The Dodgers have avoided arbitration with closer Kenley Jansen, with the two sides agreeing to a $4.3MM salary for the coming season, reports Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com (via Twitter). Jansen, 26, is a client of Wasserman Media Group.
Jansen's settlement amount comes in just above the mid-point between the hurler's $5.05MM filing figure and the team's $3.5MM counter. He falls a full half-million dollars shy of the projection of MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz. Though Jansen has been among the most dominant relievers in the game — last year, in 76 2/3 innings, he maintained a 1.88 ERA with 13.0 K/9 against just 2.1 BB/9 — he has not racked up quite the save tallies (28 last year and 25 in 2012) of several other big-name closers who earned more in their first run through arbitration.
Jansen is such an underrated player. Good bargain.
underrated?No, dude gets mad hype, all earned, but no not underrated.
that cutter tho…one of my favorite dodgers. should’ve been the closer the whole year last year.
Certainly a Marianoesk cutter
Dodgers should consider locking up Jansen for a longer term. They only have him until the end of 2016. Hanley is a bigger priority tho.
Dodgers are like the Yankees of old, no need to lock up players early if you can pay FA prices for the ones you want.
History shows that locking up closers long term is NOT a good idea. For every Mariano there’s dozens of Thigpen’s or Gagne’s that burnout quickly. I’d buy maybe a year or two of his free agent years at most and move on. Just my opinion.
Apparently ‘lolsaves’ was considered a spam response so I will express the opinion in a larger statement that I hope anybody around here is already familiar with.
The arbitration system should be improved to not use terrible statistics like the save, as it generally has a lot more relation to the scenario in which a reliever appears than performance and has low predictive value. While there is a strong correlation between elite relievers and the save, that is far more a product of managers stubbornly dictating bullpen use by a statistic, and you could make a great case the practice is counterproductive.
For example, in the most important game of the year, Don Mattingly saved Jansen to get him a save opportunity in the extra-innings, series-defining NLCS game 1, bringing his top reliever only due to the other reliever letting hitters on, and Jansen immediately had to pitch the runners on scenario he had rarely encountered during the season.
Certainly a fair opinion. I do think that advanced statistics will continue to infuse the arb process, much like the rest of the aspects of the game, even without legislating the change directly.
As for usage, clearly the completely dogmatic save-situation-only mentality has issues, especially in the postseason. But I am not convinced that it can’t make sense — at least sometimes — to maintain clear bullpen roles throughout the regular season. It is hard to quantify, of course, but there are lots of reasons (mental approach, team morale, avoidance of friction/confusion, etc) that a manager could choose to define roles in something like the “save situation” mold on an everyday basis (i.e., excluding particularly high-leverage situations).
Perhaps a good way between philosophies may be a ‘usually’ closer position in which the manager preferably uses discretion and roles but occasionally lets a reliever experience other roles to prevent stratification while, if a closer particularly excels, using them in 2 run situations while letting others do the comparatively low leverage 3 run situation, or the 8th inning during especially close games.