New York Yankees fans probably have some nasty things they’d like to say to Joe Kelly.
But, as it turns out, there’s another fanbase that takes the cake for spewing the nastiest vitriol at the Boston Red Sox reliever.
Kelly, of course, was at the center of last month’s brawl between the Sox and the Yankees. Should the hard-throwing right-hander enter a game in Boston’s upcoming series in the Bronx, he’ll probably be subject to some loud (like, really loud) boos.
Still, the jeers from the Yankee faithful likely won’t hold a candle to what Kelly endured a few years ago, when he was with the St. Louis Cardinals.
“Yes, I have been booed,” Kelly, when asked if he’s been booed by a crowd other than his own, recently told WEEI’s Rob Bradford. “Dodger Stadium after I broke Hanley Ramirez’s ribs (during the 2013 National League Championship Series). Every time I would go there they would have some guy saying they were going to stab me.
“They wanted to legit kill me. On the internet. There. People telling me when they see me in the streets of LA.”
Yikes.
So, what’s Kelly expecting for this week’s Yankees series, which gets underway Tuesday night?
“It will probably be loud and I like loud,” Kelly told Bradford. “Hopefully it gets loud. I like a lot of noises. It gets my blood going.
“It makes me laugh. It’s so much fun. I love it. We’ll see.”
Loud probably will be an understatement.
But will the two teams pick up where they left off in early April, when bad blood resulted in a benches-clearing fiasco? Yankees first baseman Tyler Austin, for one, believes everything will be hunky-dory.
Yeah, good luck with that.
