Wichitan Daryl Spencer was proud of his many baseball accomplishments

When she was young, Kari Sue (Spencer) Vosburgh followed her dad around. They would eventually land at a ballpark.

“I was his sidekick, probably 12, 13, 14 years old,” Vosburgh said. “I just grew up loving sports in general and baseball, being kind of a slow game, was more interesting when I knew the players.”

I first met Vosburgh when she was at her dad’s side during the National Baseball Congress World Series in the late 1970s. Daryl Spencer, who played in the major leagues for 10 seasons and spent another seven in Japan, was the tournament’s official scorer for a couple of years and his young daughter was his helper.

“I liked keeping score,” said Vosburgh, whose dad died Monday at 88. “We had a little system and we would use a red pen for hits and RBIs so that they kind of jumped out at you.”

Vosburgh started out as a bat girl for her dad’s El Dorado Coors team that he managed from 1974-78 with two top-five finishes in the NBC World Series.

“I retired from that after one year, though,” she said. “You think the guys aren’t going to throw their helmets at you, but they would. It was just typical baseball player stuff. You think everything is going to be cool, but then a guy gets mad and throws his helmet. That’s when dad taught me to keep score.”

Spencer loved baseball but, after his playing career, you couldn’t always tell. He chastised modern players often for not playing the game the way he thought it should be played. But he did get caught up in the Kansas City Royals over the past several seasons and spoke of his admiration for players such as Eric Hosmer and Salvador Perez.

Guys who played the game the right way.

Spencer loved to tell stories about his baseball career, which started at East High where he was an unheralded infielder who worked his way through the minor leagues to debut with the New York Giants in 1952. He missed the 1954 and 1955 seasons while serving in the military, but returned in 1956 and moved west to San Francisco with the Giants in 1958, where he is credited with hitting the first major-league home run on the West Coast off Dodgers right-hander Don Drysdale.

Spencer was traded to St. Louis in 1960, then dealt to the Dodgers — a team he despised because of his upbringing with the Giants — two months into the 1961 season.

“Dad was a Giant at heart,” Vosburgh said. “When he was traded to the Dodgers, he told us that he sat outside that locker room for 15 minutes before he could go inside. But then he met Sandy Koufax and the other players and it was fine.

“He did hate (Dodgers manager) Walter Alston, though. He thought he was an idiot.”

Try as she might, Vosburgh rarely could get her dad to bite his tongue. He said what he thought and what he thought wasn’t always complimentary.

Spencer ended his career with Cincinnati in 1963, where he said Reds star outfielder Frank Robinson offered him the No. 20 that Spencer had worn in San Francisco.

“Dad told Robinson to keep the number,” Vosburgh said, “and that he was going to do a lot with it.”

Sure enough, Robinson, already a rookie of the year and National League MVP, went on to become one of the greatest players in history.

Spencer was a bigger baseball star in Japan than he was in the United States, which rankled him.

“I don’t think he felt like people here knew how good he was, so he liked to talk about how good he was,” Vosburgh said. “He was inducted into the El Dorado Baseball Hall of Fame last year and he had nine pages written for his speech. We were like, ‘Dad, you can’t talk that long.’ ”

Eventually, Spencer cut down the speech. But he kept dozens of scrapbooks through the years that detailed his baseball accomplishments. If you spent any time with Spencer, you spent time looking at those scrapbooks.

He also organized family photos. He and his wife, Eleanor, would have been married 67 years on Jan. 20. They have two daughters: Vosburgh and Karen Spencer of Newcastle, Okla. He adored his two granddaughters, Maddie (24) and Elly (22).

“He changed Japanese baseball,” Vosburgh said. “He told us that the first time he slid into second base and took out one of the fielders, they stopped the game for 30 minutes trying to decide if that was something they were going to allow. They just didn’t do things like that.”

Spencer spent five years with the Hankyu Braves from 1964-68, took two years off, then returned to Hankyu in 1971-72. He batted .275 with 152 homers in Japan. A classic photo of his Japanese career shows Spencer holding a bat upside down at home plate as he was chasing a home-run title.

“He knew they weren’t going to pitch to him because they didn’t want an American to lead the league in home runs,” Vosburgh said.

Spencer returned to Japan numerous times over the years for various honors.

In 2008, he and his family went to San Francisco to celebrate the Giants’ 50th year in the city. Four years later, he and Vosburgh went to Los Angeles to honor 50 years of Dodger Stadium.

“The last baseball thing he did was this past summer when he got to throw out a first pitch at the NBC World Series,” Vosburgh said. “He looked forward to that and even went out and practiced because he worried he couldn’t get the ball to the plate. But he did pretty well.

“We tried to get him to write a book and he started, but it didn’t go far. He was going to call it ‘I Did it My Way.’ And that’s definitely how he did it — his way.”

This story was originally published January 3, 2017 at 2:28 PM with the headline "Wichitan Daryl Spencer was proud of his many baseball accomplishments."