LOS ANGELES — Kenley Jansen had never endured a game quite like this one. The Angels’ 37-year-old closer had pitched more than 900 regular-season and playoff games in the majors without allowing three homers in a game until May 2.
Still, when Jansen spoke to reporters just 15 minutes after that debacle, he was already well into the process of flushing it from his mind. He shrugged and offered a simple explanation.
“Sometimes, you stink,” he said.
He went home, talked it over with his wife and went to sleep. He got up early the next morning and played with his kids in the yard.
That kind of routine has helped Jansen survive a job that grinds down many other pitchers in a few years.
“To me, being a closer is 90% mental,” Jansen said this week. “How are you going to show you can bounce back? You shut the door, shut the door, shut the door. When you have one hiccup, people want to see how you’re going to bounce back.”
Jansen has 454 career saves, which is the fourth-most in the history of baseball. That also means he’s been doing it long enough to have 60 blown saves and 38 losses.
Much of that was accumulated during 12 seasons with the Dodgers. Over the last few years, the failures often overshadowed the success, leading to annual questions about whether his run as an elite closer had come to an end.
Yet, Jansen will still be a major league closer when he returns to Dodger Stadium on Friday with the Angels. He said his staying power is because of what he learned from those failures.
In fact, it was his blown save in Game 4 of the 2020 World Series that led Jansen to seek professional help with the mental part of his job. He’s now five years into his work with the same therapist.
“That could have broken me,” Jansen said of the 2020 World Series. “But I made the decision that I won’t let it break me.”
Jansen came back in 2021 and posted another typical season: 38 saves and a 2.22 ERA. The Dodgers allowed him to leave as a free agent after the season, and he went to the Atlanta Braves. In Atlanta, Jansen tallied 41 saves with a 3.38 ERA and then 29 saves with a 3.63 ERA.
Last year with the Boston Red Sox, Jansen recorded another 27 saves with a 3.29 ERA.
He’s had 12 seasons with at least 25 saves and an ERA under 4.00, which trails only Hall of Famers Mariano Rivera (16), Trevor Hoffmann (14) and Lee Smith (13). Among active pitchers, no one else has more than eight such seasons. Only two other pitchers – Aroldis Chapman (8) and Craig Kimbrel (8) – have more than five.
Jansen believes that closers generally don’t stick around in the job because they can’t handle the mental toll.
He knows because that used to be him.
“I like this new me more than the young, insecure Kenley, with really good stuff, punching tickets left and right,” he said. “Compared to now, I feel I’m more mature and know how to deal with it. I wish I could have had this in my younger days, but sometimes things have to happen for you to develop and become more mature.”
Jansen now counts working on his mind as something just important as his conditioning or his nutrition.
“It’s just like eating,” Jansen said. “You get big. Then you have to exercise and eat healthy to lose weight. You gotta do the same thing with your brain. … Sometimes you’ve got to exercise your brain, to flush it and stay lean. That’s what I do.”
Jansen has already had a couple of opportunities this season with the Angels.
All but two of his outings have been scoreless, including successful conversions of all seven save opportunities. However, he’s lost two of the tie games that he’s entered. One was the six-run, three-homer fiasco against the Detroit Tigers on May 2. On Tuesday night in San Diego, Jansen gave up a walk-off homer to Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr.
When Angels manager Ron Washington was asked after that game if he was concerned about Jansen, he answered quickly: “I’m not concerned about Kenley. Just didn’t get it done. He’s been doing this a long time, and I don’t think anything that goes on out there affects him.”
Hours before Jansen allowed that homer to Tatis, he sat in the tunnel leading to the Angels’ dugout, describing how things like meditation and therapy helped him remain in this role for so long.
He also smiled at the mention of this weekend’s return to Dodger Stadium.
“I love the Dodgers,” Jansen said. “I’m happy for them. I’m happy that, even though I wasn’t there last year, if I want to see anyone win the World Series, I want to see them win the World Series, because I know what the Dodgers meant to me in my career. I have nothing but respect for them.”
That said, Jansen also hasn’t forgotten the Dodgers fans who gave up on him.
“Everyone who thought that I was done was a motivation for me,” Jansen said. “So I have to thank all of them for making me who I am today. Oh, he’s done. He’s washed. At the end of the day, I’m still who I am. And I appreciate them, and I love those doubters. So I’m going to continue to work hard, and I think I have few more years left in the tank, and I want to accomplish great things.”
It won’t be easy with the Angels, who don’t provide save opportunities nearly as often as the Dodgers did. (The three-homer game followed a stretch in which he didn’t pitch for a week, although Jansen declined to use that as an excuse.)
Jansen said he has faith that the Angels, who haven’t had a winning season since 2015, can win. A part of that, he said, is him sharing what he’s learned about bouncing back from failure.
“I’m at the point in my life that I’m going to bring my wisdom to this team and hopefully we can turn things around and make this organization good again,” Jansen said. “I think we’ve got a great team. We had a rough three weeks. You just have to look at how we played in the first two weeks of the season and bounce back. I think we’ll be fine.”
UP NEXT
Angels (RHP Jack Kochanowicz, 2-5, 5.23 ERA) at Dodgers (RHP Dustin May, 1-3, 4.08 ERA), Friday, 7:10 p.m., FDSN West, 830 AM