The Craig Kimbrel experiment didn’t go well. They could try again with another experienced closer.
For the rest of 2024, Camden Chat staff will be profiling assorted free agents, trade targets, and other potential offseason moves that could address needs for next year’s roster.
If everything had gone according to plan for the Orioles in 2024, the team would be set already at the back end of the bullpen. The only notable signing of Mike Elias’s tenure to date was Craig Kimbrel, whose contract for this year also included a team contract option for 2025. Kimbrel’s erratic nature kept him from even making it all the way through this season.
The Orioles have already dropped a couple of their incumbent relievers from the 2025 mix as well. A contract option for Danny Coulombe was not picked up, and the team chose not to tender Jacob Webb a contract as well. Other returning pitchers Yennier Cano, Seranthony Domínguez, Cionel Pérez, and Gregory Soto had underwhelming results to consider them as guys with late-inning lockdown expectations. And we’re all just hoping really, really hard that Félix Bautista comes back from Tommy John surgery looking like his pre-surgery self. There are no sure things.
Much of the same reasoning that led the Orioles to sign the veteran Kimbrel could still be applied towards the relievers on the market for 2025. The O’s could use a pitcher who’s been around the block in the late innings – and preferably with less of a recent track record of suddenly having long periods of stinking it up. They could even attempt to solve this problem the exact same way as they did a year ago, by signing the current active saves leader. It’s just that after 2024, that’s a different guy than Kimbrel. Now, it’s Kenley Jansen.
Jansen, now 37, sits at 447 career saves, having passed Kimbrel during this season when Jansen kept notching saves while Kimbrel flamed out. He’s fourth on the saves list, needing 31 more to tie former Oriole Lee Smith for third place. The Curacao native has notched all of those saves over the course of a 15-year career that’s probably on a Hall of Fame track, assuming that Billy Wagner gets into the Hall in 2025 to pave the way for pitchers like Jansen (and, for that matter, Kimbrel.)
There have been a dozen years where Jansen has been the primary closer for his teams: Mostly the Dodgers, then one year with the Braves and a couple more with the Red Sox. He has been at this for a long time and is a free agent coming off of two years where he made a total of $32 million with the Red Sox.
The career track record is not what matters the most about Jansen. That lesson was just learned with Kimbrel. It’s about what has happened lately. It’s been seven years since he got consistently elite results, and he hasn’t had an unambiguously great season since 2021, his last with the Dodgers. That said, I think he’s got a much better case to be made for him right now than Kimbrel did a year ago.
Jansen’s last two seasons with the Red Sox have seen him post a 3.44 ERA, 3.30 FIP, and 1.158 WHIP. These aren’t bad numbers, and he’s saved 56 games in that time even as Boston was in a mediocre period where they were muddling along near .500. He saved the game in 88% of his opportunities, right in line with his career.
A team in the position that the Orioles are in should want better than that ERA/WHIP from its closer, but you can do worse than a guy hitting 88% of his save chances. Kimbrel, for instance, was coming off a 2023 season where he saved only 82% for the Phillies, and he hasn’t saved 88% or more since 2018.
While down from his performance in his 20s, when Jansen was regularly posting K/9 numbers of 13 or more, he’s still been able to strike out more than a batter per inning. In contrast to Kimbrel, who brought with him multiple recent years of a bad walk rate, Jansen has only had a BB/9 over 4 one time since the start of the 2012 season. He’s not a guy where we’ll be wondering if he’s about to walk the bases loaded before getting unceremoniously yanked.
If all goes well, the Orioles won’t need Jansen to get the lion’s share of save opportunities. It would be best if Bautista’s recovery leaves him looking like we remember him looking from 2023. Yet that can’t be taken as a given, and having a pitcher with Jansen’s pedigree and recent track record should allow the O’s to ease Bautista back into the highest-leverage spots, as well as provide some insurance in case his return doesn’t go swimmingly.
Although Jansen being 37 carries with it some risk, especially since he finished the 2024 season on the injured list, this should mean that he’ll be signing contracts one year at a time, too. At FanGraphs, he’s projected for a one-year contract in the $10-12 million range. That’s a gamble that the Orioles can afford to take, as it shouldn’t preclude them from an effort to either improve the starting rotation or add righty-batting balance to the outfield on the free agent market.
Jansen may want to go somewhere that he could more clearly be “the” guy in order to keep his march going up the career saves leaderboard. If that turns out to be the case, then this may not line up very well after all. I hope that the Orioles at least find out, because they can do a lot worse than this to set up a bullpen that doesn’t have everything wagered on Bautista having a flawless, healthy return.