"Maybe Jonathan Papelbon isn't headed out the door this year after all.

The free-agent market for relief pitchers figures to be crowded this winter, and it got even more crowded when Francisco Rodriguez waived his $17.5 million vesting option. Heath Bell, Jonathan Broxton and Matt Capps don't have quite the same track record as Papelbon, but all have "Proven Closer" in big type atop their respective resumes, and all could be options for teams who don't want to commit $30 or $40 million to the most volatile commodity in baseball.

Papelbon knows that -- "Of course I pay attention," he told WEEI.com's Rob Bradford before Sunday night's 16-inning epic -- but he also knows that his past accomplishments outshine those of any other closers who will be on the market this winter.

Papelbon ranks third among all relief pitchers in the major leagues with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 6.63, probably the best measure of relief-pitcher performance. His ERA is 3.96, but his Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is 2.09 -- best among all free-agent-to-be relievers -- and the difference can be explained pretty easily by the .361 BABIP and sub-70 percent strand rate he currently sports.

For the sake of comparison, Baltimore's Koji Uehara has a similar strikeout-to-walk ratio and a 1.84 ERA, but he's sporting a .187 BABIP and a 97.4 percent strand rate.

"Pap has had a great year," Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said last week in an interview on 98.5 The Sports Hub. "It's in line with what he's done over the majority of his career. The thing with Pap and why people got on him a little bit over the last year or two is that he set such a ridiculously high standard earlier in his career. The things that he did were truly historic in nature. There has never been a reliever to start their career, from the very beginning, at as high a level as he did.

"The 2009 and 2010 seasons were still good, but they didn't quite match the standard he set earlier in his career, so it was easy to criticize him. That said, while he wasn't the same pitcher, he was still a very, very good pitcher and still helped us win a lot of games. I do think his stuff and command have ticked up this year from where they were the last two years, and he's been an instrumental part of the 'pen."

If Papelbon walked away as a free agent, who would replace him?"