http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/mariners/2008006322_webmari19.html
I'm sure there's no love lost for McLaren here, but let me ask this...does this move make sense? Does it make sense to wait a week to do this after firing Bavasi? And replacing him with Riggleman, another lifer with a **** track record as a manager? Do the higher-ups expect different results or is this more of a show for the fans?
EDIT: ...and w/r/t to Riggleman, is this the guy we want handling Felix and Morrow? Really?
[Kerry]Wood’s first manager in the majors, in 1998, was Jim Riggleman. He, too, had things on his mind other than Wood’s health — he had a record of 217-251 with the Cubs and had yet to make the playoffs. But Riggleman, who is now the field coordinator for player development for the Cardinals, is the only manager willing to admit that he might have had something do with Wood’s injuries.
Though Wood had rocketed through the Cubs’ organization, Riggleman says, he wanted to keep him in Class AAA for more seasoning. But 1998 was shaping up as a magical year for the downtrodden Cubs — after two straight losing seasons, they had a playoff-worthy lineup led by Sammy Sosa, who would hit 66 home runs that season in a duel with Mark McGwire that would focus almost-daily attention on the team. Influential Cubs players were clamoring for Wood. So when a spot opened up in the rotation in April because of injury, the Cubs brought him up. Wood believed he was ready to handle the workload, but he now says he was carrying too much weight and had paid too little attention to his mechanics to prevent injury. But he was 20; and when you’re 20, with a tremendous fastball and an even better curve, you don’t think twice about heading off to the majors. As Wood told teammate Mark Grace one day, “I’m gonna win 15 games and strike out the world.”
He pitched passably in his first four starts. Then came the fifth, a day game against the Astros for which Wrigley Field was less than half full. Few argue with the assertion that it was the most dominating game ever pitched at Wrigley. Some say that it may have been the most dominating pitching performance in the history of baseball. The only Astros hit was an infield grounder by Ricky Gutierrez that bounced off the glove of Cubs third baseman Kevin Orie. Wood’s fastball reached 100 m.p.h., but it was not the fastball that had the Astros shaking their heads: it was the curve, which broke sharply downward thanks to the tremendous torque Wood’s arm supplied. The Cubs won, 2-0, and Wood’s line read like this:
IP H R ER BB SO HR BF Pit-Str
9 1 0 0 0 20 0 29 122-84
Wood, still virtually unknown to the casual fan, had just equaled Roger Clemens’s single-game record for strikeouts. All of a sudden, he found himself mentioned alongside the heady company of hard-throwers like Clemens, Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal and Bob Gibson. “The expectations were ridiculous for someone at 20,” Wood says. “I had pitched five games. I had, like, 17 innings. It’s tough when you punch out 20 guys in your fifth start and then everybody expects you to do that from here on out.”
Riggleman says he actually contemplated lifting Wood from the game as his pitch count climbed beyond 100 pitches, but adds, “If I had taken Kerry out of the game, they would have had to have security take me out of the ballgame.”
Wood went 13-6 and struck out 233 batters that season and earned National League Rookie of the Year honors. But in August his elbow began to ache. The club shut him down for the rest of the regular season, then brought him back in the first round of the playoffs with the Cubs down two games to none to the Atlanta Braves. Wood threw five solid innings, but he now wonders why Riggleman even bothered bringing him back. “What’s the point? . . . We’re down 2-0,” he told me. The Cubs were swept anyway.
In his very first start in spring training the next season, Wood tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow on a warm-up pitch before the second inning. It would require reconstructive surgery and make him the first pitcher since World War II to win 12 or more games as a rookie and then miss the entire next season. “I think the wear and tear he put on his arm the previous year had something to do with what happened to his elbow,” Riggleman says. But for a manager whose job was on the line (he was fired the following season, after the Cubs finished 67-95), using a high-strikeout pitcher who could work deep into the game was an essential form of self-preservation.
“I have some reservations,” Riggleman says now. “I wish I would have done some things differently. I’m sure I was caught up in trying to get to the playoffs.” In hindsight, he says, he would have taken Wood out of some games earlier than he did because of his pitch count, which topped 120 pitches or more eight times in 1998, including a high of 133 in a game at the end of August. Riggleman says he sighed with relief whenever Wood left a game, and eventually he told Wood to stop throwing the hard curve/slurve — a combination of curveball and slider — he had used against the Astros because of the damage it might do to his arm. (Wood ultimately abandoned the pitch.)
Riggleman also notes that the Cubs’ medical reports showed that Wood’s ligament was thin to begin with, making it likely to blow at some point anyway. Then there was the issue of his mechanics. Throwing across your body as a pitcher is good in terms of creating deception, because the ball is harder for the batters to pick up, but it puts terrible stress on the elbow and shoulder. 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.”
Kerry wood began the 2000 season on the disabled list, still recovering from surgery, and didn’t pitch his first major-league game until the beginning of May. In the summer, he went back on the D.L. for 22 days because of a strain in his left oblique muscle. He pitched only 137 innings all season. But the next three years were largely pain-free. His run of good health culminated in a wonderful 2003 season, the best of Wood’s career, in which he won 14 games and led the majors with 266 strikeouts. In September, as the Cubs advanced toward a Central Division title under their new manager, Dusty Baker, Wood was 3-1 with an e.r.a. of 1.00. (He also won two games in the playoffs.) His pitch counts were high, an average of 111 per start, second in the majors only to the Cubs’ new phenom, the equally overworked Mark Prior.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/sports/playmagazine/0603play-wood.html?pagewanted=all
