The triumph of Joe Kelly and the childhood pain he had to overcome

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Joe Kelly looked up as the bullpen door opened. Sprinting onto Dodger Stadium’s outfield grass, he directed his eyes toward the top deck on down. The Boston Red Sox were six outs from a championship, and Kelly knew they were about to crush 50,000 fans’ spirits. When he reached the infield, he looked toward the visiting dugout. He caught the eyes of his manager smiling and saw several of his teammates hollering.

Never in his adult life had he felt so relaxed. He thought back to his teenage years in nearby Corona, to the liberating feeling he first found in skateboarding, which is where he turned as alcoholism and divorce at home unsettled his young life. Then he pumped fastball after fastball to the Dodgers. When Cody Bellinger missed the 16th, at 99 mph, Kelly howled his way home. He screamed obscenities, wagged his head back and forth, and banged his right fist on his chest. He felt uniquely fulfilled.

“That moment was the first time in my life where I thought, ‘I deserve this shit,’ ” Kelly said. ” ‘I’ve worked hard for this. My teammates have worked hard for this. I deserve to act like an idiot.’ I’ve never felt that, and I was finally able to enjoy it.”

One month earlier, the Fenway Park faithful had booed Kelly off the mound. Inconsistent in his delivery, he teetered on the postseason roster bubble, but he snuck on and dominated baseball’s best teams in October. In vaulting the Red Sox within three outs of the end, Kelly found for the first time unadulterated satisfaction.

“The struggles I’ve had, the good pitching, the bad pitching, going out and doing it in such dominating fashion, it was a weight off my chest,” he said. “And I saw 25 guys getting hyped as if I just crossed somebody over and hit a step-back 3. That was the culmination of how much I’ve been through.”

Kelly overcame a conflict-filled childhood, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and his father’s alcoholism. He learned to present himself as he is and located joy in baseball and outside of it. What was received as his flippancy as a teenager now manifests as a rare ease in entertaining and leading.

“This,” Kelly said recently, touching his right forearm, “is from not being smart.”

“And this,” he said, pointing under his left eyelid, “is from not being smart.”

They are scars, the lingering evidence of fights he incited in his early teen years, of warning signs he failed to heed, of provocations he accepted. In junior high, one classmate stabbed a pen into his arm, dug in and drew blood. At a hotel on a travel-ball trip around that time, Kelly pummeled a boy who had picked on his teammate during a game.

“If we’re wearing the same uniform and someone runs up on you, I’m gonna have your back right away, even if I don’t know your character,” Kelly said. “When the pressure gets big, I want to attack it. When the anxiety is up, I want to be the guy to lead.”

That was true then. It was true last April when he fired a fastball at an offending Yankee’s ribs, steadied his feet into a crouch and motioned for him to bring it on. And it’s true now.

“If I think I’m in the right and someone’s gonna get in my face, it’s not gonna be just a bunch of talking crap,” Kelly said. “It’s gonna go straight to, ‘All right, I shouldn’t have broken the guy’s nose when he just said, ‘F you. Maybe I took it too far.’ But I’m not gonna take my time, if I feel like I’m in the right, for something to happen. I’m always gonna be the aggressor, and that helps me out competitively on the field.”

In those terms, Kelly is a better fit for football, even basketball. But in baseball, he found a vehicle for his talkative nature. He wants to keep the conversation going. He wants to be honest. Where most ballplayers are 50 percent transparent, he said, he aims for 90 percent. So he admits his mistakes.

“I have a lot of downfalls,” Kelly said. “But my major one is going from 0 to 100 faster than I should. And I have to say sorry after it. But I will say sorry.”

He didn’t always, and for that, his parents believe they are at fault.

“A lot of times, kids don’t know why they have anger inside, why their emotions are the ways they are,” said his father, Joe Kelly Sr. “They can’t articulate it, but a lot of it goes back to their parents and what happened to their family.”

Kelly Jr.’s parents separated when he was 11, soon after they moved from Anaheim to Corona, a burgeoning bedroom community outside Orange County. Just as he was finishing elementary school in a new area, he and his siblings began to alternate weeks at their parents’ homes. The carefree first decade of his life was over, ushering in a harsh second, when he picked up skateboarding, dyed his hair assorted colors and quit baseball to get back at his dad. It took until the third for him to feel whole, for him and his dad to reconcile.

