Galen Cisco Player Stats

Galen Cisco was born on Saturday, March 7, 1936, and began his Major League baseball career in 1961 with the Boston Red Sox. The 26 year-old played for 7 seasons on 3 different teams and ended his big league playing career in 1969. (Baseball Almanac)

Co-captain and fullback for Ohio State's 1957 national collegiate football champs, the curveballing Cisco had little success with Boston and was released on waivers to the 1962 Mets. In the longest game, by time, in ML history (the 7:23, 23-inning Mets-Giants marathon of 5/31/64), he worked the last nine innings, shutting out San Francisco the first eight, then yielding two runs to lose 8-6. In three-plus years with the Mets, he was 18-43. He later became a respected ML pitching coach. (BaseballLibrary.com)

...Cisco, who turns 64 in March, has been in the game 42 consecutive years, the last 31 as a pitching coach, including four with the Phillies. ...Cisco is a pitching wizard. Robert Person's fast conversion from wild, erratic hard-thrower to having one of the best ERAs in the NL is just one of the feathers Cisco has put into his cap during his stay in Philadelphia. With Cisco's tweaking and guidance, Paul Byrd had an All-Star season and Randy Wolf is developing into a staff ace. That many of the other flawed arms that are or have been on his staffs haven't panned out isn't his fault. The guy knows the art of pitching and how to teach it. ...Cisco, a hard-nosed country boy from Ohio who was a two-sport collegiate star at Ohio State and captained the Buckeyes' 1958 Rose Bowl team, has the same motto. His only immediate concern is continuing attempts to get the most out of his not-so-talented pitching staff. At the same time, he knows he's getting up there in years, and that's a scary thing because he's not ready to give up baseball. "You never think the time is gonna come, but it's gonna come sooner or later," Cisco said. "We all know that. I guess my stance is when it comes, I'll deal with it. Baseball has been my life for 42 years, so it's hard to let go. When you do something you've loved all your life, you just don't say that's it, walk away and forget about it. It's in your blood." (Phillies News, Sunday, September 24, 2000)

Jack Bickel coached [football] in St. Marys for just four seasons, before moving on to a pay raise in Piqua in 1954... An avid story-teller, Bickel can still relate tales from his Army experience as a paratrooper in the Pacific in World War II, and from his experience as a player at Miami University under coaches Sid Gillman and Woody Hayes. But his favorite stories still go back to St. Marys. “I was asked at a coaching clinic to step up to a chalk-board and write down my three most successful plays. I wrote: ‘Number one: Give the ball to Galen. Number two: Give the ball to Galen. Number three—oh, you get the idea.’” ...Galen Cisco, as St. Marys sports fans well know, went on to Ohio State to become a stellar two-way performer for the Buckeyes, playing both fullback and linebacker. Cisco was the captain of the Buckeyes 1958 National Championship team. It was a condition of his signing with Ohio State that Galen would be permitted to pitch for the Buckeye baseball team in the spring, thus missing spring football—a rare concession by Coach Woody Hayes. Cisco then went on to a long major-league baseball career, first as a pitcher for the Red Sox and the Mets, and then as a pitching coach for several different teams, including the World Champion Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993. There can’t be many other athletes, if any, who can boast both a NCAA National Football Championship ring and a World Series ring. ("Roughrider Retrospective" by Buz Howard.)

Galen Cisco was inducted into The Ohio State University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1995.