BCB After Dark: What about Kenley Jansen?

It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in out of the fall air. We’ve got the place jumping tonight. There’s no cover charge. We’ve got a couple of tables still available, or sit with a friend. The show will start shortly. Bring your own beverage.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

First of all, I want to congratulate Sara Sanchez for a successful first weekend running a coffee shop in this space. BCB After Dark now runs five days a week.

The Dodgers took a commanding three-games-to-none lead in the World Series with a 4-2 win over the Yankees. Only a two-out, two-run home run in the bottom of the ninth by Alex Verdugo prevented the Yankees from being shut out. I thought the Dodgers were the better team going into the Series and thought they’d win in six or seven, but I really thought the Yankees would put up a better fight than this. Honestly, it’s an embarrassment. Maybe we can just substitute the Padres for the Yankees in Game 4 to give the Dodgers a good game.

Last week, I asked you what you’d think about the Cubs signing free agent first baseman Paul Goldschmidt to a one-year deal. Only 47 percent of you voted “Are you freaking nuts? No!,” which is a lot fewer than I thought. But that was still good enough for first place. Thirty percent of you said “meh” and another 23 percent were intrigued by the idea.

Here’s the part where I talk about music and movies. You’re free to skip that. You probably won’t hurt my feelings.

We’re finishing strong this week with Halloween jazz, so we’re featuring one of the great pieces of “spooky” music tonight. It’s clarinetist Artie Shaw and his orchestra playing “Nightmare.”

The 1960 Italian film Black Sunday has become a cult horror favorite over the years. Also known as “The Mask of Satan” or La maschera del demonio in Italian, the film marked the directorial debut of Mario Bava, who would go on to earn the title of “The Master of Italian Horror.” Starring English actors Barbara Steele and John Richardson, the film owes a lot to the Universal horror films of the thirties. But it also represents a step forward in the genre to a more explicit form of horror that would influence the British Hammer horror films of the sixties as well as the American low-budget Roger Corman works. The plot of Black Sunday is nothing special and the acting is hit-and-miss, but Bava, who had been the cinematographer for the Hercules films in the fifties, creates a terrific feast for the eyes in this cult classic.

The film is based on a novella by the 19th-century Russian/Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol about a witch that comes back to life to take revenge upon the descendants of those villagers who killed her, who are led by her own brother. And that’s basically all you need to know about the plot of Black Sunday. Steele plays Asa, a 17th-Century Moldavian witch who was set to be burned alive. Or maybe she’s a vampire. They call her both a witch and a vampire. She’s probably both. She certainly behaves like both at different times.

Anyway, before her brother puts her to death, she puts a curse on the whole town and vows revenge on their descendants. The villagers start by hammering a bronze mask of Satan with sharp spikes onto her face. The sharp spikes being driven into her head are enough to kill her, but a sudden storm extinguishes the bonfire that would have incinerated her body. So she gets buried in her family’s tomb instead. It’s not really explained why they wouldn’t just try to burn her after the rain stopped. (Of course, she probably brought the rain with witchcraft, so . . .)

Two centuries later (so like the 1830s), two scholars are traveling through Moldavia on their way to Moscow for a congress. Their carriage breaks down and while it’s being repaired, the two men stumble into the mausoleum where Asa’s body has lain for 200 years. Being inquisitive scholars, they disturb her body and accidentally bring her back to life. Although they don’t know this and leave. Still stuck inside her sarcophagus, Asa uses her magic to manipulate people to complete her resurrection. That involves stealing the body of her brother’s descendent Katia, who is also played by Steele.

The dialog in Black Sunday is pretty standard b-movie horror stuff. As in, it’s not good. The acting is uneven and the film uses the traditional Italian method of having every actor do their lines in their own language and then dub when necessary so everyone is speaking one language in the final print for each market. This leads to some uneven work here. Steele is much better as Asa than she is as Katia, although she does get off some real screams at Katia late in the film. Although the term hadn’t been invented yet when Black Sunday was made, Steele is considered one of the original “scream queens” for the many horror films she made throughout the sixties. But this was her first horror film and she’s still feeling her way around the genre. She’s a promising rookie here rather than a seasoned horror veteran.

