Jansen and Kimbrel deserve Cy Young consideration

It's been 14 long seasons since a reliever won the Cy Young award. In fact, out of the 54 Cy Young awards given out since the beginning of the 1990s, just two have been awarded to a closer.

The last reliever to win Cy Young was the Los Angeles Dodgers' Eric Gagne back in 2003. Among the most important statistics to the voters at the time, Gagne led all of baseball in saves without blowing a single opportunity.

However, we know more about the historic run with the benefit of hindsight, as Gagne also led all of baseball in Win Probability Added (WPA). It was unarguably an incredible season:

Before that, there was Dennis Eckersley - the only other pitcher to come out of the bullpen and win a Cy Young in the past 27 years.

Eckersley's 1992 campaign not only earned the pitcher the American League Cy Young award, it was also MVP-worthy according to the voters at the time.

In retrospect, Eckersley's year pales in comparison to Gagne's. In fact, the Oakland Athletics' closer didn't even hold sole possession of the WPA lead that year, instead sharing it with Greg Maddux who handily won the NL Cy Young.

Since then, there has been a bit of an assault on the value of a reliever to a baseball team. They routinely rank well outside the top pitchers in WAR thanks entirely to workload.

Fortunately, the dominance of Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel may be enough to end the drought. Here's how both of those pitchers have looked so far this season:

Both Kimbrel and Jansen lead their respective leagues in WPA, with Jansen leading the entire major leagues - though just barely ahead of Anthony Rizzo.

What Kimbrel and Jansen epitomize is the modern reliever - the closer that does not need to lead in saves in order to be recognized as elite. Both pitchers have been better than Eckersley's 1992 season by almost every measure. Not coincidentally, both Kimbrel and Jansen have generated the most swings and misses among all pitchers as well.

Jansen retired nearly 100 batters before issuing his first walk of the season this year - a free pass to Nolan Arenado on June 25.

In September, with the Boston Red Sox honing in on their second consecutive division title, Kimbrel has struck out 16 of the 33 batters he's faced and opponents have had a .138 slugging percentage against him.

Both pitchers have been truly otherworldly. In the case of Kimbrel though, both Corey Kluber and his teammate Chris Sale will likely take the lion's share of Cy Young consideration.

While that's true in the AL, there really hasn't been a standout performance in the NL, and Jansen deserves serious consideration. The incumbent Max Scherzer sits atop the WAR leaderboard as the only pitcher above 5.5 WAR according to FanGraphs.

The electorate wouldn't be wrong to select Scherzer, who will likely pitch 200 innings for the fifth consecutive season, but Jansen has given one of the most dominant relief performances in recent memory.

Relievers leading in WPA isn't a new concept, however. It was a large part of why Zach Britton should have won the AL Cy Young last year, and even garnered MVP consideration. WPA is a descriptive stat that benefits closers because they frequently enter during the game's highest leverage moments.

Rick Porcello's 2016 AL Cy Young will be widely regarded as one of the worst uses of the award in recent memory. Sure, because Kluber or Justin Verlander were more deserving. But, really, because Britton was the deserving candidate.

We can't continue to gloss over elite pitchers because of shorter workloads. Neither the Red Sox nor the Dodgers would be in the position they are without Kimbrel or Jansen. And, by WPA, no player in baseball has helped their team win more than Jansen. It's time to acknowledge that performance.