kerry wood bows out at wrigley

This sums up the Cubs pretty well. We're sentimentalists. Sentiment is all we have to go on. The only reason Kerry Wood came back to the Cubs this season was because of a conversation with Jim Hendry at Ron Santo's memorial service. He essentially came back for pennies. He wanted to go out with the Cubs. He didn't fit the new direction of the team under Theo Epstein, but that wasn't the point. The point was for Kerry Wood to go out as a Cub, like a Cub. And he did.

We surely got the best of him in 1998, when he won the NL Rookie of the Year award for his dominant performances that season, including a that incredible 20 strike-out game. Which, interesting to note, is more rare than a 4 home run game. But his mechanics would be the end of him, and I think we all knew that after his first season. Yet he ended his career with more strikeouts than innings pitched, and he went out in the white and blue pinstripes of the Cubs pitching against their cross-town rivals.

It doesn't get much better than that. And it doesn't get much more Cubs than that.

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