Jansen is staying in the moment
FORT MYERS, Fla. — Kenley Jansen is still here.
With his big right arm and big 2024 salary, everyone, including Jansen, knows the
Red Sox closer could be traded at any moment. Yet like a symbolic last domino he stands, ready to topple in management’s ongoing cost-cutting teardown of a once-contending team.
He’s one of the last remaining links to a Red Sox time gone by, when big-time free agents were courted and championship dreams were entertained.
Signed amid promises of lucrative spending and decisions based on winning championships, he is hanging on while the Sox operate in precisely the opposite way.
Yet for now, he is still here. In fact, in the morning hours before a workout Wednesday at JetBlue Park, Jansen is impossible to miss. Shooting a mini-basketball in a locker room that is far from spacious, he nearly grazes the ceiling with the long, muscled arms on his 6-foot-5inch, 260-pound frame. He finishes with a flourish, swishing his last shot over the outstretched arms of Tanner
Houck, and he is laughing as he returns to his seat.
One of the oldest (36, second to Chris Martin’s 37) and most veteran players by service (13plus years) on the roster, Jansen is well-liked among teammates, friendly and outgoing, as hardworking as he is talented.
Yet around these rebuilding Red Sox, his ongoing presence remains a surprise, even to himself.
“I just have to have the mindset that I need to get ready regardless, right?” he said. “So all the buzz that’s going on around me, all that stuff, it’s not time for me to focus on it.
“It’s not a great feeling, but you got to do what you got to do, understand this is a business. I’m here right now, so I try to help this team, and that’s all.”
On Wednesday, that included throwing his first full-speed bullpen of the spring, delayed by some tightness in a lat muscle, after which he reported “no issue, no tightness that I used to have” and declared it “went great.”
His throwing path includes two more bullpens and two live batting practices before he appears in a game, a two-week prediction that could have an end date here or who knows where?
So much has changed since Jansen chose the Sox before last season, when his big-time bona fides (391 career saves, World Series ring) led him to a city he believed would help him to more of the same, to a team that had fallen just short of a Series appearance in 2021 and believed its 2022 last-place finish was an aberration Jansen could help fix. But the Sox were already in decline, going back to the decision to trade Mookie Betts and let Xander Bogaerts walk away, and they limped to a second straight last-place finish, a putrid season that Jansen’s 29 saves could do nothing to improve.
And the roster has been shredded even more since then. When Jansen looks around the locker room now, it’s the young players, the unproven masses, the just-getting-started guys that make up the majority around him.
Chris Sale, traded. Justin Turner, not re-signed. Free agent pitcher Jordan Montgomery, still on the market.
Beyond the bedrock foundation of Rafael Devers, beyond Jansen’s fellow free agent from the spending days Trevor Story, these Red Sox are more familiar with last place than first, a direct result of management’s buy-low/ sell-high, do-more-with-less mantra.
“The vision then, the vision now is totally different,” Jansen said. “But I can’t question myself, man. There is frustration because you have other options, but I think playing in Boston, being in Fenway is special, and I always wanted to experience that.
“The fans in Boston are great, they’re fantastic, and it’s a city of winning, a city of champions. There’s nothing more fun than seeing you win ballgames in Boston. Even though we were in last place last year, I can imagine if we were in first place how special it can be. It makes you want to play here.
“But they have a different vision now and I got to be patient.”
Dealing the closer could clearly help both sides, netting the Sox a prospect or two in return for a player who isn’t likely to be needed that much on a projected last-place team, and getting Jansen to a contending team for a chance to win a second World Series title. But there’s danger in it, too; for management to throw one more white flag onto the growing pile of surrender risks further alienating a frustrated, disgruntled fan base.
And it’s not what Jansen believed he was signing on for when he inked the deal that owes him $16 million this year. He never envisioned the precipitous fall, one that left him missing the playoffs for the first time in 10 years and leaves the Sox unlikely to get him there this year.
In hindsight, it looks like a wrong-place, wrong-time type of deal, a sad reminder of how things should work around here, but no longer do.
“It is tough,” he said. “We’ll see how the season starts.
“Understanding that some other teams have bigger payrolls — not saying more talent, for you to be in the big leagues you got to have some kind of talent — but with more established players on other rosters, these guys are young and have to believe in themselves now. Step up and believe that they can compete. That can be my message.”