Joe Kelly book reveals inside look at baseball
Most books about baseball aren’t written by baseball players.
The ones that are almost always hit the shelves after they’ve played their last game.
Rare is the baseball book written by an active ball player.
For one thing, when would they find the time?
Former Red Sox pitcher Joe Kelly made the time. Working with WEEI’s Rob Bradford, the 2018 World Series champion wrote “A Damn Near Perfect Game: Reclaiming America’s Pastime.”
The book, released earlier in spring training, is a collection of Kelly’s memories, experiences, thoughts, and feelings about the game he plays. In some places, he’s ‘romantic about baseball,’ but he also doesn’t pull punches; Red Sox fans remember that from a certain incident with the Yankees in 2018.
Baseball is the game Kelly loves and he wants to see it improve, grow, and flourish long after he leaves the mound. That requires the carrot and the stick.
In a conversation with the Herald, one of Major League Baseball’s most outspoken players covered all the bases.
The lockout
Major League Baseball’s most recent work stoppage, a 99-day lockout of the players, really set the wheels in motion for Kelly and Bradford.
“I like to do podcasts, and I like to do radio, and I like to do interviews,” Kelly says. “Not for publicity, but I like to talk about things that are important to me.”
The lockout divided the league and its players, but it also divided fans. While many fans, perhaps even the majority, supported the players, some supported the league, claiming these athletes were being too greedy.
“People were asking me every single day, Joe when are we gonna play baseball?
Why are players so greedy? Why do you guys have this lockout going?” He said, “I’d take my kid to baseball practice and they’d be like, ‘When you guys come back from this lockout, we’re not even gonna watch, like F off.’ And, you know, I was kind of getting upset, you know?”
First, he published a firstperson piece in the Los Angeles Times. “A plea: Don’t give up on baseball. It’s too important,” was the lede.
Fittingly, at one point in the essay, he wrote, “Baseball is a book, not a sentence.”
Kelly says that Bradford already wanted to write a book, and he wanted to wait until he retired. But when the LA Times piece did well, they pushed up the timeline, found a publisher, and got to work.
The creative process
“It was fun, I had a great time doing it,” Kelly says. “It was a grind, too. It was late nights, like, four-hour sleep nights, but it was worth it.”
Often, athletes are looked at as monoliths; the game they play is the entirety of who they are. The possibility that a baseball player might have a personal life, never mind other hobbies and interests, is surprising, even jarring for some fans. It’s not unlike being a child and seeing your teacher at the grocery store.
Baseball is a huge part of Kelly’s life, but not the whole picture. In the book, he gleefully recounts surprising his family with his origami skills, one of his many artistic interests.
“I loved writing growing up. I used to write poetry,” he reveals. “I like art. I used to draw, you know, I like shading, so I do realism, I do cross-hatching, and get charcoal and put it on big notepad and shape, you know, contour people’s faces. So I’ve always been like kind of artistic that way.”
Women in baseball
One thing Kelly regrets is that he didn’t include more women in the book.
He has a daughter, his wife is a former college athlete, and he has a lot of respect for women in sports.
There was a superstar voice lined up.
“I wish that it would have worked out,” Kelly says. “When I played for the Dodgers or something, I pointed out to Billie Jean King, if, you know, she would be able to come into it. It didn’t work out, but even after that, I could have done more.”
A new perspective
Writing the book wasn’t just a chance to stretch his creative muscles. Kelly also says it “One-hundred percent” changed his opinion and gave him new perspective about the media side of sports.
“I’ve always respected the media and stuff,” he says, “Even before we did the book, I’ve known that the media, you know, I put myself in their spot, they literally stay up just as late as we do right? You guys stay up later. It definitely gave me an appreciation.”
“And there’s days where the media is off, right? Where you put out a piece and you’re like, ‘man, that I thought it was good, but nobody likes it.’ Or the days when you’re tired and you put out a piece like, ‘This one sucks but I’m throwing it out there’ and people are like holy crap, that was good. So they’re just like us athletes, right? Like when you pitch good or you pitch bad. You write good, sometimes you write bad,” he reasons.
Being vocal
Kelly has always been vocally and physically passionate about the game. He’s been suspended multiple times, his benchesclearing brawl with former Yankee Tyler Austin and his pouty face and taunting of the Astros, immortalized in gif form, are legendary in certain fan bases.
He knows that being outspoken can effect positive change, if done the right way. Benches-clearing brawls are entertaining, but not particularly effective. Social media is a better way to amplify one’s thoughts and feelings, as evidenced during last year’s lockout.
“I think it was huge during the lockout, and I think it would be fair to say that the players definitely had more power than the previous ones, like the 94 strike, right? Back then, a player would have to really search hard to find media. It was only in newspapers, the internet wasn’t really a big thing,” the 80s kid recalls. “Nowadays, it’s so easy for, you know, one of my guys and my teammates to hit up one of the beat writers like hey, this is how players feel. I think it definitely played a role into the lockout ending.”
When he retires, Kelly will consider doing something in the baseball world. He agrees that the league and each team should have at least one person serving in some sort of a fan representative capacity, to voice the needs and wants of the public in the rooms where decisions are made.
Red Sox
There is a hierarchy in baseball. Rookies and young players are expected to defer to the more veteran members of the team. Baseball is a team sport, and individuality can hurt the collective goal.
“I think as young guy when I came up, like yeah, did say like, ‘Hey, shut up, answer the media like this, don’t show your true colors. We want everyone to be vanilla ice cream, don’t be rainbow sherbet,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t hide.”
Being himself is what got him to Boston, Kelly says.
“I feel like I’ve done this, like my whole career since 2012, being a St. Louis Cardinals, right? I think I did maybe a little bit too much back then, being myself. It probably got me traded to Boston,” he surmises. “That’s probably one of the main reasons I did, because I think, you know, the ‘Cardinal Way,’ follow the rules and do all this, that was never my style. So it was like, let’s ship this young guy out while he’s still got value, because he’s just messing around.”
It turned out well for the young pitcher, who’d been on the Cardinals when they lost to the Red Sox in the 2013 World Series. Thanks to the trade, he was on the winning side in 2018.
He’s not happy about what happened to that championship team.
“I hate it,” he says. “I’ve mentioned this multiple times, it kills me to see Xander Bogaerts, one guy that I thought would do it forever. It’s disgusting.”
Demolishing that historic roster “was relatively fast,” he observed. What bothers him is that he thinks they could have repeated.
“There was a chance to literally bring back the same team, which only like, two moves.”