Tag Archives: Merrill Kelly

WS Game Two: Kelly’s blue book

Posted on by
Reply
Merrill Kelly

Kelly kept the Rangers from another series of bombing raids and tank attacks Saturday night.

“I decided to take a look back just to double-check that it said ‘World Series’ behind me,” said the Diamondbacks’s Game Two starting pitcher, Merrill Kelly, the day before. Then, he went to work Saturday night and made easier work of the Rangers than many might have expected him to make.

He looks more than a little like comedian Chris Elliott, and he took an unusual route to get to the Show in the first place. But nobody’s laughing at Kelly after what he and his Diamondbacks did, one night after they got hammered out of a lead and into an eleven-inning Game One loss.

Not after Kelly pitched seven innings of three-hit, one-run baseball while his fellow Snakes pecked, poked, and pried nine runs out of the Rangers to even this World Series at a game apiece.

Not after the Diamondbacks atoned for losing a two-run lead in the Game One ninth with a seven-run spread of two in the seventh, three in the eighth, and two more for good measure in the ninth Sunday night.

Not after the only hit the Rangers could summon up after Kelly and the Diamondbacks handed off to their bullpen was a leadoff ninth-inning single by Marcus Semien that went for nothing with a line out, a called strikeout, a walk, but another lineout ended the 9-1 D’backs win.

Not after Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte showed the Rangers they weren’t the only ones with men who could reach and re-write a page or two in the postseason record books—even if it took him until the eighth inning to hit the two-run single that gave him a record eighteen-game postseason hitting streak.

Not after ancient Evan Longoria dropped a sacrifice bunt that went for naught in the third but stuck in the mind of Rangers third baseman Josh Jung when Longoria batted in the seventh. That’s when Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas opened with a double, then Jung played on the edge of the inner infield grass and Longoria swatted a single off Jung’s glove and into left enough to send Thomas home with the third Arizona run.

That’s right. The game was tighter than a rush hour crowd on a subway platform for six innings. The Snakes posted a pair in the fourth when catcher Gabriel Moreno wrestled Rangers starting pitcher Jordan Montgomery into a full count before hitting one over the center field fence, and designated hitter Tommy Pham’s two-out double was rewarded with left fielder Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. singling him home.

The Rangers got one back when their own DH Mitch Garver hit a 1-1 service from Kelly into the left field seats. And that’s where things stayed until the seventh. Until Longoria’s RBI single was followed by Corbin Carroll’s RBI single in that inning. Until Marte’s record-setter and Carroll’s immediate RBI single in the eighth.

Until the insult-to-injury two-run single in the ninth that might have helped set up more but for late Snakes third base insertion Emmanuel Rivera (who hit it) getting thrown out trying to stretch for second base.

Marte wasn’t the only Diamondback to join or expand the postseason record book. Longoria became only the fourth man to get a World Series hit before age 23 and after age 38—joining Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Pee Wee Reese, and Eddie Murray.

But most eyes were upon Kelly. The 35-year-old righthander went from the minors to a four-year term in Korea, where he says he really learned how to pitch mostly by the proverbial seat of his pants. The Diamondbacks took a chance. They’re reaping rewards some might call unforeseen.

On the regular season, Kelly could be remarkable and about average. He struck out 9.1 per nine but walked 3.5 per nine. He led the National League with 33 starts in 2022 but has a lifetime 4.02 fielding-independent pitching rate.

He kept the Dodgers in check during his divsion series start (no runs, three hits, three walks, five punchouts), but he and his Snakes were bludgeoned by the Phillies in National League Championship Series Game Two, especially after he was taken over the fences twice by Kyle Schwarber and once by Trea Turner.

But Kelly recovered well enough to allow only one Phillie run on three hits and three walks in Game Six while striking out eight in five innings’ work, setting the stage for the Diamondbacks dispatching the Phillies in a comparative whimper. Now he stood as the guy who made a once-impossible dream come true for one World Series game at least.

