Rays reliever Kevin Kelly has enjoyed a strong bounce-back season in 2026.
After injuries knocked him off track in 2025, Rays reliever Kevin Kelly has returned to being the reliable ground-ball machine the Rays trusted in leverage situations. What changed? A cursory look at his profile and you might note that he has added a new pitch, a changeup that gets the second most use in his arsenal this season, but how different is he really from the pitcher he was in 2023 and 2024?
Kelly adding a change aligns with the team-wide pitching developments we saw in Spring Training and now deep into the regular season. Kelly’s off-speed usage has gone from 0% last year to 36% against lefties and 20% against righties. It’s primarily used to expand the zone as he lands it in-zone only about a third of the time; however, its location consistency is roughly average for the pitch type, suggesting he’s already got a good feel for this relatively new weapon.
The two traits that help an off-speed pitch perform well are its velocity and vertical separation off a fastball. Kelly has below-average velocity separation between his fastball and off-speed pitch, and he has even worse vertical separation between them. How is he able to maintain such strong results if the pitch doesn’t have optimal differences from his fastball? By playing to his strengths.
Kelly doesn’t miss bats; it’s not his game. His game is inducing ground balls and suboptimal contact, as evidenced by his strong track record of throwing strikes and pitching at the bottom of the zone that light up his statcast page with plenty of red. His new offspeed pitch simply allows him to miss the barrel of the bat just a bit more than last year by generating chases and getting hitters out in-front just enough on those chases. His contact rates are roughly in-line with his career norms.
The pitch could probably generate more whiffs with greater velocity separation, and pairing an elevated fastball with this off-speed pitch below the zone could create a more traditional tunnel. But that’s not really Kelly’s game. Both pitches live at the bottom of the zone, so he’s leaning into his strengths rather than forcing the pitch into a mold it doesn’t fit.
Kelly’s biggest skill however might be his unique look that he has always had. It’s a true sidearm delivery with plus-plus extension from a low release height. Hitters simply aren’t used to seeing that, and it’s difficult to train against even with a Trajekt.
Pitch-replication systems can give hitters reps against unusual pitch shapes, but they can’t fully eliminate the challenge of facing a delivery as unusual as Kelly’s. Just 1.5% of all pitches thrown in the last three seasons combined have come from players in a similar arm angle bucket to Kelly between -5 and 10 degrees.
So yes, Kelly’s off-speed pitch has helped him put together a terrific bounce-back season, but more of his performance is driven by his old tricks than his new one. His feel for pounding the bottom of the zone, coupled with his unique release traits, has helped Kelly carve out a critical relief role. The new off-speed pitch simply adds another dimension to an already successful pitcher.