Gene Covington Vance (born January 5, 1947) is a former

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), ...

. Drafted in the second round of the June 1968 secondary phase (behind Steve Garvey, first round) he pitched in 30 games in the 1970s for the

Los Angeles Dodgers The Los Angeles Dodgers are an American professional baseball team based in Los Angeles. The Dodgers compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West division. Established in 1883 in the city of Brooklyn ...

, including 21 starts and 2 complete games. In his first year as a rookie with the Dodgers, he was voted "Dodger Rookie of the Year" for that season with a 7–7 record and the lowest ERA on the Dodger pitchers starting staff. Arm injuries during the 1971 season (2-1 record) eventually forced an early retirement from baseball at age 26 in 1973. He went to school at Stanford University, graduating "with distinction" (top 15%) with a subsequent graduate degree from California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly Pomona) in Land Planning and Landscape Architecture. While a pitcher at Stanford, he compiled a 32–3 win-loss record in his freshman, sophomore, and junior years, with a perfect 15–0 record (including 4 post season wins in Regional and College World Series play) in his sophomore year, a school record that still stands unbroken. He was subsequently voted into the Stanford Baseball Hall of Fame. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with a 37-year career in land planning and landscape architecture. He is currently a Senior Manager/Planner/Landscape Architect at

Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc. Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc. is an American planning, surveying, engineering, and design consulting firm. The company was ranked #22 on Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list in 2022, its 15th year on the list. ''Engineering News-Re ...

, a national multi-disciplinary consulting and design firm in land use, urban planning, civil engineering, traffic/transportation planning, as well as landscape architecture. He designs and lays out new communities and master plans throughout California and in other parts of the world. He continues to give pitching lessons in his spare time to local teens. He and his wife, Dee—former owner of In Place, an all-women move coordinating company—have three children, Ryan (Content Executive for Tonal, a home workout system), Erik (science journalist and associate editor with the New York Times living in Colorado), and Heidi (life and nutrition coach working from Big Sky, Montana)

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Vance, Sandy Major League Baseball pitchers Los Angeles Dodgers players Stanford Cardinal baseball players 1947 births Baseball players from Colorado Living people Spokane Indians players Ogden Dodgers players Albuquerque Dukes players Bakersfield Dodgers players People from Lamar, Colorado Pasadena High School (California) alumni