'Challenge master!' Jansen overturns four calls in Rangers' win

LOS ANGELES -- Brandon Nimmo likes to wear his “I just hope Danny Jansen is having fun” T-shirt around the Rangers’ clubhouse. It’s safe to say Jansen had plenty of fun in Texas' 5-2 win over the Dodgers on Sunday.

The Rangers’ catcher displayed his excellent sense of the strike zone on both sides of the ball, drawing three of their 10 walks on offense, and going 4-for-5 on ABS Challenges behind the plate. Three of his successfully challenged calls resulted in strikeouts for his batterymates.

It was an important step for a team that had not been using ABS very much -- entering Sunday, the Rangers had only 16 challenges, tied with Boston for the fewest in MLB. Texas had won exactly half of those.

Jansen’s performance on Sunday led manager Skip Schumaker to declare him the player of the game.

“I guess our ABS numbers went up, right?” Schumaker said. “Fifteen games in, we’re all adjusting to this thing, and we’ve gone over all the data and are trying to be proactive with it, and reactive. He did it in high leverage, he did it in low leverage.

“There were some big calls that went our way, so credit to him. He definitely was the player of the game, for sure, in the way he attacked. [Jacob] deGrom had a nice day, I don’t want to say it was just Jansen. But I think that combination, that battery, was super impressive.”

The praise for Jansen’s game didn’t end with Schumaker. As the media spoke to the catcher at his locker postgame, first baseman Jake Burger interjected with his own take: “Challenge master!”

Jansen said he and fellow catcher Kyle Higashioka had a game plan for ABS stemming from Spring Training that placed an emphasis on saving challenges for high-leverage moments later in games. But as the system becomes more familiar, Jansen said they also want to be able to trust their instincts more, too.

“I think we wanted to switch it up a little bit and be a little more aggressive,” he said. “I think a lot of times, when I look back at ones that I didn’t challenge, it would be like, got to trust your gut a little bit at times. But I think Skip giving us more of a chance to be more aggressive helped, for sure, today.

"And it’s kind of nice to get past the threshold of a couple, when we get some right, kind of get some confidence into it. But I do feel like I know the strike zone pretty well, so that felt really good.”

Jansen said his perspective began to change during MacKenzie Gore’s last start against Seattle, when there were a number of pitches that barely clipped the zone that he chose not to challenge.

“There’s definitely a couple where they can switch the at-bat and switch the inning,” he said. “I think that we’d rather give ourselves a chance to flip it. And obviously if we’re wrong, we want to make sure that it’s not crazy out there, because I think we both know the zone pretty well. But if we’re wrong, we still have one too, then go back into the strategy of saving it for later and all that. But take our chance early.”