Montgomery wasn’t exactly terrible, even if this was one time his ability to get away with sinkers that don’t sink all the way betrayed him when Moreno took him long. And he did give the Rangers all the room they’d need to win. But Kelly didn’t let the Rangers get into his head and, in fact, juggled his entire kit bag of pitches to strike the side out in the sixth.

“I’ve been kind of saying he’s the most underrated pitcher in baseball,” said Diamondbacks pitching ace Zac Gellen, a day after the Rangers yanked three runs out of him en route the Game One Rangers win. “How it’s gone that way this long, I think it’s the market we play in. But the guy posts. And when he does, you see what it is.”

“I think we realized the second time through the lineup,” said Garver, who did reach him for that homer, “that we weren’t getting too many pitches to hit. He executed his stuff and a lot of times, we ran out of barrel.”

This time, Kelly had the Rangers over a barrel. It also enabled Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo to leave his absolute best relief pitchers alone and save them for the Phoenix swing of the Series. Not to mention Rangers manager Bruce Bochy still having his better relievers available for that swing, with veteran starter Martín Pérez going out for the Game Two eighth and taking a four-run one for the team over the final inning and a third Saturday night.

“We’d be naive to think that we’re going to run away with four in a row against a team that really fights hard, the same way we did,” said Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe. “They had to go through the wild-card round and all the way through, and they’re here. It’s a resilient bunch over there, but we’re pretty confident in our group, too.”

Rangers beware: His first World Series start didn’t intimidate Kelly at all. “I think going over to Korea as a 26-year-old is way scarier than pitching in the big leagues or even the World Series, to be honest,” he said. “It felt literally and figuratively miles away when I was over there.”

Even in Globe Life Field as opposed to Chase Field, there was no place like home.

NLCS Game Two: Was it loud enough?

Posted on by
Reply
Merrill Kelly

Arizona pitcher Merrill Kelly leaving NLCS Game Two in the sixth inning and hearing it from the Citizens Bank Park crowd whose sound he underestimated. He ended up bearing the least of the Phillies’ destruction on the night.

Maybe nobody gave Diamondbacks pitcher Merrill Kelly the memo. Maybe he missed the sign completely. Wherever Kelly happened to be, if and when he was warned not to poke the Philadelphia bear and his native habitat, he learned the hard way Tuesday night and the Diamondbacks whole were dragged into class.

Maybe the Braves sent him a message he never saw. You remember the Braves. The guys trolling Bryce Harper after their second division series game, when Harper got doubled up on a very close play following an impossible center field catch to end the game. They learned the hard way, too. They’re also on early winter vacation.

Before this National League Championship Series even began, Kelly was asked whether the heavy metal-loud Citizens Bank Park crowd might have a hand in the field proceedings. He practically shrugged it off, though in absolute fairness he wasn’t exactly trying to be mean or nasty.

“I haven’t obviously heard this place on the field, but I would be very surprised if it trumped that Venezuela game down in Miami [in the World Baseball Classic],” said Kelly, a righthander whose countenance bears a resemblance to comedian Chris Elliott and who’s considered a mild-mannered young man otherwise. “When Trea [Turner] hit that grand slam, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced—at least baseball-wise, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an atmosphere like that so I hope that this isn’t louder than that.”

That grand slam jolted Team USA into the semifinal round. By the same Trea Turner who’d start Kelly’s Tuesday night with a jolt, hitting a one-out, one-strike pitch into the left center field seats in the bottom of the first. 

Kelly may not have been trying to be snarky, but The Bank let him have it early and often, first when he was introduced pre-game time and then when he took the mound for the bottom of the Game Two first. Loud, clear, and unmistakeable.

The only things Kelly faced louder and more clear than that were Turner’s score-starting blast, the one-ball, two-out laser Kyle Schwarber sent off Kelly’s best pitch, a changeup, into the right field seats in the third, and the 2-1 skyrocket Schwarber sent into the right center field seats leading off the bottom of the sixth.

