I have a friend here in Austin, and she’s a woman, and this is useful, because society conditions women to be more prepared than men are to babysit their friends’ kids. This friend was my wife’s friend first—they were roommates in grad school—and she’s still better friends with my wife, and this is also useful. It’s nice, when you disagree with your wife, if your wife has a friend who’s predisposed to being sympathetic to your side.
Anyway, this friend is a big deal in our lives. She’s our son’s godmother. She’s our go-to person when we need help with our dog. We’ve gotten to know her family and they’re great as well. It’s a good situation, and it might be getting even better. This friend has started dating a baseball fan.
As a guy who’s a baseball fan, I think it’s good if your wife’s best friend dates a baseball fan. Baseball fans are a repressed bunch these days. Outside of a few places, we don’t get to talk very openly about baseball. Football? Plenty of men want to talk about football. The NBA? For about six weeks a year, plenty of men want to talk about the NBA. But unless you live in New England or it’s October and the hometown team is good, baseball’s not a big talking point these days. My friend is dating a baseball fan, and that means I might have a baseball fan friend, and if I see him at a brewery on a Saturday while I hoist my kid around and try to sneak one more beer than my wife realizes I drank, I might get to ask if he knows whether Nolan McLean will ever get a chance to hit again or if the Mets are making him a full-time pitcher forever.
There is, however, a problem.
Evidently, when this friend’s boyfriend told her he likes baseball, the first thing she said was, “Eww. Baseball’s so boring.” Not a great start. She knew this. She realized this. She tried to recover. “One of my friends really likes baseball, though. He writes a blog about Joe Kelly.”
There’s a lot I love about this story, but the biggest thing is that it turned our little Joe Kelly blog into a peace offering. Hey man, I hate the thing you love. But if it makes you feel any better, my friend’s husband is a lunatic who for the last six years set notifications up on his phone to let him know every time one specific middle reliever entered a game, a process that cost him an estimated 50 hours of sleep annually once that reliever signed with a team on the West Coast.
And this is where the problem came to light. The guy’s an Astros fan. The guy hates Joe Kelly. Which means instead of talking about whether Pat Murphy’s right about redheads or if those greasy pieces of pizza are banned from Yankee Stadium, my first baseball interaction with the dude is going to be a Joe Kelly fight in which I inevitably ask Siri how many World Series Joe Kelly has won (three) and then immediately ask Siri how many World Series the Astros have won (two).
So, because I’m an anxious cat (that’s why they call me Whiskers), I’m preparing. I’m getting ready to talk to my friend’s boyfriend about Joe Kelly.
There are two ways this conversation can go, and it depends on what kind of baseball fan this guy is. In the first scenario, the guy is a baseball fan and I can say, “You remember the Tyler Austin fight?” and he’ll realize I’ve been doing this since the Boston days, giving our Joe Kelly discourse an off-ramp which avoids a Dusty Baker-shaped traffic jam. In the second scenario, the guy is an Astros fan.
Texas is a big place, and it feels even bigger when you live here. Couple that with some Texan exceptionalism, and there’s a certain kind of Texan who does not know about anything that happens east of Beaumont or north of Wichita Falls. I went to College Station last fall for a football game and spent a couple hours next to a friendly family with Aggies season tickets. They love Texas A&M. They go to every game. They plan their calendars around Texas A&M football. They asked where in the country Notre Dame is. These people weren’t college football fans. They were Texas A&M fans. There’s nothing right or wrong about that, but it’s unusual. I don’t think it happens in Kentucky.
A similar phenomenon plays out with the Astros.
Part of this might be the time window in which the Astros have been competitive. The Astros sucked for a while, and then they suddenly became very good, and they’ve stayed very good now for a whole decade. If you got into the Astros at the beginning of that decade, you got into baseball at a weird point in its arc. The Cubs were good. The Pirates were good. The Red Sox were an established power. The Yankees were good but no longer scary. The Cardinals were about to become a small-market team. The Dodgers were too good to like but not good enough to be their own dynasty. It’s been a topsy-turvy time for the sport, and with it already hard to follow baseball as a whole, it makes sense that a newfound Astros fan would just follow the Astros.
