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Kelley quietly dominating in relief for Nats
- Updated: May 24, 2016
Over the past calendar year, who has been the best reliever in baseball? For the sake of entertainment, let’s pretend you didn’t already read the title to this article. Your first thoughts probably go to Wade Davis or Aroldis Chapman, or maybe Craig Kimbrel or Dellin Betances, or maybe Andrew Miller or Kenley Jansen.
Valid choices, each and every one, and yet none are the right answer. Over the past 365 days, baseball’s most effective run-prevention reliever has been an oft-injured righty who was traded for Abraham Almonte in 2013 and Johnny Barbato in ’14. Welcome to the spotlight, Shawn Kelley.
Past calendar year, lowest ERA by a reliever 1. Kelley — 0.81 2. Hector Rondon — 0.96 3. Davis — 1.27 4. Arodys Vizcaino — 1.55 5. Zach Britton — 1.60
Whether or not you really value ERA as the best tool to evaluate a reliever — there’s certainly plenty of reasons not to, and no one is really arguing that the Yankees, for example, would rather have Kelley back than Chapman, Miller or Betances — the greater point of the unheralded Kelley being secretly dominating remains. In 19 appearances this year for Washington, he remains unscored upon, with a perfect 0.00 ERA.
But how “secret” his success really is depends on your perspective. Through the end of the 2015 season, Kelley had two Tommy John surgeries (2003, 10), been with three teams (Mariners, Yankees and Padres), and recorded four saves (all in ’14 with the Yankees, subbing for an injured David Robertson), along with a reputation for fragility — he missed time in 2014 with a back injury and in ’15 with a calf injury and forearm soreness.
Yet as Kelley worked around those setbacks, he piled up the strikeouts, 63 in 51 1/3 innings in his lone season with San Diego. Last winter, before he signed a three-year deal with the Nationals, we looked at value free agents and compared Kelley’s previous three seasons favorably with that of Cardinals closer Trevor Rosenthal — they shared nearly identical stats in strikeout percentage (30.4 percent), walk rate (approximately 9 percent) …
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