“I felt good out there,’’ Kelly said after the outing, a 15-0 victory for the Sox. “It was like my college debut. I talked to my dad last night and he told me to go out there and have fun. It’s the game I’ve been playing all my life.’’
All his life. All 20 years and five months.
This is a kid who was born into baseball. His dad, Pat, played 13 seasons of pro ball, including a Moonlight Grahamesque three-game cup of coffee in The Show with the Blue Jays in 1980. Kelly’s uncle, Mike, played six years in the bigs. His cousin, Dustin, played in the Sox minor league system, and his brother, Chris, is a pitcher in the minors with Tampa. When he was 6 years old, Casey Kelly played catch with a young Expos outfield prospect named Vladimir Guerrero.
Kelly turned down a shot to play quarterback at Tennessee when he signed with the Red Sox out of Sarasota High School two years ago. He has been a shortstop and a pitcher in the Sox system. Last year he went 6-1 with a 1.12 ERA at Greenville, while also hitting .224 with a homer and 10 RBIs in 32 games at short.
He was still playing shortstop in the Arizona Fall League last autumn, but over the winter, a meeting was held, and his father was summoned, and it was agreed that, moving forward, Kelly will be a starting pitcher.
And now he is a 20-year-old starter getting more hype than perhaps any pitcher in the Sox system since Roger Clemens was drafted after winning the 1983 College World Series at the University of Texas.
Kelly is 6 feet 3 inches, 195 pounds, and keeps his hair Hoosier-short. Everything about him says “future ace.’’ He is the second-highest-ranked Baseball America prospect in the Sox system. But unlike the young Clemens, he is poised, well-mannered, respectful, and cheerful. Kelly said the thing that made him most nervous yesterday was throwing to a veteran like Victor Martinez. He said Martinez wanted the young pitcher to shake him off a couple of times to confuse the hitters. Kelly couldn’t do it. Too green. Too polite.
He has yet to play above Single A ball at the professional level.
