of PTSD (Wood started the more fateful but easily-overlooked Game 7 of that series).  This was in addition to the physical injuries that kept Prior sidelined for chunks of the next couple years before being signing a one-year deal with his hometown San Diego Padres, who eventually opted to resign him to their minor league squad.  He's bouncing around the minors even today.  At least Wood was able to remain a big leaguer to the end.

But Prior was never "Kid K," the 20-year old who, in his fifth big league start, struck out twenty batters in a single game, tying Roger Clemens' record and becoming a force during the Cubs' 1998 Wild Card season.  He was not the fastest ever pitcher to reach 1,000 strikeouts and he does not hold the second highest mark for strike outs per inning, as Wood was and does.  Wood stuck around through the rougher years around the turn of the millennium and came back from Tommy John surgery to throw a 12-6, 3.36 ERA season in 2001.  He didn't miss a single start the following year and then went 14-11 with a 3.20 and a couple of Divisional Series wins in the inauspicious 2003 season.  And, like Prior, that's when things started going bad, with injuries mounting and expectations for the whole team achieving that strange kind Chicago Cubs brand of schizophrenia, weighing everyone down.  He had taken on the reliever role for the twin train wrecks of 2007 and 2008 and by the next year, he had been shuffled away, along with so many following the official century mark of the Cubs' title drought.  In 2011 he turned down other offers to return to the "family."  And though he was never going to be what he once was, we were happy to have him and were sad when he showed significant age at 34 and 35, in a position that regularly showcases 40-somethings. 

That's mostly because, for a franchise that twice traded the best pitcher of the last fifty years, Wood was all we could have dared dream.  More importantly, he was a Cub through and through and not just because he said so.  He shined so brightly so young, personifying the fabled eternal hopes of the Cubs Fan, making our old and badly aged franchise feel as young as he was.  He took the mound in times of plenty and times of poverty, each time reminding us of those early days when everything was possible and we really had a future.  And though he left briefly, it was not his choice and when he did, it was because he found it impossible to know home anywhere else (it's modern baseball poetry that negotiations for his resigning began the day of Ron Santo's funeral).  And like our hopes, year after year, he broke down and flamed out earlier than he deserved. 

So long, Kerry.  And thanks.