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A Baseball Savior, Knock on Wood
by Rick
Reilly
Posted: Tue May 26, 1998
Every
now and then, just when
you're ready to burn your Topps, trash your Rawlings and
melt your Mr. Coffee, baseball finds a peach-fuzzed kid to
remind you why you loved the game in the first place.
Seventy-two strikeouts in
461/3 innings.
Four-and-oh in the last month. A fastball that's been timed at 101
mph, which is good to know, because nobody has actually
seen it yet. Grown men taking grenade cover on curveball
strikes. Talk around the cage about Koufax, Drysdale and
Gibson.
In 20-year-old righthander Kerry Wood, we've finally found
that rarest of players—somebody the Florida Marlins
can't unload—and the game is loopy about it. Coaches
who
haven't stood up for a pitch in 30 years are leaning
against dugout rails to warm
their gnarled hands on the kid's heat. Atlanta was sold out
last Saturday for the Chicago Cubs' rookie. Cincinnati,
officially dead, had 33,480. At Arizona, many of the 47,129
fans cheered him on as he fanned their own guys.
"This is why you hang around the game 25 extra
years," 59-year-old Cubs dugout coach Billy Williams
says. "This is why you keep putting on the uniform, to
be part of something like this, to see a kid who could end
up among the alltime
greats."
Is this fun or
what?
"It's not just the strikeouts," says Chicago
first basemen Mark Grace. "It's the
way guys are striking out. Swinging an hour late on fastballs.
Buckling like little kids on curveballs. Swinging two feet
above a slider. Crazy
stuff."
Listen, how would you like to have been there when Wolfgang
Puck made his first sandwich? When Carl Sagan peered
through his first junior scientist telescope? When Bill
Gates slipped in his first pocket protector? You don't
often get a chance to be
there when everything's new and preposterous and your legend
still has a flattop and some residual acne and paperboy
blue eyes, and if he
weren't in a Cubs uniform, you would swear he's the kid who
helped your aunt with her groceries last
week.
Thanks for saving baseball, kid. Can we see some
I.D.?
Best of all, Wood seems to have arrived straight from 1953.
He's never any good, it's his catcher. ("He called
such a perfect game!" Wood will say.) It's not
him, it's the fans. ("They got me through the late
innings!") Perhaps this week it will be the
maintenance man.
(Every inning I'd come back and sit on a great varnish
job!)
Missing the superstar ego chromosome, Wood has said no to
Leno, answers every question about himself with a kick at
the dirt—"I just don't see what the big deal is
about, well,
me," he says—and is befuddled that anybody wants
him to scribble his name down and send it to them. "In
the mornings I come in and my chair is full of mail,"
he says, amazed, "so I try to take care of it. But by
the time I get back from [batting
practice], the chair's full again." So what's a young phenom to
do? "Well, I try to answer as much as I can before the
game
starts."
Excuse us for a moment while we
faint.
The kid is selling out in cities he's visiting for the
first time. Asked if he'd ever been to Atlanta before last
weekend, he replied, "Yeah, once, in the middle of the
night, on a bus, in Double
A. They woke us up as we drove by the new stadium. Then we
went back to sleep."
Just to wake the rook up, Cubs veterans have stolen his
clothes and made him board the team charter wearing a 1970s
disco outfit. They have locked him in the bathroom for 45
minutes. They have fined him for every imaginable offense:
Sitting, not
sitting, sitting in one place too long. "We don't want to get
too rough on him," says catcher Scott Servais. "He's
going to be in this game a helluva lot longer than the rest
of us, and we'll need to get on his pass
list."
This week Wood returns to Wrigley Field for the first time
since he hung his 20-strikeout Michelangelo on the
Houston Astros on May 6. The Cubs expect a sellout, the first of
many, knock on Wood. Two weeks later, on June 16, he'll
turn 21. He's making
the major league minimum, $170,000, is worth 30 times that
and can't even figure out how to spend the $75 per diem he
gets now. "I can't think of a single thing I need for
my birthday," he says. "Usually, I ask for money,
and my parents give me $20 in an
envelope. Maybe I'll just do that
again."
Seriously,
couldn't you just
cry?
Tell us what you think. Sound off on the CNN/SI Message Boards.
Past Editions of Life of Reilly
photograph by Robert Beck
Issue date: June1, 1998
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