Kerry Wood wants to straighten out one little misconception.
His bride-to-be, Sarah Pates, is not really a strength-and-conditioning coach. She just acts like one.
“She doesn’t even work out,” Wood says, laughing. “She just gets on me all the time. She yells at me and tells me to get off the couch. She wants me to be healthy more than the fans do, I think.”
That would be saying a lot, because Wood’s overall health, and specifically the well-being of his right arm, is as critical as any factor to the Cubs’ fortunes this season.
Just how getting off the couch relates to avoiding arm problems is probably best left to a seminar at an orthopedic surgeons’ convention. But Wood is convinced it can make him a more consistent pitcher.
“It can if mentally you think it can,” he explains. “That’s the way I look at it. I’m not going to go out and look like [Kyle] Farnsworth and think I’m going to be a better pitcher because I’m in better shape.”
But Wood believes being in better shape can lengthen his career.
“Without a doubt,” he says. “Guys like Roger [Clemens] and Nolan [Ryan] worked harder than anybody in the game, and that’s why they stuck around longer than anybody else.”
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Clemens and Ryan, like Tom Seaver before them, also had great mechanics and knew how to use their lower-body strength, which Wood is working constantly to improve.
And while he may never recapture the snap of that wondrous curve on that magical afternoon against Houston four years ago, there is no reason Wood’s breaking stuff can’t take him into his 30s. But talking to a fastball pitcher about his long-term future is like talking to a race car driver about his mortality. You just don’t push your luck.
Wood acknowledges being spooked by the shoulder tendinitis that took him out of the rotation for five weeks toward the end of last season.
“It frightened me,” he says. “I never had any problems in my shoulder before.”
But it further motivated him to rededicate himself to off-season conditioning as he approaches 25. And he insists he long since has stopped worrying about the elbow reconstruction that caused him to miss the ’99 season. Youth, in that respect, is a wonderful thing.
“I looked at it like if the doctor did his job and I did my job and the rehab part of it, that I shouldn’t have any problems,” Wood says. “And once I picked the ball up and got on the mound, I didn’t even think about it. My arm feels better now than [before] I got hurt.”
He continues to say he understands why the Cubs offered him a one-year contract in January.
“If they offered me a long-term deal I’d have to wonder what they were really thinking,” he says. “I would’ve done the same thing with a pitcher who hadn’t been healthy.”
Getting on with a career that is still as potentially fragile as the ligaments and tendons that hold together that golden arm is now the dicey part, regardless of the work he is doing on the rest of his body.
“Pitching is an unnatural act,” Cubs President Andy MacPhail says. “There’s an expression in baseball: elbows blow out, shoulders wear out. There are probably preventive things you can do to push the odds in your favor, but that’s about it.”
And so Wood won’t worry about it, says he can’t worry about it to the point where it will change the type of pitcher he is right now, which reminds you that in his heart he may always be a young fireballer.
“I plan on pitching until this thing doesn’t work anymore, but I’m not going to go out there and change my style of pitching so I can pitch longer,” he says. “I’m not going to go out and try to start hitting corners and throwing 85 so I can save my arm. I’m going to go out and do what I know how to do, which is throw hard and pitch and go as hard as I can for as long as I can.”
He laughs. “I won’t be around when I’m 40.”
Nope, going as hard as you can for as long as he can is not the recommended strategy for a 20-year career. It is however what we have grown to love about Kerry Wood.
Maybe with a little luck and a wife’s prodding, he’ll still be another Clemens or Ryan.
Then again, maybe we should follow his lead and not worry about it.