ARLINGTON, Texas — You know the story is going to be a good one when the teller of the tale begins, “It’s a real story. It’s true.”
The spinner of the yarn was Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo. The subject was Arizona pitcher Merrill Kelly, who had just put on such an exquisite exhibition of pinpoint pitching Saturday night that there are only six other games like it in the history of the World Series. Kelly was that good—historically good—as the D-Backs emphatically seized Game 2, 9–1, to square the series.
On nights like this, when Kelly placed his palette of pitches on the edges of the strike zone with the exactness of a pointillist, to understand who Kelly is means going back to that true story, when his own manager called him “the worst starting pitcher in baseball.”
