You probably won’t want to hear this, Kerry Wood. You’ll shrug, spit in your snuff cup and change the channel. You admit you’re basically a couch potato who doesn’t care for running or lifting weights any more than doing interviews or walking batters.
You have no more sense of urgency than most of us did at 21.
But if anyone deserves any blame for the torn ligament in your elbow, it’s you, Kerry. Not your manager or general manager. If they had babied you any more, you would have been throwing underhand in diapers.
No, only you could have saved yourself. Ask Randy Johnson. Ask Roger Clemens. Best of all, ask the guy whose No. 34 you wear, your boyhood hero, Big Tex. Ask Nolan Ryan.
In 1986 Ryan partly tore the same ligament you did–the last of his arm injuries. Before he saw the light, Ryan saw lots of doctors for everything from rotator cuff problems to bone chips in the elbow. Until that light goes on in your head, Kerry, you and your many fans are in for many more dark days.
As Ryan told me after pitching his seventh no-hitter at age 44, “I only wish I had known in my 20s what I know now. Tom has really helped save my career.”
Tom House, a psychologist, is the former Texas Rangers pitching coach who wound up doing instruction books and videos with Ryan. Randy Johnson also credits House with turning around his career in 1992. Now when young power pitchers call Ryan for advice, he refers them to House, who consults for several big-league teams in the United States and Japan.
That’s how I wound up talking to House about you, Kerry.
House said: “Until now everything has come very easy for Kerry. Hopefully, this will be a wakeup call. This surgery is so advanced that I have no doubt it will make him 100 percent structurally sound. But if Kerry thinks surgery will be the cure-all, he’ll be sadly mistaken. It will fix the symptom, not the illness.”
Your “illness,” Kerry, is that the muscles around your elbow aren’t able to support the ligaments when your arm speed starts breaking Wrigley Field’s sound barrier. God gave you the ability to generate 100 m.p.h. fastballs and curves that make fools of stars. God did not give you ligaments like steel cables.
You’re a race car with string suspension.
You will keep breaking down until you develop what Ryan calls “functional strength”–the arm-muscle strength to function at triple-digit velocity. Ryan learned to increase his only because he had no choice. He was 38 when he tore his ulner collateral–too old to risk what was then much riskier “Tommy John” surgery.
Ryan decided to let the partial tear heal on its own while he worked like mad to build the muscles around it. Eventually, he and House were going at it three hours a day every day, doing all sorts of arm exercises with light weights that would bore you to beers, Kerry.
“People used to talk about how Nolan’s arm belonged in the Smithsonian,” House said. “No, a lot of pitchers had his arm. Very few hard throwers had his work ethic. Same with Roger (Clemens). But it really wasn’t until Roger left Boston that he got angry and really recommitted to an accelerated Nolan Ryan program. Look at him now.”
House has been studying you from a distance, Kerry.
“I have his mechanics in the computer,” House said, “and they’re in the 94th percentile–as good as any hard thrower out there. They talk about how he hurt himself `throwing across his body,’ but plenty of guys throw across their body without hurting themselves. Pitch load certainly didn’t hurt him–the Cubs handled him beautifully.
“No, believe me, he broke down because of lack of functional strength. Kerry probably thought he should take it easy over the off-season (after slightly tearing the ligament last August) and he probably came back even weaker than before (in the support muscles).”
Listening, Kerry? Ryan swore off the beer and cheeseburgers. Ryan rode an exercise bike for an hour after every game he pitched.
Yet you’re a kid who looks up to his elders on a smoke-and-chew team that mostly scoffs at exercise–a team more Gas House than Tom House. Your team’s strength–its macho grit–could be your weakness. In your clubhouse, your gut is almost the status symbol that tattoos are in NBA locker rooms.
Remember, though, none of your elders have your gift. Start paying the price to insure your arm and you could pitch dominantly and relatively injury-free for the next 20 years. You say now the money doesn’t matter to you, but just wait.
You said the right thing Wednesday about how important your work ethic will be through your rehab. But can you stick with it for 12 to 18 longer-than-church months? Will you be sticking with the proper program? The Cubs don’t sound too enlightened when it comes to dealing with an arm as rare as yours.
“How scared is Kerry?” asked House. “Has he realized he may never pitch the way he did if he doesn’t listen? Maybe he should talk to Nolan.”
