I'm a huge Red Sox fan, I can't wait to watch this kid play...........Yahoo:
Casey Kelly threw his last pitch of the season Sunday night. He is one of the best pitching prospects in baseball, and he is perfectly healthy, so if none of this makes sense, understand that little about Kelly’s young career does.
The Boston Red Sox are undertaking a grand experiment in their handling of Kelly, one that could change how teams guide young players who show exceptional talent as a pitcher and everyday player. Kelly is a shortstop, too, a potentially dynamic one, and given his druthers, he’d play there full-time.
And when Boston chose him with the 30th overall selection in the 2008 draft, Kelly said he would turn down a scholarship to play quarterback at the University of Tennessee and sign with the Red Sox under one condition: He gets to play shortstop, even though the Red Sox – and almost every other team – viewed him as a potential top-of-the-rotation pitcher. So Boston offered a compromise: play shortstop in 2008, then pitch the first half of 2009 before returning to shortstop in the second half.
The novelty appealed to Kelly. If he couldn’t be the next Babe Ruth, two-way phenomenon, he’d settle for a modern-day facsimile. Then he went out and put up a 2.08 earned-run average over 95 innings at two levels of Class A, and thus the reality that the Red Sox are shutting down perhaps the best arm in a system loaded with good ones.
“I mean, I’ve had a lot of success pitching,” Kelly said before the All-Star Futures Game, where he pitched a scoreless sixth inning for the U.S. in a 7-5 loss to the World team. “It’s kind of crazy. I want to play shortstop, but should I?”......................................
