Alexander: Joe Kelly’s book offers an entertaining look at baseball

“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 might 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 by 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 if Houston had faced the Dodgers in the 2020 World Series and the teams were forced to share a hotel in the COVID bubble in Arlington, Texas, he might have renewed the feud with Correa.

He doesn’t deny it. He wrote that baseball officials reached out to his wife Ashley, asking her to talk him into making peace with Correa and foregoing any additional retribution for the 2017 sign-stealing scandal and, as he wrote, the Astros’ “whininess” after the plot was revealed.

Her response, as he wrote it: “Good luck with that. I’m not going to tell him that. Joe’s crazy. The only way you’re going to stop him is by making the Astros lose and go away.”

(As it turned out, the Tampa Bay Rays took care of it so nobody else had to.)

But the most startling revelation? Kelly actually had a conversation with Rob Manfred that didn’t involve disciplinary action – yeah, he’s been suspended a few times – and came away from it convinced that the commissioner is a better steward of the game than credited.

It wasn’t heavy lifting to get Manfred to talk for the book, either. When the commissioner made the rounds of spring training camps to talk to players following the 2021 lockout, Kelly recalled, Manfred gave him his cell phone number and said, “If you ever want to talk, let me know.”

So, for the book, Kelly decided to take a stab at an interview, not knowing if the commissioner would agree.

“I was just throwing it out there thinking that, obviously, it would be shut down instantly,” he recalled in our conversation. “And he agreed to it, said yes. And I was like, ‘Oh, shoot. I didn’t even prepare.’ He’s like, ‘All right, let’s do it in (a couple of) days. I’ll be available from this time to this time.’

“Going in, I wasn’t the biggest fan. Coming out, I really do think he’s the right guy for the job.”

For instance, as Kelly noted, Manfred could have unilaterally imposed those rules changes, without player input, but actually made the attempt to talk to players and create a more collaborative atmosphere.

“He is a player’s commissioner if you really think about it,” Kelly said.

I won’t give away a lot more, but the transcript of his conversation with the commissioner was enlightening. And so were his observations of life in a big-league clubhouse, or a bullpen, or coming up through the minor leagues – and he notes that living and travel conditions were a lot better when he was a collegian at UC Riverside than they were when he first joined the Cardinals organization in Batavia, N.Y.

“I ultimately became grateful to baseball for making me wait,” he wrote, noting that the hardships of the minors “were the foundation of my life as a professional.”

The book was a two-year project, Kelly said, but a particular impetus occurred during last year’s lockout when fans expressed their dissatisfaction with the game and its labor relations.

“Being from the Riverside area and being a former Dodger, people were upset and I was very recognizable in my hometown,” he said. “So every day I would get the question, ‘Hey, when are we gonna play baseball?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ And then another person would (say), ‘Man, why are the players so greedy?’ I was like, ‘If I had time to explain to you what’s going on, you wouldn’t think that.’”

The book helps with that explanation.

And the rules changes, and the spring training laboratory for players to get used to them, are no longer theoretical. The one that impacts Kelly the most, the pitch clock, could play to his advantage. He got three outs on seven pitches in his first outing of the spring last Thursday against Colorado and indicated the adjustment was minimal.

“I think it’s going to be harder for the hitters, honestly,” he said. “I think the advantage goes to the pitcher – especially the way I mess up (hitters’) timing with, you know, long holding and quick pitching and double leg kicks and doing all that.

“So I think it’s going to be a very fun year.”

jalexander@scng.com