“He’s really effective because he has a plus-plus changeup,” Schwarber said postgame. “He threw it 2-0 and kinda gave me the window. That’s what it looks like coming out of there. I think that was the first strike [on a] changeup I saw. [The home run pitch] was a little bit more down and away. But, I mean, it came out of the same height. So those are things that you look for.”

“They’re good big-league hitters,” Kelly said of the Phlogging Phillies postgame. “That’s what good big-league hitters do. They don’t miss mistakes.” Neither did The Bank’s crowd, serenading him with “Mer-rill! Mer-rill” chants at any available opportunity. But Kelly actually pitched decently despite the bombs. He only surrendered three hits, but walking three didn’t help despite his six strikeouts.

He’d also prove to have been handled mercifully compared to what the Phillies did to the Diamondbacks bullpen in a 10-0 Game Two blowout.

Once they pushed Kelly out of the game, with two out in the sixth and Turner aboard with a walk, they slapped reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply with a base hit (Bryson Stott), a two-run double (J.T. Realmuto), and another RBI double (Brandon Marsh). Just like that, the Phillies had a four-run sixth with six on the board and counting.

Then, Mantiply walked the Schwarbinator to open the Philadelphia seventh. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo reached for Ryne Nelson. One out later, Harper singled Schwarber to third, Alec Bohm doubled them home with a drive that hit the track, Stott hit a floater that hit the infield grass between Nelson plus Diamondbacks third baseman Evan Longoria and catcher Gabriel Moreno, Realmuto singled Bohm home and Stott to third, and Nick Castellanos sent Stott home with a sacrifice fly.

This time they didn’t need Harper to provide the major dramatics. He’d done enough of that in Game One, hitting a first-inning, first-pitch-to-him, first-NLCS-swing, first-time-ever-on-his-own-birthday nuke one out after Schwarber hit his own first-pitch bomb. That game turned into a 5-3 Phillies win. On Tuesday night, they turned the Diamondbacks into rattlesnake stew.

They made life just as simple for Game Two starter Aaron Nola as for Game One starter Zack Wheeler. Wheeler gave the Phillies six innings of two-run, three-hit, eight-strikeout ball; Nola gave them six innings of three-hit, seven-strikeout, shutout ball. It was as if the Philadelphia Orchestra offered successive evenings of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major—featuring Isaac Stern one night and Itzhak Perlman the next.

“It’s a little more hostile and a little more engaging,” said Turner of the Bank crowd after the Phillies banked Game One. “I think [Kelly] can maybe tell you after tonight what it’s like, but I wouldn’t put anything past our fans. Our fans have been unbelievable. They’ve been great. I don’t know what decibels mean, but I guess we did something cool for AC/DC concert level decibels the other night . . . I would just wait and see and we’ll see what he says after [Game Two]”

“They’re up all game on their feet from pitch number one till the end,” said Nola postgame. “I feel like you don’t really see that too much around the league. That just shows you how passionate and into the game they are. They know what’s going on, and that helps us a lot.”

That was not necessarily what Lovullo wanted to hear before or after the Game Two massacre ended. “Everybody’s talking about coming into this environment,” he said, audibly frustrated, “and I don’t care.”

We’ve got to play better baseball. Start with the manager, and then trickle all the way down through the entire team. We’ve got to play Diamondback baseball . . . Diamondback baseball is grinding out at bats . . . driving up pitch counts, catching pop ups . . . win[ning] a baseball game by just being a really smart, stubborn baseball team in all areas.

That assumes the Phillies will just roll over and let them play it. The wild-card Diamondbacks who steamrolled two division winners in the earlier rounds to get here in the first place looked like anything except an unlikely juggernaut after getting manhandled in Philadelphia. They shouldn’t take the Phillies for granted once the set moves to Chase Field, either.

