George Elwell Spencer (July 7, 1926 – September 10, 2014) was an American

pitcher In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throws ("pitches") the baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw ...

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

. A right-hander, he was primarily a

relief pitcher In baseball and softball, a relief pitcher or reliever is a pitcher who enters the game after the starting pitcher is removed because of fatigue, ineffectiveness, injury, or ejection, or for other strategic reasons, such as inclement weat ...

for the New York Giants and the Detroit Tigers. Spencer stood tall and weighed . A graduate of

Bexley High School Bexley High School (BHS) is a public high school located in Bexley, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. Athletics Bexley’s athletic program includes teams in the following sports: Football, Basketball, Baseball, Cheerleading, Cross Country, Field ...

and

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

, where he played

quarterback The quarterback (commonly abbreviated "QB"), colloquially known as the "signal caller", is a position in gridiron football. Quarterbacks are members of the offensive platoon and mostly line up directly behind the offensive line. In modern Ame ...

on the OSU varsity football team,Park, Jack, ''The Official Ohio State Football Encyclopedia'', page 221
/ref> Spencer was a key member of the 1951 Giants' pitching staff, leading the club in saves and winning ten of 14 decisions, including a key August start over the front-running Brooklyn Dodgers. The Giants would famously overcome a 13-game, mid-August deficit to tie Brooklyn on the season's final day, then defeated the Dodgers for the

National League The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the National League (NL), is the older of two leagues constituting Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States and Canada, and the world's oldest extant professional team ...

pennant on

Bobby Thomson Robert Brown Thomson (October 25, 1923 – August 16, 2010) was a Scottish-born American professional baseball player, nicknamed the "Staten Island Scot". He was an outfielder and right-handed batter for the New York Giants (1946–53, 1957), M ...

's historic Game 3

home run In baseball, a home run (abbreviated HR) is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run i ...

References

External links

Retrosheet profileVenezuelan Professional Baseball League statisticsObituary
1926 births 2014 deaths Baseball players from Columbus, Ohio Charleston Senators players Columbus Jets players Denver Bears players Detroit Tigers players Detroit Tigers scouts Indianapolis Indians players Jacksonville Tars players Jersey City Giants players Knoxville Smokies players Leones del Caracas players Major League Baseball pitchers Minneapolis Millers (baseball) players Navegantes del Magallanes players American expatriate baseball players in Venezuela New York Giants (NL) players Omaha Cardinals players Salt Lake City Bees players Seattle Rainiers players Statesville Tigers players Toronto Maple Leafs (International League) players {{US-baseball-pitcher-1920s-stub