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Pro athletes have been in therapy for decades, although they never would’ve explained it that way. It’s a loaded word, therapy, especially when it comes to sports, what with the competition and the best-on-best, and the winner vs. loser, and the scoreboard-tells-the-story, and the If you ain’t first, you’re last, et cetera, ad infinitum. You have to be tough to compete in athletics at the highest levels — that’s what we all say. We say it because it’s true. It just isn’t the whole story.
That is a long way around to acknowledging Kenley Jansen, a person who even by sports’ standards has a weirdly ultra-competitive job: closer for the Dodgers. In an expansive interview with the Orange County Register this week, Jansen spoke openly and passionately about seeking therapy after last season ended. That’s interesting on a billion levels, but one in particular: The Dodgers won the World Series last season.
They won, but Jansen wasn’t on the mound to cement the victory. A sad but extended spell of ineffectiveness had tethered him to the bullpen bench. Julio Urias pitched the final 2 1/3 innings in the Game 6 win over Tampa Bay. Kenley Jansen, a Dodger his entire career, the team’s all-time saves leader by miles and miles, ran in to join the on-field celebration like all the other reserves.
It was a rough time at the end of a rough year. And so Jansen got help. He used his agents at the Wasserman Media Group to put him in touch with a counselor. Jansen calls what ensued “mental training,” which isn’t bad, although we’ll fix that phase in a minute. It needs a little something.
“I was stubborn before,” Jansen told the Register. (Here’s a link; you may hit a paywall.) “My attitude was, ‘I’ll get that thing done. I’ll get that (expletive) done. You don’t need to help me. Give me the ball.’ You think you can figure out everything.
“(But) you learn that you need people to help you out. You need a team to help you out. For me, that was key. I put my trust in people.”
There is much, much more to Jansen’s story, including his past health issues and the fact that he’d already been experiencing emotional ups and downs for years before 2020 finally broke him through. For now, though, let’s step back and make a couple of observations.
First, what Jansen is doing is what almost every elite athlete should consider doing. It just needs a better name. If the word “therapy” is off-putting, and for many professionals it certainly may be, then let’s broaden the term. Jansen called it mental training, but be specific: This is mental strength training. It’s about learning to harness the power of the mind during some of the most difficult moments of an athletic career, in part because not all those moments are really, exactly about competition. Sometimes they’re about reception, about angry fans or disconsolate teammates, or a coach or manager who doesn’t get it. Sometimes they’re about regular life pressures that athletes bring to work because they are not AI. There’s a lot going on — and oh, by the way, we’d like to see you set a new personal best today while you’re out there competing.
Second, as I mentioned up top, athletes who are parts of franchises have already been doing this for years, albeit in group form. Most bright teams long ago enlisted help on the mental side for their players. This organizational hire might be called a sports psychologist, or a mental coach, or a team coach, or a performance enhancement consultant. Same thing. You may have heard Harvey Dorfman’s name, back in the day. Ken Ravizza, rest his soul, was one of the preeminent sports psychologists, highly sought after by teams and individuals alike. If you’ve ever heard athletes talk about trying to get themselves into “the Zone,” you were hearing sports psychology at work. For Olympians, this study goes back 40-plus years.
Jansen’s story is interesting in part because it’s so specific — he sought help for himself, but as an athlete. He was fixing a competitive problem and understood that part of the problem was simply him. He also admits that he thought meeting with a counselor was weak, in part because people around him thought it was weak. “(But) if you see great athletes, they all need it,” Jansen told the newspaper. “I’m not shy to say that. I think it’s a great thing.”
Teams couch their therapy in whatever language works, because words always matter, and the most forward-thinking teams use the most creative language to get their players to buy in. So you’ll probably hear athletes speak about how they got a “talk on the mental stuff” today, or that somebody told them to quiet their minds. They might use the word visualization, although that’s pretty close to touchy-feely territory. But when you see a hitter step into the box only after taking a major inhale/exhale, trust me, the notion of that cleansing breath didn’t come to them over coffee that morning. They’ve been trained.
Kenley Jansen has been a public target for years. He’s a closer, he’s in a massive market, and the Dodgers are the only franchise for which he has ever played, meaning that the fans, front office and media have seen every single one of his ups and downs. By definition, they’ve seen failure from Jansen often enough to occasionally forget how remarkably good he has been for most of his career.
Now he’s 33 years old, having navigated a mid-season hiccup — three blown saves in a row, two of them to the rival Giants — to compile stats that are on par with some of his best seasons. He’s converted nine straight save opportunities. He is pitching on an expiring contract. And his team is good enough to win it all again.
Jansen may be tested again this weekend, with the Dodgers in San Francisco. It’s a battle of teams with identical .634 winning percentages, and it is for the lead in the National League West. That’s good stuff. That’s great stuff, actually. Kenley Jansen will be there for all of it.