Excerpt from “Your 1948 Houston Buffs, Dixie Champions: Brief Biographies By Morris Frank and Adie Marks (1948).
Charlie Sproull
As Frank and Mark point out in their cartoon, former Buffs pitcher Charlie Sproull (6’3″, 185 lbs.) (BR/TR) was born January 9, 1919 in Taylorsville, Georgia. Save for a deal that sent him to Dallas at the very end, his 1946-48 time with the Buffs were a wrap on his 10-year minor league pitching career (1938-44, 1946-48) and a record of 87-96, and a 3.73 ERA, He was out of baseball as an active player at age 29.
Charlie’s big league career took place in 1945 when he won 4 and lost 10 with a 5.94 ERA for the Philadelphia Phillies. In spite of his Georgia Peach tree and culture roots, Sproull married a girl from Rockford, Illinois and made his home there until his death on January 13, 1980 at the age of 61. In his off-seasons, as Frank and Mark also show, Charlie worked as a machinist who liked fishing in the spring and summer and hunting in the fall and winter.
Charlie Sproull was hardly close to ever having been one of the revered names in Houston Buffs history. He won 1 game for the ’46 club, 5 games for the ’47 team, and a mere 2 games for the ’48 Buffs, but he was made of the stuff that made minor league baseball popular. He was a member of that legion of dreamers who, whether they realized it or not, had to put everything else in life aside while they each chased the chance to one day fly across the summer sky of America’s consciousness as one of the game’s shooting stars.
Charlie Sproull put his baseball dream to bed before he turned 30. Hopefully, he spent the remaining 32 years of his life from there in a loving marriage with the fullest satisfaction of knowing that he had given baseball all he had.
God Rest Your Soul. Charlie Sproull!
The Pecan Park Eagle 
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