Kenley Jansen was once a minor league catcher who couldn't hit. Now he's one of the most distinguished closers in MLB history. Six years ago, he "felt miserable" winning the World Series with the Dodgers and wondered if he was done. Now he's shutting down games for the Tigers and approaching 500 saves. There's still some gas in his 38-year-old arm.
"I think I felt it on the second strike to (Starling) Marte," catcher Dillon Dingler said with a smile. "It was down a little bit, and pretty heavy."
With a chance to pass Lee Smith for third all time in saves on Tuesday night, a runner on third and the Tigers protecting a 2-1 lead, Jansen cranked it up to 97 mph for the final batter of the game. He threw five straight cutters -- his "bread and butter pitch" -- to Marte, an old foe from the National League, before getting him to fly out softly to center on a slider to nail down the Tigers' fourth straight win.
A.J. Hinch joked afterward that he's going to tell Jansen every save is a potential record-breaker from here on out. Jansen smiled and said the spike in velocity was one of those random acts of baseball, like the cutter he discovered by mistake.
"I don't know, man. My whole life, some days I come throwing 96, 97, all the way to 99, and then the next day it’s 91 to 93, so that’s the story of my life. When my arm is in the higher slot and the ball has more horizontal (movement), the velocity is going to be a little down. I think it was less cut today and the velo was up, so that’s the story of my life and I’m not going to try to see what’s wrong," Jansen said with a laugh. "Just keep riding the horse, man, and get to the finish line."
He's talking about the finish line for the Tigers, which they hope is sometime in late October. Jansen doesn't think past his next pitch, but knows this team has a chance to leave its mark. His only regret is that he didn't arrive in Detroit a year or two sooner. He's no longer fretting his own finish line, whenever it might come.
Jansen is at peace in year 17 of his big-league career, which could have ended before it started. He was signed out of Curacao by the Dodgers as a 17-year-old catcher and made it as high as Triple-A behind the dish. But he never had a chance to crack the majors due to his limitations at the plate. A year after the Dodgers convinced him to covert to pitching -- the same year that he was the starting catcher for Team Netherlands in the 2009 World Baseball Classic -- Jansen was mowing down hitters in the bigs.
Like Mariano Rivera, Jansen calls his cutter a "God-given pitch." He throws it like a four-seam fastball, but it started cutting and never stopped. It has tormented big-league hitters for the better part of two decades, a grenade released high above his 6'5 frame. Jansen struck out 40 percent of the batters he faced over the first eight years of his career.
But baseball is hard. Jansen started showing cracks in 2018 and saw his ERA spike to 3.71 in 2019, a harsh number for a closer of his caliber. A three-year struggle stretched into 2020 and was compounded by a few poor performances in the playoffs that year, including a blown save in the World Series. Jansen referenced after the game Tuesday night that in the face of prolonged adversity, "at some point you think that you're done." Asked later if he ever had that reckoning himself, he said, "2020 in the World Series -- I felt miserable."
"And maybe that’s when people doubted me. We won a championship that year and it’s the happiest thing in the world, but me personally, I wasn’t in the right spot mentally," Jansen said. "I got with a (therapist) to work on my mental health, and kept grinding."
Staying in physical shape was never an issue for Jansen. The way he explains it, he gained weight mentally, burdened by each poor outing and all the data he hoped would help him turn things around. One fed the other until it became too much to bear: "So much information, so many paths that you went down, the book is this big," said Jansen, lifting his hands a few feet apart. "Sometimes you just gotta get your bucket and erase those papers to get light again."
"You gain a couple of pounds up here," he said, pointing to his brain, "and you gotta have some professional help to lose a couple pounds and be in the best shape you can be. And I'm telling you, man, this is fun. I love this version of myself more than the young, insecure Kenley Jansen, because you’ve been through a lot and now it’s just the beauty of this game."
This version of Kenley Jansen doesn't get hung up on a bad game. He accepts that he's going to fail now and then, like when he allowed a go-ahead three-run homer and took the loss in his second outing with the Tigers. He accepts that "we're human." This version of Kenley Jansen is lighter than ever, and "having a blast out there playing baseball."
"Nothing rattles me no more," he said. "I feel like that’s a key point of my life, not just my career, but my life in general. You see life different, you’ll be a better man, a better husband, a better father, everything, man, because you don’t let the negative control the highlights of the success that you’ve had for so long. This is -- what? -- my 17th season. You have so much more beautiful highlights than just one negative game."
It feels like Jansen and the Tigers are meant to be here, running this race together. Jansen nearly signed with Detroit ahead of the 2025 season wanting to chase a championship, but chose the Angels instead to be close to his family after the passing of his mother. The Tigers tried to trade for him at the deadline last season, and Jansen went so far as to say this spring that he felt "guilty" watching them last October when they fell short in Game 5 of the ALDS for the second year in a row.
"Watching the last couple years, I should've signed and played the 2025 season with them," Jansen said.
Jansen was terrific last season, the best he's been in years, outside of one awful outing against the Tigers in early May. He allowed three homers and six runs in the ninth inning of a tie game that turned into a 9-1 loss for the Angels, and immediately changed his walk-out song to 'In The Stone' by Earth, Wind & Fire, his favorite band (followed by New Edition). He had a 1.97 ERA the rest of the way, and hasn't changed it since.
"'In The Stone' is electric, man," he said. "I play it on the bass, too, and it gets me going. It gives me goosebumps. That’s why I have it."
When he was a 20-year-old catcher playing in Midland, Mich. with the Great Lakes Loons, the Dodgers' High-A affiliate, Jansen visited Detroit. He stopped by Tiger Stadium shortly before it was razed to the ground and envisioned himself playing there, in the big leagues. He gazed at the old stadium from across the street and recalled watching Cecil Fielder hit homers on TV.
"I wanted my dream to be there one day," he said.
Jansen would realize a different dream as a pitcher in Los Angeles, but he still has a chance to leave his mark in Detroit. He made the playoffs in each of the first 10 years of his career but hasn't been back since 2022, which is what lured him to the Tigers. He's likely headed to the Hall of Fame, 21 saves away from joining Rivera and Hoffman in the 500 club, but Jansen wants to go out a winner.
He could have quit a long time ago as a catcher. Later, he could have listened to the critics who said he was finished as pitcher, "but I always have that fight in me," Jansen said. When he stood up and gave a speech in the Tigers' clubhouse Tuesday night, the ball from save No. 479 in his hand, he told his teammates to keep going. He encouraged them to keep believing in themselves, as individuals and as a team, no matter what.
"When you do that, man, it don’t matter what people think about you, that you might not have it no more. It shows you the consistency (it takes), and here I am today, still doing it on a really good level," said Jansen. "I’m proud of myself, proud of my teammates today that we grinded this game out. And that’s what it’s going to show us: we just gotta battle through adversity. Don’t give up, and we didn’t today."
We'll see what's written in the stars for Jansen and the Tigers. So far, he likes what's written in stone.
