I know way too much about Kerry Wood’s right elbow. So I can’t help staring. It is wrapped in a blue cut-off sleeve, while the left elbow hangs bare and common, of little practical use except to balance the set, maybe to scratch, fish for change or shake hands with strangers. Can’t be too cautious.
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No one cares about the left elbow. It is almost completely dispensable, an everyday elbow, no more vital than yours or mine. It has not been surgically attended. It has never been the National League rookie of the yar, never struck out 20 batters.
It has all its original ligaments, none borrowed from other parts of the body. There is no exotic designation for what has happened to it. It could have had Tommy Smothers surgery and no one would ask how it is coming along.
I feel rather sad for the left elbow, the Prince Andrew of elbows. It should wear a tag that says, “My other elbow is a Mercedes.” Under repair, but a Mercedes nonetheless.
The right one, the money elbow, ignores the gawks and accepts the concern for its welfare, tucked warm and safe next to Wood’s side. The special wrap seems like the covering for a pool hustler’s favorite cue or a velvet container for aged scotch. No ice?
“Iced already,” Wood says, now accepting his duty of reporting on the welfare of the most famous joint in Chicago since the Pump Room.
I know everything about Wood’s right elbow and I know nothing. No one knows anything. Not really. Not Wood. Not Don Baylor. Not Ed Lynch. Not James Andrews, M.D., who took a graft from Wood’s right forearm and repaired the right elbow.
No one knows if Wood will be Wood or if he will be someone else (Mark Fidrych comes to mind), if he will be another Cubs tragedy, another unrealized Cubs dream.
“I will try to be the same as I was,” Wood says, “and if not, I will try something else.”
Wood means he will be another kind of pitcher, for at 22 there is too much ahead to not try everything. But if Wood cannot throw fastballs in the 90s, and he says he is doing that already, it seems foolish to expect him to have a career pitching the kind of junk that hurt him in the first place.
“The team will play well with me or without me,” Wood says. “There is no added weight on my shoulders.”
Wood is as patient as he is confident, doing nothing without prior arrangement, following his program of rehabilitation as if it were a treasure map, which, of course, it is. Does he never get tempted just to open up the Mercedes, to hurry and see what that elbow can do?
“And ruin 11 months of sitting around and doing all this work?” Wood asks. “I don’t want to blow it out and start all over.”
Wood says he knew after four months, when he began playing catch, that things would be fine. But he is surprised that he is where he is, throwing for the first time to live batters, a designation not always applied to Cubs major-leaguers, and these were live batters from the minor-league roster. Wood had thrown off the mound, and then off the mound with a batter in the box. This was the next baby step.
“They put some balls in play,” Wood said. The actual totals, which should be meaningless but are analyzed like specimens in a petri dish, were 30 pitches, fastballs and changeups, no curves, no “spinners,” of which five were fouled and six were hit fair.
“I wasn’t telling them what was coming,” Wood said.
He’s pleased to be involved again in any kind of competition, happy to be so pain-free that his concern was his mechanics and not his elbow.
The Cubs want Wood to be what he was, of course, but mostly what the Cubs want of Wood is not to hurt himself again. He may be mediocre, but he cannot be permanently damaged. It would be the Cubs’ fault if that is how this turns out.
Wood is putting his complete faith in their program for his return, the same folks who counted his pitches and yet did not prevent his first collapse. His new pitching coach, Oscar Acosta, looks at Wood and sees Roger Clemens. Baylor sees Randy Johnson. No one sees the Venus de Milo, who, by the way, doesn’t even have a left elbow.
Talk about Tommy John surgery . . .
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