And it took 13 years for his parents to reach speaking terms, tied to their son’s success. The day before he turned 24, Kelly Jr. got the big-league call from the Cardinals. The whole family flew to St. Louis. As they watched him twirl five effective innings, his father and stepfather grew to like each other. And, for the first time in a long time, Kelly Sr. became friendly with his first wife, forming a “mini-coalition” to help their grown children.

“That was the perestroika,” Kelly Sr. said. “To be honest with you, it should have began a long time ago.”

Growing up in 1970s Orange County, Joseph William Kelly excelled at football and throwing the javelin, earning a scholarship to Vanderbilt. He was in training camp with the San Diego Chargers when he and his junior-college sweetheart Andrea had their first child, a daughter.

Joseph William Kelly Jr. was born three years later, in 1988, when Joe Sr. was playing Arena Football for the short-lived Los Angeles Cobras. As a little boy, his father engineered ways to develop his hand-eye coordination. He’d scrunch up two paper towels and sketch out receiving drills. He’d ask his son to close one of his eyes, leap into the couch and collect the paper.

“If you do it,” he’d tell him, “you don’t have to go to bed.”

Joe Jr. had the explosive ability his father enjoyed at his athletic peak and his substantial arm strength. Even now, Joe Sr. excels throwing javelin on a national level. But Joe Jr. was so small. His youngest brother grew taller, his middle brother stouter. Kids his age dwarfed him in organized sports.

Joe Sr. knew he did not want his boys playing football, the sport he knew best. So he learned how to coach baseball and brought his passion for competition to it. Like so many parents, he was harder on his sons than all the other boys, and harder on his oldest son than his others, regularly bringing Joe Jr. to tears. All the while, he drank, and his marriage crumbled.

“Joe Sr. was up and down because of his drinking,” said Rich Krzysiak, a family friend, accomplished coach and recovering alcoholic himself. “He was drowning in alcohol at the time. It wasn’t his dad. It was the alcohol that was talking.”

Sometimes on the worst of the late nights, Kelly Sr. called Krzysiak, who had on many occasions offered to take over coaching Joe Jr. Finally, he agreed, accepting his failings and putting his son’s interests ahead of his own.

“He knew that he had a son that needed help, and he was so completely controlled by the substance,” Krzysiak said. “He cried out for help.”

Joe Kelly Jr. and brother Christopher were coached by their father, Joe Sr. (Photo courtesy of Joe Kelly Sr.)

The younger Kelly took to Krzysiak. They would go to malls together during travel-ball trips. Joe Jr. would show up at the house asking for the soup the coach had once thrown together for him. The recipe called for one pack of top ramen in a can of cream of mushroom with a couple of chopped vegetables thrown on top. But it was the same every time, and the boy always wanted seconds.

“When he came to my door asking for soup,” Krzysiak said, “I think he was searching, grasping for something that wasn’t there for him.”

Eating soup, playing baseball, mastering a new rail on his skateboard — Kelly Jr. escaped by leaving his parents’ houses.

“I wanted to get away from everything,” he said. “Baseball was where I took a lot of my anger, my feelings out. The reason why I’ve never been afraid of the moment is because I’ve been doing it forever.”

It is a paradox, he knows: Those years were terrible, and he hesitates to relive them. But they helped forge him into who he is.

“There’s some fire in there, and I don’t think that fire would have been there if he didn’t pass through the dark depths that he did,” Krzysiak said. “Joe Kelly Jr. is an amazing dude, man. To go through what he went through, to accept what he did, and to be able to get on that bump in front of millions, I’m telling you, there is something special inside of him that allows that to happen.”

Joe Kelly Sr. was a functioning alcoholic. He held jobs; he just drank, too. He re-married, but he blamed himself for the breakup of the family and the struggles of his children. His parents’ marriage had been a happy one. Both sets of his grandparents had lasting unions, too. But his had floundered.

“Really,” he’d ask himself, “you’re not happy?”

When his drinking reached its worst, he would wake up and pour a half-pint of vodka into the blender alongside protein powder, skim milk, a banana and oats.

“I thought I was being healthy,” Kelly Sr. said. “I’m like a walking miracle, really.”

