When I found out that Travis Wood had made the Cubs’ rotation, I was actually really happy. Rather than viewing it as a stop-gap measure rooted firmly in desperate necessity, I looked at it as a chance for rebirth. Maybe, I reasoned, the 2014 season was simply a pyre, the ashes from which Wood would rise like a bearded Arkansan phoenix.
Through the first four games this season, that appeared to be the case. Well, sort of. But he had gone 7 innings in two of those games and had allowed no more than 3 runs in any of the starts.