George Scott (first baseman)
| George Scott | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| First baseman | |||
|
Born: March 23, 1944 Greenville, Mississippi |
|||
|
Died: July 28, 2013 (aged 69) Greenville, Mississippi |
|||
|
|||
| MLB debut | |||
| April 12, 1966, for the Boston Red Sox | |||
| Last MLB appearance | |||
| September 27, 1979, for the New York Yankees | |||
| MLB statistics | |||
| Batting average | .268 | ||
| Home runs | 271 | ||
| Runs batted in | 1,051 | ||
| Teams | |||
| Career highlights and awards | |||
|
|||
George Charles Scott, Jr. (March 23, 1944 – July 28, 2013) was a first baseman in Major League Baseball for the Boston Red Sox (1966–71, 1977–79), Milwaukee Brewers (1972–76), Kansas City Royals (1979) and New York Yankees (1979). He batted and threw right-handed.
Scott was born March 23, 1944, in Greenville, Mississippi, as the youngest of three children. His father, a cotton farm laborer, died when George Jr. was two years old, and young George was picking cotton by age nine. "That's all we knew", he said. "The reason you did that, all of that money was turned over to your parents to make ends meet. Nothing can be worse than getting up at four in the morning waiting for a truck to pick you up to go pick and chop cotton from six or seven in the morning until five or six in the afternoon."
Scott played Little League baseball in his spare time but was temporarily ejected from the team for being "too good", having hit two or three home runs per game in one six-game stretch. At Coleman High School in Greenville he excelled in baseball, football and basketball, quarterbacking the football team and leading his football and basketball teams to state championships. He chose baseball as a career "to make my living. I got tired of watching my mom struggle [with three jobs]. I didn't have the mind that I could go to college and see my mother struggle for another four or five years."
Major league scout Ed Scott (no relation to George) of Mobile, Alabama, who had signed Hank Aaron to his first major league contract, discovered George Scott and signed him as an amateur free agent straight out of high school on May 28, 1962, for $8,000. Eventually promoted to the Boston Red Sox' new Pittsfield Red Sox farm team of the Double-A Eastern League in 1965, Scott became the Eastern League triple crown winner that year, leading the league in home runs, RBIs, and batting average. He became a Red Sox major-league rookie in 1966 as a third baseman, and played all 162 games that season, the last Red Sox rookie to do so.
...
Wikipedia