City Series Special: Talk with our baseball experts

The BP Crosstown Cup series is back, at last, here at Wrigley.

It’s been quite the morning already with the news that Cubs favorite Kerry Wood appears ready to announce his retirement from baseball. It’s likely the Cubs will let Kerry get into today’s game (or sometime over the weekend) so he can soak up some applause before riding off into the sunset.

I’ve covered Kerry since spring training 1998, when he wowed everybody and darn near made the team. I remember asking catcher Scott Servais where Wood, then 20, ranked as far as stuff goes. Servais simply smiled and held up his index finger.

Wood didn’t break with the team, but he was up soon in April, making a shaky debut at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. He was a shy, rawboned kid, but he could bring it.

That was quite evident on May 6 of that year, when he struck out 20 Houston Astros in perhaps the most dominant pitching performance in major-league history. The only hit of the game came on a squibber off the bat of Ricky Gutierrez. A couple years later, when Ricky was a Cub, he walked by a TV set in the clubhouse in Mesa, where highlights of the 20K game were being shown. Ricky gave a mock disdainful look and said, “I got a hit off that sorry (so-and-so).”

Should be a fun weekend out here. The weather is great. The Cubs’ Jeff Samardzija takes on Philip Humber today.

Scot Gregor and Barry Rozner also may stop by today.

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