Kenley Jansen Returns to Los Angeles — Well, Sort Of

Kenley Jansen his headed back to Los Angeles, if only in name, on a one-year, $10 million contract with the Angels.

The 37-year-old four-time All-Star currently sits fourth all-time on the career saves list and leads all active pitchers in the category. Jansen famously did most of that damage in Dodger blue, and now at the twilight of his career, he returns to his old stomping grounds… ish. Like 45 minutes down the freeway from his old stomping grounds. Close enough.

There are three levels on which to consider this signing. Let’s dispense with the first right off the bat: Last week, the Angels signed Tim Anderson and Yoán Moncada to free agent contracts. This offseason, they had already added J.D. Davis, Travis d’Arnaud, Kyle Hendricks, Scott Kingery, Carter Kieboom, and Kevin Newman. With Mike Trout, Anthony Rendon, Mickey Moniak, and Jo Adell already in the fold, the Angels seem to be operating under the assumption that it’s still 2019. (If wishing made it so…)

Easy jokes notwithstanding, it’s fair to wonder what Jansen stands to gain by joining the Angels. His previous two stops — a one-year contract with the Braves in 2022 and a two-year pact with the Red Sox for 2023 and 2024 — placed him with teams that had a realistic path to title contention, and on significantly better money.

Not that $10 million is anything to sneeze at. But now, Jansen’s old enough that it wouldn’t be weird if he retired. Especially not with all those accolades, plus a World Series ring and more than $150 million in career earnings, already in hand. If he wants to continue for love of the game, bully for him. I just worry whether that sentiment will hold in the final third of the season, on a team that seems to make those around it love baseball less and less.

The most tangible benefit to Jansen is that the longer he pitches, the more chances he has to bolster his Hall of Fame case. As with most things Cooperstown-related, I defer to the wisdom of Jay Jaffe, who wrote about Jansen’s Hall of Fame chances in July, ending his capsule as follows: “[Jansen will] have a real shot at Cooperstown if the electorate feels generous towards relievers, but that’s no given.”

I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. Billy Wagner’s recent election might be a positive marker for other modern closers, but my sense is that it speaks more to the voters’ realizing how catastrophically Wagner had been underrated, rather than a reassessment of standards.

Jansen has not only been excellent, he’s been reliable, which is not easy to do. He’s posted at least 50 appearances and 25 saves in every full season of his career — 13 of them in a row, and counting — and he has never turned in an ERA- worse than 87. That’s truly astonishing consistency for a relief pitcher, but it takes more than that to get in.

Francisco Rodríguez is no. 6 on the all-time saves list, just 10 saves behind Jansen; he’s hovered around 10% of the vote all three years he’s been on the ballot. Which is more than you can say for John Franco, Joe Nathan, Jonathan Papelbon, and Troy Percival, all of whom fell off after their first year of eligibility.

The argument for Jansen is that every pitcher ahead of him on the career saves list — Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and Lee Smith — is in. But all three of those pitchers retired as the all-time saves leader, which carries more cachet than merely getting to 450 or 475.

I don’t know if there’s a magic save total for Hall of Fame enshrinement; Jansen’s at 447, so if that number is 500, he’ll almost certainly have to pitch into 2026 or even 2027 if he wants to hit it. Which is also the downside that Craig Kimbrel — currently second among active pitchers in saves, with 440 — is experiencing.

Early in his career, Kimbrel posted Wagnerian per-inning numbers that would’ve been impossible for Hall of Fame voters to ignore. But with his postseason bona fides already a point of contention, Kimbrel has spent the past two or three seasons looking shakier than ever under the brightest lights. He arguably single-handedly pitched the Phillies out of a pennant in 2023, pitched himself off the playoff-bound Orioles roster in 2024, and might be pitching himself out of Cooperstown as we speak.

Jansen is such a different pitcher to Kimbrel that I wouldn’t worry about that kind of utter meltdown. Surely the Angels are convinced one is unlikely. Less because they care about Jansen’s Hall of Fame chances as such, but because they’re interested in winning enough games that people stop making jokes like the one I led off the article with. Getting 60 innings and 30-odd relatively low-stress saves from Jansen would go a long way toward achieving that end.

To be clear, Jansen is no longer the pitcher he was when he was building that Hall of Fame case. Since before the pandemic, he’s been posting ERAs in the low-to-mid 3.00s, rather than the high 1.00s and low 2.00s. Starting in the late 2010s, he went away from the all-cutter, all-the-time strategy that brought him great success in his youth, and started mixing in a sinker and slider with greater frequency.

I was a huge fan of Jansen’s original slider, a high-70s-to-low-80s breaker with soft vertical action. Not because I had strong opinions on its efficacy, but because I just thought it was a really aesthetically pleasing pitch.

Jansen’s slider now is a few miles an hour harder, with two-plane movement. It’s not quite as nice to look at, but opponents went 0-for-15 against it in 2024, so don’t worry about what I think.

What’s really interesting is that Jansen’s gone back to throwing his cutter about 85% of the time. His cutter usage rate in 2024 was the highest it had been since 2017. And after throwing a harder, straighter cutter his first year in Boston, Jansen was back to living around 92 mph with six inches of glove-side movement, which is more or less what he was throwing during his salad days.

That coincides with a readjustment in Jansen’s arm angle. He dropped down to a three-quarters arm slot in 2023…

… but in 2024, he returned to the arm angle — 62 degrees — he used in 2020.

The pitch and usage are pretty similar, but evidently hitters are better now than they were eight years ago, because the results aren’t quite as good.

The cutter is still good; it’s just no longer the bat-missing weapon it was a decade ago, when Jansen could just pound the zone in the low 90s all the live long day and still not give up any hard contact.

Fortunately, Jansen had quite a bit of breathing room at his peak. He’s still a decent high-leverage reliever, and one year and $10 million for him is perfectly acceptable, considering the going rate for Geriatric Millennial closers this winter: one year, $13 million for Kirby Yates; two years, $22 million for Blake Treinen; one year, $10.75 million for Aroldis Chapman; and one year, $10 million for Andrew Kittredge.

So, yeah, I’m relatively optimistic about Jansen’s Henry Aaron-with-the-Brewers era. Keep throwing the cutter, rack up another 30 saves, and we’ll be back here a year from now.

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