April 12, 2017

Let It Eat

Who Is Responsible for Joe Kelly Has Great Stuff?

by Ben Carsley

If you’ve ever been on Baseball Twitter, or really any part of Baseball Internet, you’re familiar with Joe Kelly’s Great Stuff™. It’s been memed. It’s been looked at seriously. It’s allowed certain former BP Local site managers to get away with extreme abuse of editorial privilege. Any time Joe Kelly appears in a game the Great Stuffs start rolling in, from tweeters and commenters and Kelly’s colleagues in equal measure.

But just where did the saga of Joe Kelly Has Great Stuff begin, and how did we get to where we are now? Who is primarily responsible for the meme? These are the types of questions we’ve all been asking. These are the kinds of questions to which you deserve the answers.

To find out, I took a brief look into unironic descriptions of Joe Kelly’s stuff by people in or reporting on baseball. Again, unironic, so apologies to Tim Britton, Brian MacPherson, and Evan Drellich, whose collective Great Stuff Awareness disqualifies them (but not their reporting) from this hunt.

JOE KELLY STUFF DESCRIPTORS

HIS STUFF IS ...	WHO SAID IT? (source)	WHEN?
Good ... Great	David Ortiz	11/13/2013
Really good	Ben Cherington	7/31/2014
Very good	John Farrell	8/1/2014
Great	Mike Napoli	8/4/2014
... plays anywhere	David Ross	9/21/2014
Electric	Peter Gammons	12/4/2014
The best	John Farrell	2/26/2015
Excellent	John Farrell	2/28/2015
Great	Matt Yallof	3/2/2015
So good	“ESPN”	3/3/2015
Big-time	John Farrell	4/27/2015
... there’s no denying his	John Farrell	5/25/2015
... gotta love his	Jerry Remy	2/29/2016
Explosive	Kevin Boles	5/16/2016
Great	John Farrell	5/29/2016
Terrific	John Farrell	6/2/2016
Premium	John Farrell	4/7/2017

As you can tell, I ran out of steam a bit there at the end, but in about 45 minutes of research I found 17 distinct references that directly describe Joe Kelly’s stuff from people inside baseball. And believe me friends, I was selective.

Selective enough to omit this:

@jmattnewton loving Joe Kelly's stuff is a universe away from loving the product

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) May 4, 2015

And this:

Joe Kelly, by the way, looks like the real deal if he can harness his stuff.

— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) September 27, 2014

And this:

Scouts absolutely raving about Joe Kelly last night. One scout who saw him in May said he could not believe the transformation.

— Gordon Edes (@GordonEdes) August 25, 2015

Those tweets don’t directly describe Joe Kelly’s stuff, so I left them out. Sort of.

Either way, the first reference to the greatness of Kelly’s stuff I can find from anyone inside baseball is from Ortiz in late 2013, recounting facing Kelly in the 2013 World Series. Yes, it’s easy to forget now, but there was a time when Kelly’s ... evocative repertoire ... was used against the Red Sox, and not in their service.

So how did we get to the point where a man with a career 3.91 ERA, who’s most famous for an embarrassing Cy Young prediction, is synonymous with an industry's propensity to fetishize “stuff?” How does one player—your standard doomed-starter-turned-sporadically-effective-reliever—now embody baseball’s willingness to overlook command, control, and execution if pitches look pretty or go fast?

To me, the answer is obvious.

Do you blame the first person who ever got the flu for all subsequent influenza outbreaks? No, so it’s not David Ortiz’s fault. Do you blame the reporters who just want to get in on the action? No, it’s a long season and they need the entertainment. Do you blame someone like me, who’s just trying to get some lolz on Twitter? No. And if you do, I don’t care.

Because it’s clear who you should blame. You should blame John Farrell.

In the study of 17 Joe Kelly Stuff references above, Farrell was responsible for eight of them. If we narrow that down to Joe Kelly Stuff references from 2016 or later, we’re at 60 percent.

I mean, just look at this:

More than 800,000 results linking Joe Kelly, stuff, and John Farrell. Might one or two of those be duplicative instances? I mean, maybe. But the numbers speak for themselves here. You might think Farrell is just a manager sticking up for his player, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think he knows.

Farrell is The Gravemind and Joe Kelly’s Great Stuff references are The Flood. Farrell is @dril and everyone else is the RTers. It’s so contagious, even Joe Kelly himself is falling for the stuff-describing craze. Here’s what Kelly said to Christopher Smith of MassLive.com when talking about playing catch with Chris Sale:

He's got obviously great stuff and with a little bit of funk. That's what makes him so good.

Is Kelly himself in on the joke? Is Farrell in on it? Are any of us truly in on it? Is it even a joke anymore?

Maybe not, because while Joe Kelly Has Great Stuff is often used ironically ... it’s true. The offspeed pitches move. The fastball has crazy life. He was dominant as a reliever last season. I mean, look at this. And even more incredibly, look at this:

Joe Kelly improves to 13-0 since 8/1/15. He owns the longest active winning streak in the majors.

— Red Sox Notes (@SoxNotes) April 6, 2017

Like it or not Farrell has a point, because you can’t tell me a pitcher can do that without great stuff.

You just don’t have to tell me about his stuff as often.

Ben Carsley is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @bencarsley
Click here to see Ben's other articles. You can contact Ben by clicking here