Joe Kelly: 2018 Red Sox would have ‘swept through’ playoffs if they cheated

The investigation into cheating allegations levied against the 2018 Boston Red Sox has been met with scorn by most of the team’s players.

Former Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly slammed the investigation as a “debacle” in a recent appearance on WEEI, saying that the 2018 team wouldn’t have lost a single playoff game if they were cheating.

“If there is cheating involved with how good our team was we should have won every single out,” Kelly said, via Rob Bradford of WEEI. “We should have not even lost an inning if there was some good cheating involved, which would have been a lot more fun because we would have won in four. We would have swept through the playoffs and made it really, really fast and been able to go to Hawaii or go to Mexico and go on vacation a lot sooner than we did.”

The current coronavirus pandemic has delayed the release of the report, but early hints indicate that Boston will be found to have violated some sort of rule. Kelly’s conclusion is overly simplistic, but it’s easy to understand that he doesn’t want that team’s accomplishments to be marred by suspicion of cheating.