“The Pout,” the famous facial expression that made Joe Kelly a folk hero in L.A. and led to Jonas Never’s 16-foot mural depicting his putdown of Houston’s Carlos Correa in 2020, is naturally the subject of the prologue of the former Dodger relief pitcher’s new book. But it may not be the highlight, as entertaining as Kelly’s description of that incident was.
“A Damn Near Perfect Game: Reclaiming America’s Pastime,” written with Rob Bradford and published by Diversion Books, was released a week ago. It’s a quick read and a fun one as well – at once a love letter to baseball, a plea to those who might be disaffected at the game’s trends to not give up on the sport, and a frank look at how the game lost its way in the analytic revolution, and how the rules changes for this coming season should help make it watchable again.
“When I was a kid, I watched games that are exactly played how these rules make us play today,” Kelly, now with the White Sox, said in a recent phone conversation from Camelback Ranch. “Now, without the shift, you’re going to have guys who could actually play defense and not just hit. You’re going to have David Ecksteins who can just make contact and play great defense, where the past five years we had third basemen and first basemen playing middle infield because they could hit homers and we could hide them with the shift.
“… Now the game of baseball you see is going to be the game of baseball I watched as a 5-year-old. That’s what people don’t really understand about the rules. They think it’s gonna change the game. No, we’re just going back to the game that was played when Rickey Henderson went 40-40. We’re just going back to a real baseball game, the game we played as kids.”
Are there startling revelations in this book? Yes, and the most startling doesn’t necessarily involve Kelly’s animus toward Correa and the Astros – though, for the record, Kelly related that there were worries that…
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