But the look of the film is a treat. You’ve got an old Romanian mansion (like in Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula) and some catacombs (again, like Dracula). Bava adds in an angry mob of villagers with torches which recalls Frankenstein. But instead of feeling cliché, it feels like a fresh update of the tropes. The film starts out strong with the burning of the witches scene, which frankly looks terrifying. Bava had a long career as a cinematographer coming into his directorial debut and it shows. Other than a frankly ridiculous-looking giant bat attack, the scenes are framed for maximum effectiveness. It helps that Bava uses the old cinematographer’s trick of keeping everything dark to hide any imperfections in the set design. Not only does it hide any issues, it looks spooky to boot. It’s a great-looking movie.

I should also give a shout out to the makeup work in the film. Steele, as Asa, has to look like someone has punctured her face with multiple brass stakes, and it works. The work isn’t as meticulous as, say, Jack Pierce’s design of Boris Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein, but it is good. Only rarely does it look cheap.

Black Sunday deserves to be a cult classic just for the atmosphere and look that Bava creates on the film. But it’s also an important film as it serves as a bridge from the older horror films to the modern take on the genre that evolved in the sixties and seventies. That made it a good one for me to watch, for while it’s more graphic and explicit than Dracula, it doesn’t have the kinds of explicit blood and gore that would emerge in its wake.

Here’s the trailer for Black Sunday. Or The Mask of Satan as they call it. The film is readily available for watching on some subscription services—it’s on Amazon Prime—and other services for free with ads. There’s also a copy on YouTube, but I can’t vouch for its quality.

Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.

I firmly believe that if the Cubs had had a better bullpen in May and June, they’d have been in the playoffs this year. And I also believe that if they don’t improve their bullpen in 2025, they won’t make the playoffs next year either.

However, I admit that improving a bullpen is easier said than done. Relievers are highly volatile and ones that are great in one season can be awful in the next. Hectór Neris is an example of this.

But one reliever who has been nails for the past 15 seasons is Kenley Jansen. Since his rookie season in 2010, his quality has ranged from elite to merely pretty darn good. He’s fourth on the all-time saves list with 447 and the three pitchers in front of him are all in the Hall of Fame. And he just so happens to be a free agent this winter.

Jansen has just finished a two-year, $32 million deal with the Red Sox. In that time, he saved 56 games in 64 opportunities and posted an ERA of 3.38. Yes, that’s down from his heights with the Dodgers ten years ago, but he’s still a quality pitcher. He pretty much just throws one pitch these days—his cutter—but it’s still an effective pitch that hasn’t lost much if anything lately. Around 85 percent of his pitches last year were a cutter.

Of course, the downside of Jansen is that he turned 37 on September 30, so there is always a chance that it comes crashing down at any time. Time is still undefeated. Jansen has been remarkably healthy for a pitcher throughout his career, but he does have an issue with an irregular heartbeat that crops up from time time to time and leads to trips to the injured list. It also means he doesn’t pitch in (or even travel to) Colorado which, I guess, wouldn’t be a big deal for the Cubs.

Jansen also finished the season on the IL with shoulder inflammation, although he said it was no big deal. But health is always and issue with pitchers and it’s especially an issue with young pitchers and old ones. And Jansen is an old one.

On top of that, the Red Sox have no interest in bringing him back and there are some sketchy explanations why. There has been reports in the Boston media that Jansen’s teammates were upset with him for leaving the team after he was shut him down with that shoulder injury. It’s hard for me to know what to make of that. Boston sports media is probably the only market that’s worse than New York, so this could be a mountain out of a molehill. After all, Jorge López got driven out of New York by a partially media-driven narrative of being a bad teammate, and we’ve heard no complaints about him as a teammate in Chicago.

But it is worth considering why the Red Sox seem to have no interest in bringing Jansen back. On the other hand, it doesn’t sound like Jansen wants to return either. He’s said he wants to pitch in the playoffs and the Red Sox finished 81-81 last year. So getting Jansen to come to Chicago would mean convincing him that the 83-79 Cubs are closer to the playoffs than the 81-81 Red Sox. On the other hand, he might not get a better offer than one from the Cubs.

After signing a two-year, $32 million deal with Boston, Jansen will likely be looking for more than that. It’s highly unlikely that any team gives the 37-year-old Jansen a four-year deal and even a three-year deal is unlikely, although it could happen. But a two-year deal or a two-year with an option? I think that’s the minimum that Jansen would get. And he would likely get a bump up on the $32 million he made with Boston. Probably something more like $36 or $38 million over two years.

So with all that in mind, do you think the Cubs should try to sign Kenley Jansen?

Thank you all for stopping by. It was good to see you. Please get home safely. Let us know if you need us to call a ride. Recycle your cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.