A Damn Near Perfect Game by Joe Kelly

A Damn Near Perfect Game: Reclaiming America’s Pastime
by Joe Kelly (with Rob Bradford)
Diversion Books 2023

In a Major League Baseball career entering its 12th season, Joe Kelly has made a name as a hard-throwing relief pitcher and a relative eccentric—a wiry guy who takes the mound wearing eyeglasses, and one who does weird and funny and dangerous stuff that infuriates opponents, gets him in trouble with MLB’s commissioner and, at least occasionally, attracts the attention of nonfans.

When Kelly, then with the Red Sox, was serving a six-game suspension for intentionally hitting a Yankees batter with a fastball, he ignored precedent, which holds that penalized players repent in their team’s clubhouse, opting instead to watch a game alongside Boston loyalists in the Fenway Park stands. As a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, he added a pinch of irreverence to the pregame pieties, regularly standing statue-like on the field, hat over his heart, until the Star Spangled Banner was long-finished and an umpire chased him back to the dugout. As a Dodger, he wore an embroidered jacket formerly owned by a mariachi musician when he and his World Series-winning L.A. teammates visited the White House.

In short, Kelly, who’s now with the Chicago White Sox, isn’t your standard-issue big-leaguer. This is a point of pride for the pitcher—and one he accentuates in A Damn Near Perfect Game: Reclaiming America’s Pastime, a book he’s written with longtime MLB reporter Rob Bradford. “People think I’m crazy,” Kelly writes. “I don’t feel that way. I just do things others won’t.”

In publicity materials, Kelly’s publisher positions his memoir-manifesto as an heir to a tell-all by another maverick pitcher. But it’s not fair to compare his book to Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, published in 1970. In then-scandalous fashion, Bouton depicted Mickey Mantle as temperamental and a hard drinker, and noted that other players were amphetamine-taking lotharios. Kelly insults some well-known big-leaguers—he calls the Yankees’ Josh Donaldson “a douche” and the Minnesota Twins’ Carlos Correa a whiner—but he isn’t going to shock anyone. It’s more likely that readers will roll their eyes at Kelly’s goofy boosterism for “this big, beautiful world of baseball,” a “spectacularly special” game that’s “all about making memories.”

Kelly is, however, the rare pro athlete who’s authored a book aimed at improving a sport in which he still competes. A Damn Near Perfect Game will have absolutely no impact on how the game is played, and it sometimes reads like a branding campaign, an effort to put Kelly, who turns 35 this year, in line for a media job after he retires. But it’s fitfully engrossing, until its staggeringly boring last two chapters.

Baseball fans will remember that for two seasons—the pandemic-shortened 2020 and the traditional 162-game season of 2021—doubleheaders featured two seven-inning games. Purists complained, but Kelly liked it. His feelings took shape when he went from seven-innings in high school to nine in college: “Those two extra innings were tough to take. It felt so fucking long.” Not only would Kelly bring back seven-inning doubleheaders. He’d cut “all games to seven innings” to bring more “urgency” to the game. Were this to happen, Kelly, who pitches in the middle innings, might be jobless. But considering that nobody with any say in the matter is even talking about shortening games, it’s a radical proposal that’s going nowhere.

Though quixotic, Kelly’s idea is in keeping with his thesis: the game needs to be more fun, and for that to happen, it must move faster. The average MLB game in 2022 was more than three hours; four-hour playoff games aren’t uncommon. “For both players and fans alike,” he writes, baseball “is a game that feels too long.” Which is why Kelly wants umpires to enforce the universally ignored rule that compels batters to stay in the batter’s box between pitches. He also says it’s time for “robot umps,” at least for calling balls and strikes. This would streamline the game by reducing complaints from aggrieved batters and pitchers. It’s not a stupid argument. But given that such a change would be another part of life in which artificial intelligence chases humans from the workforce, the very idea makes me angry.

Kelly might be best-known for the run-in he had with Correa, who was with the Houston Astros from 2015-21. After the Astros won the 2017 World Series, it emerged that the team used a prohibited sign-stealing scheme that sometimes alerted Houston batters what pitch was coming. Pitching against Houston in 2020, Kelly struck out Correa; as the two shouted at each other, Kelly stuck out his lower lip in a mocking pout.

A photo of Kelly, mid-pout, appears on his book cover, and if you’ve never seen a ballplayer over the age of 11 pulling such a face, well, that’s a shame, he suggests. He contends that baseball needs more idiosyncrasy, more honest displays of emotion, more improvised celebrations. He doesn’t care that baseball’s vast unwritten rulebook disapproves of stuff like this. “If you really want to respect baseball,” he writes, “understand that we need more of that personality. Pimp away. Take a minute rounding the bases. Pitchers, throw your hats up in the air.” Sure, why not, though it’s hard to imagine new fans tuning in for a 1:05 first pitch on a cloudless July Sunday because one of the players might make a funny face.

The most personal parts of this book are uneven. Kelly vividly depicts the friction that characterized his relationship with his father, an alcoholic who pressured Kelly to succeed as an athlete. One day, when Kelly was practicing with his college team, he saw his father “standing by the fence and yelling until I couldn’t take it anymore. I just walked off the field.” But then there’s the book’s penultimate chapter, “an open letter” to Kelly’s three children. It’s a heartfelt promise to be a good father, but probably not something anyone outside of the Kelly household will care to read.

Weaker still is the closing chapter, in which ballplayers, celebrities and internet personalities explain why they love the sport. Though this book has its strengths, there’s nothing Kelly can do to make me care what a Nascar driver, an actor or a member of a pseudo-punk band thinks about baseball. As a member of this book’s target audience—loyal and would-be fans who think games shouldn’t take three hours—I bet I’m not alone in feeling this way.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.