LOS ANGELES — Cubs catcher Carson Kelly still has photos of the X-rays on his phone. They show his ulna snapped through, a millimeter shy of being considered displaced and requiring surgery, the result of a spring-training fastball striking the exact wrong spot on his right forearm in 2023.
Kelly can explain how fractures heal, as he feels along his forearm for the bump in the bone that he suspects is still there.
“It’s forming back together, but then you’ve got to get it to be pliable,” he said in a conversation with the Sun-Times this week. “So it’s a long process.”
Kelly’s 2023 season would become a turning point in his career. It brought him to -Detroit, where he’d “reinvent” himself, first as a catcher, then as a hitter. And his success would lay the groundwork for his free agency this past winter, when he signed a two-year deal with the Cubs worth $11.5 million guaranteed.
He has teamed up with Miguel Amaya to provide the kind of offensive production the Cubs had been missing from the catching position since Willson Contreras left in free agency.
“Carson, he can really throw, and he’s a really good defender; all the reports from the teams he’s been on were really positive, and we were excited to add him this winter,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said last week. “And I do think that our catching group is a stronger group than it was, and it needed to be upgraded.”
To get here, Kelly began that defining 2023 season in a sling.
“I don’t want to make excuses about it, right?” he said. “You lose everything you worked on in the offseason.”
Arm strength, gone. Hitting progression, gone.
It wasn’t an excuse; it was just reality.
Kelly returned from the injury in less than three months. He went hitless in his first four games and had only improved to .226 by mid-August, albeit trending up with a four-game hitting streak. That’s when the Diamondbacks released him.
“Baseball is still going on, and you’re at home,” Kelly said. “You’re like, ‘This is weird.’ So getting to a place where you’re vulnerable, you’re like, ‘All right, I need to do something different.’ ”
The Tigers, who signed Kelly four days after his release, had ideas on what that something different could be. His first day there, Kelly said, they had a power-point presentation for him.
“I bought in,” Kelly said. “I was at a point where I needed to kind of reinvent myself a little bit and redo some things, so why not?”
He changed his crouch behind the plate, switching to a one-knee-down stance. And while defense took up most of Kelly’s focus in the last 1½ months of the season, once Detroit picked up his $3.5 million option for 2024, the offseason allowed him to continue that work and overhaul his swing.
He concentrated on bat speed and a more direct path to the ball, believing that would address his issues with low pitches and breaking balls.
“It was basically, try a lot of different things,” Kelly said. “We’re going to lower my hands; we’re going to put my hands higher. We’re going to change the bat angle of where we start.”
He went to Marucci for a bat fitting. And to give himself time for the trial process, he started his offseason program early, hitting again by late October.
Kelly landed on an athletic stance with his hands a little lower. And with a quicker, more efficient bat path, Kelly had more time to recognize pitches and make swing decisions.
His OPS went from .565 in 2023 to .687 in 2024, his season split between the Tigers and Rangers. And his chase rate on breaking balls dropped from about 29% to 21%, according to Statcast.
“It takes a lot of bravery to do that when you’re not a rookie and you’re in the middle of your career, right?” said left-hander Matthew Boyd, who has known Kelly since the catcher’s visit to Oregon State, Boyd’s alma mater, before Kelly was ultimately drafted out of high school. “So it speaks to that courage and that commitment of him just going out and saying, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ And it’s not surprising because he’s a pro on every level.”
Kelly has only built on that success to get off to a hot start with the Cubs. Entering Friday, he had a .500 on-base percentage and was leading the team with a 1.262 OPS. And who could forget him hitting for the cycle on the road against the Athletics?
“Anytime you come into a new organization, you want to have a good first impression,” Kelly said. “I’m thankful for the guys here, the teammates, the clubhouse — there’s a lot of support, and it’s a special group. And it motivates you to continue to get better and want to take care of those little things to stay consistent throughout the whole year.”