"Sometimes you have to wander off the script, ad-lib a little. By this point in the game, 13 years in the major leagues, Kerry Wood was going to have a couple thousand strikeouts, a couple hundred wins, and he would have leaped the Sears Tower in a single bound while ending a century-long drought on Chicago's North Side.

That was the plan, anyway.

We know what happened to the plan, because we keep seeing it happen. Yesterday was the day when the latest version of Kerry Wood 2.0, Stephen Strasburg, underwent Tommy John surgery, and there's no way of knowing what Strasburg is going to be when he comes back from that in a year, year-and-a-half. Some say the procedure can actually strengthen an arm. Some have never come back at all. You really never know.

It might be that the best Strasburg will hope for is the kind of career Wood has had, which wouldn't be awful. It isn't destined to end up in Cooperstown any longer, but it's still been a long and distinguished run. And now, for Wood, that includes assuming a place of prominence in the Yankees bullpen, occupying one-third of Joe Girardi's troika of righties — along with David Robertson and Joba Chamberlain — around whom the Yankees will hope to build their fabled bridge to Mariano Rivera.

"This really couldn't have worked out any better for me," Wood said yesterday, after throwing another 1 2/3 scoreless innings and earning the win in a 7-3 Yankees win over the Blue Jays, their seventh in a row. "I picked up 30 games in the standings and get two months in the heart of a pennant race, and beyond. And now my command's better and I'm starting to really contribute. I can't be happier about that.""