On several occasions, he flirted with quitting. On one visit to see Joe Jr. in the minor leagues in Iowa, he stayed sober the entire trip and enjoyed himself. But he only gave up drinking for good on May 10, 2011, when he resolved to do it cold turkey. Instructing his wife to not let him leave the house, he spent three painful days detoxing in bed.

“I had gotten to the point where I realized this is gonna kill me, and it’s definitely gonna have an effect on my grown adult kids,” he said. “I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I didn’t want my kids to say about me, ‘Well, he drank himself to death.’ ”

One year later, he visited his son during a big-league trip in Pittsburgh. After a game at PNC Park, several Cardinals and their fathers walked to dinner. When they were seated, the waiter went around the table taking drink orders. The first several men ordered a beer.

“And a beer for you too, sir?” the waiter asked Kelly Sr.

“Oh, no, no,” Kelly Jr. said. “He’s not having a beer.”

Nearing eight years of sobriety, Kelly Sr. has renewed his Christian faith and taken on an elder role at the Living Truth Christian Fellowship in Corona. He teaches classes at the church’s Truth Academy. He and his wife work as licensed real-estate brokers. He reads. He watches his sons play sports and sees his grandchildren. He counsels others facing the same obstacles that nearly felled him.

“I do all these things that would never have happened if I had not stopped drinking,” he said. “I thank the Lord for that. I feel like I was spared, in a way.”

When he was 15, Kelly Jr. played in a winter tournament at the Peoria Sports Complex, just up the freeway from the Dodgers’ spring-training facility. One tight game stretched into extra innings, requiring a move to a lighted field. Right away in right field, Kelly Jr. faced an awkward fly ball with two outs and a man on first. He lost the ball in the lights. At the last second, he lifted his glove in self-defense, and the ball bounced off of it. The runner scored from first, and Kelly Jr.’s team lost.

“You would’ve thought he lost the World Series on his own,” Kelly Sr. said. “He just wept and wept.”

At that time, Kelly Jr. had little else. He wasn’t a fan of the game in the traditional sense; he never watched the sport on television. But his pre-teen years had showed him the sport would reciprocate all the intensity he put into it. Now his well-being depended on it.

“Baseball was the only thing in my life that I felt like wouldn’t let me down,” Kelly Jr. said. “So, losses hurt even more, even until this day. I think that’s why I was successful, even though I was way smaller than everyone else my whole life. That part stuck with me, though I am better at it now than I was before.”

By his last year of high school, Kelly Jr. stood 5-foot-10 and weighed something like 145 pounds. He still had that strong arm, but he was not a college or pro prospect. And given all that he poured into baseball, given how much he had relied on it, the prospect of ceasing to play daunted him.

Krzysiak offered him a tryout on his Cincinnati Reds-sponsored scout league team, which met Sundays at Azusa Pacific University. Seated in the bleachers when Kelly Jr. arrived were area scouts and coaches, the same ones who had been ignoring him to date. As he ran to right field for drills that dewy morning, he reasoned that he would have to take outlandish action to attract attention.

“Look at all these scouts,” he thought. “Fuck this.”

He heaved the first ball hit to him over the towering fence and off the third story of the neighboring dorms, nearly breaking a window. On the next, he threw a no-hop strike to home plate. Impressed by his arm, a UC Riverside coach set up an informal workout the next day, and by the following week Kelly had a scholarship offer.

“Everybody has that one 10 minutes of glory, that one spot, that one day where their whole life changes,” Krzysiak said. “That was Joe’s. My God, if he wouldn’t have been at that tryout, he wouldn’t have been where he is today.”

As Mookie Betts carried an 0-for-11 hitless stretch into the fifth game of the World Series, Kelly Jr. figured he knew how to help lighten the mood from the next locker at Dodger Stadium.

“We all know you’re holding the record for the biggest 0-fer streak in World Series history,” he said. “You already have the record. What else worse could happen?”

Sensing he had Betts’ attention, Kelly Jr. piped up again a minute later, just like he did as a kid.

“Hey, bro,” he said. “You got us to the World Series. You’re an MVP. But you haven’t done anything.”

When Betts homered that night, Kelly Jr. whooped watching it from the bullpen. Months later, he laughed recalling it.

“They know I have good intentions,” he said, “so I can talk a little bit of shit.”

