The black cloud hovering over Chicago sports actually deepened and darkened with the arrival of the baseball season, usually an optimistic time in these parts. It says something about the state of the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox that earlier in the year the Cubs looked like our best hope of actually winning something. But Kerry Wood’s career-threatening elbow injury ended all that cheap talk. His injury was as traumatic as Michael Jordan’s retirement or even Walter Payton’s health woes; in fact, its impact struck in a way that made it more upsetting. Jordan’s career had traced a full arc. While no one welcomed his retirement–except maybe Pat Riley, Karl Malone, and the rest of the National Basketball Association’s also-rans–it was readily accepted. Payton’s career, too, was over. Not to sound cavalier, but while his health problems involve real issues of mortality–not the usual sports metaphors of life or death–prospects for a healing liver transplant remain good, and the city’s fans are rooting for a full recovery almost as they would the rebuilding of a sports franchise. Back in the sports arena proper, the Bears, Bulls, Hawks, and Sox all entered the troughs that normally follow peaks–relatively speaking from team to team–and simply asked for patience from fans, a quality Chicagoans have in abundance (witness the sellout crowd that bid adieu to Chris Chelios last weekend in the Hawks’ final game of the season). Yet Wood’s injury didn’t seal off and preserve the past, the way Jordan’s retirement did. It undercut the future; and hope for the future–more often than not ridiculous hope for the future–is the Chicago fan’s most precious commodity.
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Wood’s career was almost entirely potential. He came to the majors two weeks into last season, fanned 20 Houston Astros in his fifth start to set a National League record, went on to win 13 games to boost the Cubs’ playoff drive, and by September was through, but for one gritty performance in the final game of the playoff series against the Atlanta Braves. Though he may well return to full health after having a ligament in his elbow replaced, in the now almost routine “Tommy John” surgery (the Los Angeles Dodgers’ hard-throwing Darren Dreifort, also a “Tommy John” patient early in his career, outdueled Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks just last week), that’s by no means certain. In any case we’ve probably seen–and heard–the last of that hissing, bristling curve that dropped for the dirt as it went past a batter like a razorback rooting for carrion. In fact it’s difficult right now not to refer to the 21-year-old’s career in the past tense. Right about the time Wood was blowing his arm out in a spring-training game last month, I was rereading Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., with its tale of the death of pitching phenom Brock Rutherford, and even though Rutherford is a fictional creation of a fictional creation–nothing more than a name made up to go with some dice-baseball statistics–the book brought home the loss of Wood with full impact. For anyone who experienced the excitement of a Wood outing, the fans packed in along the left-field stands craning their necks to get a better look as he warmed up in the bull pen, then watching him blow batters away, the loss was profound. It also left the Cubs bereft.
If only the Cards could keep their young pitchers healthy, they’d have a budding dynasty on the order of the Astros’. The Astros have largely built their productive farm system through intensive scouting efforts in Venezuela. Two of the three prospects they used to outbid the Cubs for Randy Johnson last year were products of that scouting system. That’s how championship teams will be built in the next few years–by spending money and other resources not on free-agent talent at the end of the line but on young talent in the draft and on amateur free agents from Central America. The Cubs have resisted spending money on free agents, but they haven’t spent it in those other areas either.
