Sunday NYT Article will feature Kerry Wood...

Pretty good read, if not so depressing.

 

Wow, that's some pretty poor research. He seriously used Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson as examples of pitchers who do a good job of maintaining their health? Really? How about mentioning that Prior collided with a midget second baseman and getting hit on his pitching arm with a screaming line drive? How about the fact that the Cubs never fired Baker and instead simply chose not to re-new his contract?

 

This guy's a decent writer, but he throws in way too many baseball cliches and baseless statements for my tastes.

 

However, some parts of it just anger me...

 

Wood himself does not remember any Cubs coaches telling him to alter his mechanics, and even if they did, he says he probably would have ignored them. “Who’s gonna say anything to you?” he says. “Who is gonna say, ‘Oh, you’re throwing twelve inches across your body.’ No one’s gonna tell you that, because you’re having success and you’re not gonna listen anyway. . . . You don’t think about that stuff. You’re young.”

 

Like Riggleman before him, Baker has come under withering criticism for using both Wood and Prior so much that he risked destroying their careers. He protests when I bring it up with him. “What is overuse?” he says. “There didn’t used to be such a word but now it’s widely used. . . . You got to blame somebody, and I got blamed for everything.”

Once again, poor Dusty. He is the world's biggest victim. Just ask him.

While drinking the other night my friends were discussing with me what would the cubs last few years have been if these two guys never got hurt. They were baiting me to say we would have won a title. I didn't, but said I thought we would have been able to win 83 games last year.

 

A healthy Wood and Prior in 2004 would've gotten us a wild card spot, easily.

I think we have one world series appearance at least.