Blast From The Past: Larry Jansen 1951

Larry Jansen was a key member of the 1951 Giants.  It was the last of a run of consecutive seasons as a workhorse starting pitcher.  After kicking around semi-pro and minor league gigs for years, including stints with the San Francisco Seals, Jansen finally broke in with the New York Giants in 1947 at the age of 26.  Pitching success in those days focused on Wins, Losses and ERA.  Jansen was an immediate success going 21-5 with a 3.16 ERA in 248 IP.  His bread and butter pitch was the slider which he used to induce soft contact rather than as a strikeout pitch.  Jansen was a contact pitcher whose highest K/9 was 5.27 in 1950.  He also walked very few.  I assumed he got a log of groundball outs, but per Baseball Reference, his GO/AO was right around 1.  He was known for using few pitches per start and short games, often clocking in at less than 1 hour.

Jansen's other 20-win season came in 1951 going 23-11 with an ERA of 3.04.  Like the team, he got off to a sluggish start to the season.  At one point his record stood at 5-5, but then he reeled off 7 Wins out of 9 Starts.  Although he remained a workhorse down the stretch, he developed back issues which affected his performance which carried over into the World Series which may have been the main reason why the Giants lost the series to the Yankees.

The back problems persisted and led to a steady downward trend in his stat lines through the end of his Giants career in 1954.  He staged a brief comeback with the Reds in 1955.  Larry Jansen was later hired by Alvin Dark to be the Giants pitching coach a position he kept through several managers through 1971.  It was speculated that Jansen fell out of favor with his Giants bosses due to over-emphasizing the slider.  Jansen believed it was because he was critical of the Giants penchant for callup up young SP's before they had learned a third pitch, which he considered essential for MLB SP success.

Larry Jansen was an essential member of the Giants famous 1951 NL Pennant winning team and a very good Giant throughout his long life of 89 years.