The intentions are essential. In recent years, Kelly Jr. said, he has learned how to feel empathy, how to think less selfishly, how to be interested in the other side of a conversation. He listens to his friends and imagines their pasts, their problems. For so long, he felt like he had to focus on himself just to keep going. So he anticipated the moment almost every interaction would end. He recalled being told by an acquaintance that a beloved pet had died and, within seconds, leaving the room.

“I lived my life a long time like that,” Kelly Jr. said. “Now I can share my feelings and talk about stuff I’ve never talked about.”

He has not yet shared his story with many of his Dodgers teammates. He has focused on observing the way the group of holdovers functions and finding opportune times to chime in.

Early indications are that Joe Kelly will be a good fit in the Dodgers clubhouse. (AP Photo / Morry Gash)

“If you don’t respect somebody that does that, it’s not gonna go well,” said David Freese, his teammate in St. Louis and again in L.A. “But guys are taking it the right way, because he’s got this life to him that makes you smile.”

In past years, closer Kenley Jansen would take his own golf cart to Camelback Ranch’s back fields for workouts. By this year’s fourth day of camp, Kelly Jr. hopped on for the ride.

“He’s a guy that you get to know well quickly,” Jansen said. “He opens up himself, kind of like a leader.”

In the sometimes stolid confines of a spring-training clubhouse, Kelly Jr. is the unpredictable outlier. He totes in bags of Jack in the Box breakfasts and boxes of donuts. He tears off his jersey to reveal a T-shirt with a cat’s face on it.

“He’s out there a little bit, huh?” Ross Stripling said. “I like it. He seems like he’s gonna be a great dude for the locker room. He hasn’t showed any timidness from the second he was in here.”

The Red Sox adored him. Several players petitioned ownership to re-sign him over the offseason, but the Dodgers offered him an extra year, a plan for how to use him in a hybrid multi-inning role and $25 million guaranteed. Kelly Jr. loved the idea of living in-season at his Rancho Cucamonga home, and he knew he’d have little trouble embracing change because of his life experience.

“It’s not like I just cut ties and will never think about it again, but I keep moving on,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing that has made me successful. Being able to move on and learn is valuable in all aspects of life, and I’ve learned how to apply it to baseball through real-world problems.”

Kelly Jr. and his college sweetheart, Ashley, have a 3-year-old boy, Knox, who, like his father, has displayed an early athletic aptitude. Now 30, Kelly Jr. uses some of the same tactics his father did decades ago: Five catches in a row, and Knox can eat a cookie.

“Me and my son will definitely butt heads,” Kelly Jr. said. “But, with what I’ve learned, I’ll be able to treat it a little differently.”

Over the last decade, Kelly Jr. has forgiven his father for all that he laid on him. He has tried to translate both the good and bad of his father’s actions into parenting lessons. He has come to admire the wherewithal it took to get back from the ledge.

“I think there’s so much appreciation between the two of them that Joe has worked hard to get where he’s at,” Krzysiak said, “and Joe has worked hard to get where he’s at.”

There was never a formal reconciliation. No conversation can erase years. But, in the minutes after Game 5 of the World Series, they understood each other.

Kelly Sr. attended thinking there was no way his son would pitch. He had to be dead tired after throwing in all four games, including 30 pitches to earn the win the night before.

But, late in the game, there he was warming up in the visiting bullpen. And when manager Alex Cora called him in one batter into the eighth inning, Kelly Sr. ran through the worst-case scenarios in his head. On the last day of his September visit east, he had heard boos when his son hit consecutive batters and blew a lead. He had to talk himself out of fighting the jeering and cursing fans.

The fans were quiet this time. One pitch in, Kelly Sr. sensed how relaxed his son was. By the time Joc Pederson struck out for the second out, he was certain it was over. He quietly soaked in the last at-bat, made a mental note to thank Cora for allowing his son redemption and waited for the final inning.

When it was over, the Kelly contingent made their way down to the crowded dirt behind first base at Dodger Stadium. Kelly Sr. was at the end of the line. Everyone else had hugged and congratulated him by the time he saw his son. The two locked eyes, and Kelly Jr. reached out and fell forward into his father’s chest, enveloped in his arms. They looked like a father and son celebrating a Little League victory. And they were. They were making up for lost time. They were acknowledging all the defeats and celebrating every little victory that led them here.

“We did it,” Joe Kelly Jr. told his dad.

“You sure did, son.”

“No,” Kelly Jr. said. “We did it.”