The Phillies might have been a one-game-over-.500 road team on the regular season, but they beat the Diamondbacks in Chase Field three out of four—a couple of weeks after the Snakes beat them two out of three in The Bank. Until this NLCS it was a little over three months since the two teams tangled. It certainly didn’t phaze the Phillies.

“I still think we’re real confident,” said Kelly. “I think there was a lot to be said about us after the All-Star break about how bad of a slump that we went into. I’ve seen in this clubhouse, I’ve seen from these guys that we haven’t gotten rattled all year. And I don’t want us to hang our heads and pout about it this time.”

But let’s say the Diamondbacks iron up and find ways to neutralise the Phillies’ offensive bludgeons and pitching scythes which, admittedly, might require a kidnapping or three. Let’s say they win all three games at Chase. They might become the only team to be at a disadvantage with a 3-2 series lead.

Because guess where the set would return then. And, unless my prowling has missed something this morning, Kelly didn’t have one word to say about that crowd after Game Two came to its merciful end. It must have been more than loud enough for him.

NLDS Games One: The Atlanta Chop Slop, the Los Angeles funeral parlour

Posted on by
Reply
Truist Park

Trash talk? Have at it. Trash the field over a call going against you? What was this, Braves fan?

Neither the Dodgers nor the Phillies expected simple National League division series this time around. Not with both teams coming in with what some call patchwork pitching. But one came out looking better in their Game One while the other came out looking like the remnant of a nuclear attack.

The Phillies and their pitching managed to keep the Atlanta threshing machine from threshing Saturday afternoon, winning 3-0. Starting with a first-inning nuking of future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, the Diamondbacks laid waste to the Dodgers Saturday night, 11-2. On the arms of big enough bats and a starting pitcher who was usually close enough to Dodger batting practise.

Letting starter Ranger Suárez go no more than three and two thirds, knowing they’d have a day off between Games One and Two, the Phillies went to a bullpen game, essentially. And that bullpen finished what Suárez started, shutting the Braves out over the remaining five and a third. The Braves who hit a record 307 home runs on the regular season looked as though they had paper towel tubes for bats.

None more glaring than the founding father of the 40/70 club. Ronald Acuña, Jr. went 0-for-3 with a walk, and his evening’s futility included an embarrassing called strikeout in the fifth, when—with first and third and one out—the second Phillies reliever of the evening, Seranthony Domínguez, planted a fastball right on the low inside corner.

Small wonder that Braves manager Brian Snitker could and did say, postgame, “I think it was more their pitching than our hitting.” Indeed.

Braves starter Spencer Strider pitched boldly enough, striking eight out and scattering five hits in seven innings’ work. But the Phillies still pried two runs out of him, both with Bryce Harper the big factor. First, Strider threw wild enough trying to pick Harper off first in the top of the fourth, enabling Bryson Stott to single him home with the first run. Then, Strider threw Harper enough of a meatball to disappear into the Chop House seats behind right field with one out in the top of the sixth.

“Strider, man, he’s one of the best in the game. You know he’s going to come at you and throw his best at you,” Harper said postgame. “So just trying to get a pitch over and was able to get the slider up and do some damage.”

Except for Acuña’s surprising silence, and the eighth-inning catcher’s interference call with J.T. Realmuto at the plate and the Phillies with the bases loaded, enabling the third Phillie run home, the Braves at least looked stronger in Game One defeat than the Dodgers did. Even Strider, who became the first postseason pitcher ever to lose twice against a team against whom he’s well undefeated in the regular season.

The Diamondbacks didn’t let Clayton Kershaw—all 35 years old of him, with possible lingering shoulder issues plus eight days of rest leaving him with little enough to offer—get out of the first alive. Their 35-year-old journeyman starter Merrill Kelly, who didn’t turn up in the Show until age 30 in the first place, manhandled them for six and a third after the Snakes bit Kershaw deep in the first.