With most teams, this wouldn’t be an issue. I’d love to talk to someone who only follows the Diamondbacks. What a cultural experience! But with a lot of Astros fans, there’s an assumption in their heads that the baseball world revolves around them. It’s not the wildest thing to think—they’ve been good every year for the last decade and they were the most hated team in the sport for a while there—but it’s not how it works. Baseball has arteries, and they’re the Dodgers and Yankees and Red Sox and Cubs. Baseball has veins, and they’re the Phillies and Cardinals and Giants and Braves. Baseball has these beautiful old ballclubs, and none of them are the Astros. It’s not that the Astros are a problem, but at their best, they’re a distraction from the lifeblood of the sport. If they pass through, playing a good stretch like the Josh Beckett Marlins, they’re a fun little diversion. If they stick around, they’re a tumor.
Certain Astros fans don’t get this. First encounter baseball in 2015 and this doesn’t make sense. What does Shibe Park have to do with who deserves attention in this game and who does not? Why doesn’t the league revolve around the best teams? It’s a fair question. But coupled with that Texan oblivion and run through a washboard when they had to defend the sign-stealing (a brain-breaking task if there ever was one, seeing as about 90% of active players were openly pissed at Houston), it became a kind of defiance. Facing the reality that baseball doesn’t revolve around them, certain Astros fans decided that it should, and they became really salty when people told them that it didn’t.
Enter this Joe Kelly blog.
Not to gatekeep Joe Kelly (really; hop on board now; it is never too late to become a Joe Kelly fan), but The Barking Crow and its predecessor have been on the guy since the Tyler Austin fight. Personally, I’ve been following Joe Kelly since before the Jim Buchanan days. That’s not really a brag. There are even earlier Joe Kelly days, earlier stories, a bizarre Nelly interview in St. Louis and some salsa and the national anthem standoff with Scott Van Slyke. But when you tell an Astros fan that you write a Joe Kelly blog, they think it started with the pouty face. They think you’re blogging about them. And that’s not what’s happening at this particular Joe Kelly blog.
We are not Joe Kelly fans because of the pouty face. We are Joe Kelly fans because of everything that’s happened before and since. We’re fans because of the canon he gave us even before he won a scrap with a guy a lot bigger than he was. We’re fans because of the glee that moment brought. We’re fans because later that summer, Joe Kelly lost the strike zone, but then that fall, Joe Kelly nearly won World Series MVP (torching the Astros in the ALCS along the way). We were there for bobblehead night in Los Angeles the next summer, and we watched in horror when his legs didn’t hold up in that second relief inning in Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS. (Remember the time he hurt himself cooking gumbo?) We were there for the book deal, and for the championships, and for that stint with the 2022 and 2023 White Sox, a pair of teams that might have secretly been an anthropological study now that I sit down and think about it. The pouty face happened in the middle there, and it’s a big part of the story, but we didn’t become Joe Kelly fans because he struck out Carlos Correa and made a funny face. We became Joe Kelly fans because Joe Kelly is one of a kind, and that kind is the exact blend of chaotic and effective and funny that modern baseball bullpens need. We didn’t become Joe Kelly fans because of the face. We became Joe Kelly fans because we could have known the face was coming.
Astros fans can hate Joe Kelly. I get it. The hyenas in the Lion King weren’t huge fans of Simba. But Joe Kelly’s career is about a whole lot more than the Houston Astros. Thank goodness for that.
One more Astros/Joe Kelly story, before we all move on with our day:
There’s a guy who lives down the street from me, and I walk my dog and he walks his dog and we see each other and we don’t really say hi. He gives me a pretty dirty look, to be honest. For a while, I thought this was because the first time I saw him, my dog tried to say hi to his dog and his dog was too old to say hi, and while I held my dog back plenty far, he didn’t like my jumping dog. I also sometimes thought the guy was just weird. A weird old man in fine health who walks his dog slowly and gives dirty looks. You know the type.
It’s possible one of these two explanations is true. I don’t know for sure that they aren’t. But I do have a new guess.
The other day, I walked past this man’s house, and I looked up and I saw a big new Astros wreath on his wall. So I think it’s possible that what’s been happening is this:
I have been wearing a lot of Joe Kelly shirts around my neighborhood.
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