Marwin Gonzalez’s Rajai Davis Moment
The simplest, fundamental truth about closers is that none of them are perfect. Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith, Craig Kimbrel — they all blow saves, and they all take losses. Give them enough time and the bad outings will even pile up. It was Rivera who took the loss in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. Maybe the best playoff pitcher in history took one of the most devastating losses in memory. Baseball perfection is on a relative scale. All that baseball actually guarantees is that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it’ll piss everyone off. No one is safe from the baseball menace.
No closers are perfect. No closer ever has been perfect, and no closer ever will be perfect. But there’s another fundamental truth about the position. By public perception, closers are binary, black and white. There are the closers — the overwhelming majority of them included — who’ll just never earn trust. The closers who make fans roll their eyes and say “here we go again” when they come in and throw their first ball. Fans have no patience with closers. There’s little tolerance for hittability or wildness. In that sense, it can be a terrible job. There’s limited praise, and limitless blame.
Then there’s the lucky few. It’s a rare breed, but there are closers who’re considered automatic. Closers you don’t even feel you have to watch that intently, because success is a foregone conclusion. Why closely watch a baseball game that’s already over? These closers have all blown saves, each and every one of them, but they retain the perception of invulnerability. Maybe it’s more of an illusion, but one can’t deny its existence.
Kenley Jansen is one of those invulnerable closers. In the same way that Rivera was one of those invulnerable closers, Jansen comes in and basically throws one pitch, and after five or ten or fifteen of them, he gets to go change his clothes. Kenley Jansen is effectively bulletproof. Wednesday night, Kenley Jansen blew a save.