Parsing

Starting with Barry Rozner's column today, he gets what's been said by this page for years:

While the nightmare of drug use in baseball continues to follow those who have denied it for a decade - no one more so than Bud Selig - there remains one unopposed fact of which the commissioner and his owners have always been certain:

The paying customer couldn't possibly care less.

Dead on, Barry. So long as the outcome of games aren't fixed, all the paying customers want is to be entertained. All the players want is to be paid in large sums. All the owners want is to collect large sums of revenue.

The result is that the players take drugs to make themselves better entertainers and grab a bigger paycheck. The fans pay more dollars because the games will be more entertaining with juiced athletes. And the owners turn away and laugh because of the millions they take in whole not caring if the players die at 50 instead of 90.

Then, we look at Bruce Miles and his regularly scheduled "Kerry Wood is hurt" story. It's so full of non-denial denials, you'd think Richard Nixon was running the Cubs.

The Cubs, however, caution that Wood's visit to the doctor is nothing extraordinary and that the stiffness Wood has been experiencing after his 4 starts this season is normal.
...
Wood, who turns 29 on June 16, made his first start of the season May 18. He pitched five days later, as most starting pitchers do, but since then the Cubs lengthened his rest between starts because of stiffness in the shoulder, a condition the Cubs say is normal for a pitcher on the comeback from this surgery.

"He's never used the word pain or anything like that," O'Neal said. "It's nothing that most people coming back from surgery don't go through. That's what we talked about earlier. They're just very temperamental joints. But we thought it was important to get the doctor that operated on him involved, and the sooner the better."

The Cubs still list Wood as their starter for Sunday'’s game against the Reds, but that could change. There has been no talk of putting him on the disabled list.

"I don't anticipate, and neither does Dr. Gryzlo (team orthopedist Stephen) or any of the rest of our medical staff anticipate them finding anything significant," O'Neal said. "We're just trying to do everything we can to help him get through this."

As of Wednesday, O'’Neal said neither X-rays nor an MRI were planned for Wood in Cincinnati.

"Don't anticipate", "no talk", "normal stiffness". Haven't we been fed this crap before? Many times?

What's sad about all this is that there will be some Cub fans who will eat this up.

It's time for Kerry Wood to move on. Jim Hendry can't be trusted to GM this team because he refuses to realize that Kerry Wood is unreliable. Why get Kevin Millwood when you already have Kerry Wood thinks Jim.

If the Cubs want to win under Jim Hendry, they have to Hendry-proof the team. And that means farewell to the once Kid K.