Joe Kelly is returning to the Red Sox as a reliever, and he's presumably not happy about it. He has long expressed his preference to remain a starter, and the team has long accommodated him, mostly out of necessity -- but his time is up, and he will finally play the role he was born to play.
We know the Red Sox' pitching staff is not great, having effectively been held together on the strength of Steven Wright's knuckles. As he took the spin off the ball, helping the Sox stay afloat, we put it back on, trying to contort ourselves into positive thoughts even as we literally relied on an SOS in place of Kelly and Clay Buchholz (in the form of the aptly initialed Sean O'Sullivan), who were delivering their own type of floaters.
Five shutout innings from O'Sullivan was all I needed to see to know I don't want Kelly back on the bump in the first inning ever again. If that makes him angry, so be it. I want him to be angry. I want him to be the ex-con turned closer Ricky Vaughn of Major League legend, who he resembles so much. And I want it despite what he did from this point on during the 2015 season as a starter, a stretch during which he pitched lights-out ball.
I just can't take any more of Kelly's volatility in the rotation. We've had plenty already from far more likable players. Wright was great, and he wasn't. David Price was terrible, then he was great, and now he's terrible again. Rick Porcello was back, due to regress, and back again. Clay Buchholz was Clay Buchholz was Clay Buchholz.
Kelly was, and is, Kelly, a zero-sum trolling conduit unleashed upon the sport. He's either owning baseball or baseball is owning him at any given time, with these forces in perfect opposition to each other; his success cannot come against anything less than the fabric of a game that makes a fool out of pretty much everyone, and his failure repeatedly proves true the aphorisms about the game's difficulties.
He is perfect for the bullpen not despite, but because of, how much he is going to hate it. The pen is the perfect place for moody dudes with live arms, stupid glasses and/or a prison record. Good times don't agree with him, so maybe he needs to face some bad ones to know just where he stands.
Or sits, as it were, out in right field, waiting for a chance to strike. The guy who said he would win last year's Cy Young award is not a major league starter despite being the (great) stuff of major league memes, and he likely has only himself to blame. I am sympathetic to athletes beyond the point where even my colleagues have stopped making excuses for them, but Kelly is an exception: his public suckitude is such that I can feel it in my bones.
Now the hope is that the situation to which he is not accustomed might help him focus on throwing the ball over the plate, a feat which he occasionally cannot perform with any alacrity whatsoever; put more simply, it's possible that as a reliever he'll stop walking everyone and their extended families before inevitably giving up a donger.
To mix classic baseball movie metaphors, as the manager in Bull Durham says, it's a simple game: you hit the ball, you pitch the ball, you field the ball. Kelly attacks it like it's the Sunday New York Times crossword and he has a box of crayons. He makes things as hard as possible. And then he claims it as a birthright.
Both Kelly and Buchholz have declared, through their extended struggles, that they'd like to remain starting pitchers. The Sox are in such a bad position that they're sticking with Buch even as he repeatedly burns the house down around himself. This isn't fine, but it will have to do, for now, and it's telling that it's not Kelly who's getting the call. For whatever else has happened to him this year, Buchholz has handled his ping-ponging around the organization like a pro, if a somewhat surly one. If this is the end, he's facing it as well as someone suddenly hapless could be expected to do.
Kelly's arm is too electric to say that the end is nigh; he'll always get a chance somewhere. (So will Buchholz, most likely, but the window might be closing sooner rather than later.) Electricity is only a good thing if you can channel it, though. For all of us who'd rather see Kelly go fly a kite elsewhere, the Sox are letting him do it on the mound, hoping he can make a discovery to put that power to use. It could be the key to extending his career. I wouldn't be shocked. But I would be happy. Even if he's not.