For the regular season’s final two months, with a 2.23 ERA over eight starts, Kershaw seemed to tell age and his shoulder alike where to stuff it. Then Kershaw took the ball Saturday night. What’s the saying about too much rest being as hazardous to a pitcher as too little rest can be?

Ketel Marte opened with a double to the back of left center field, and Corbin Carroll began showing why he’s in the Rookie of the Year conversation with a prompte RBI single. Tommy Pham—the same Tommy Pham who called out the lack of work ethic among second-tier Mets teammates with whom he played before the trade deadline—rapped a short single to left for first and second.

Then Christian Walker, a veteran first baseman who hadn’t been anything much special before 2022, hit one so far to the back of the left field bleachers some wondered how the ball didn’t leave the ballpark structure. Just like that, Dodger Stadium resembled a funeral parlour. And, just like that, Kershaw resembled the corpse for whom the audience came to mourn.

A ground out by Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. and a walk to Alek Thomas later, Evan Longoria sent Thomas all the way home with a double to deep center field, hammering the final nails into Kershaw’s coffin.

“Embarrassing,” the lefthander said postgame. “You just feel like you let everybody down. The guys, a whole organization, that looked to you to pitch well in Game One. It’s just embarrassing, really. So I just feel like I let everybody down. It’s a tough way to start the postseason. Obviously, we still have a chance at this thing, but that wasn’t the way it should’ve started for me.”

Kershaw’s postseason history is a direct contrast to the regular-season career that guarantees him a place in Cooperstown. Until Saturday night, enough of that sad history came by way of leaving him in too long or by circumstances above and beyond his control.

Entering Game One with a 5.49 ERA against the Dodgers lifetime but a 7.03 ERA against them when pitching in Dodger Stadium, Kelly pitched six and a third shutout innings before turning it over to a bullpen that kept the Dodgers to one hit. The bad news: the hit was a two-run triple by Will Smith off Miguel Castro. The good news: The Snakes could afford such generosity by then, since it cut an 11-0 lead by a measly two runs.

Kelly’s keys included forgetting how the Dodgers treated him like a piñata in regular season play. “I’m watching our guys beat up on one of the best pitchers that we’ve ever seen in our lives and watching them do it in the first game I’ve ever pitched in the playoffs,” he said postgame. “I felt if I gave those games any attention I was going out there behind the eight-ball before I even stepped on the mound.”

This time, Kelly went out there with a six-run cushion, then saw it padded to nine by a three-run second including Carroll leading off against Dodger reliever Emmet Sheehan with a drive into the right field bleachers. Kelly was now comfortable enough that he could have pitched from a high-backed leather office chair and incurred no damage.

The only thing that should have and apparently did embarrass the Braves was the Truist Park crowd throwing drinks onto the field after catcher Sean Murphy’s mitt grazed Realmuto’s bat by a thin hair. You could hear it on replays that didn’t exactly show it too clearly, but Murphy’s lack of challenging the call affirmed it.

Trea Turner—who started a spectacular double play with Acuña (leadoff walk) on third to end the bottom of the eighth, diving left for Ozzie Albies’s ground smash and backhanding to second baseman Stott—scored on the interference. The rain of drinks into the outfield annoyed both the Braves and their manager.

“There’s no excuse for that,” Snitker snapped postgame. “It’s scary because those water bottles, when they come, they’re like grenades. It could really seriously injure one of our players.”

That’s what the miscreants don’t stop to think about. Against a team whose fan base is usually considered one of the worst in the game. (Remember the Philadelphia wedding: the clergyman pronounces the happy couple husband and wife before telling the gathering, “You may now boo the bride.”) Be better, Braves fans.

Only the silence in Dodger Stadium following the Diamondbacks’ early and often abuse of Kershaw and Sheehan kept the big National League division series headlines elsewhere from reading, “Chop Slop.”