1931-1933

George Stumpf was born in New Orleans on December 15, 1910. He played semipro baseball in New Orleans for a team sponsored by D.H. Holmes Co., Ltd., a department store on Canal Street in the Crescent City where he had gone to work after school. He then went on to play for other semipro teams in Mobile, Alabama; Nashville, Tennessee; and Quincy, Illinois.

On a 1929 Mobile contract in his first year in Organized Baseball, he was farmed out to Hattiesburg in the Class D Cotton States League. In 1930 he played for the Mobile Bears in the Class-A Southern Association. He began 1931 playing in the Southern Association with the Nashville Volunteers and right at the beginning of April attracted the attention of the New York Yankees. He went on to play for the Quincy, Illinois, team of the Three-I League. Quincy won the league playoffs and as soon as the flag was sewn up, George headed to Boston to join the Red Sox. 

He picked up his first big-league hits in the first game of a 1930 September doubleheader against the visiting St. Louis Browns. He batted .250 in 28 at-bats in 1931 and got a pretty fair to chance to show his stuff with the Red Sox in 1932. He appeared in 79 games, batting just .201 and striking out three more times than he walked.

George opened the 1933 season and closed it with the Red Sox, playing in April, May, and September, but spent most of the season with the Reading Red Sox (New York-Penn League). In Reading, he hit .329 in 125 games and was a September call-up. In the big leagues, he had only been batting .200 when he was sent down in mid-May, but he was 13-for-36 with the Red Sox in September, bringing his average for the year up to .341. In December the Red Sox assigned him to play for the Kansas City Blues in 1934 where he played four seasons in a row.

After the 1936 season with the Blues, he played the next five years for another American Association team, the St. Paul Saints. Then it was on to the Columbus Red Birds, still in the AA, from 1943 into 1946. He appeared in only two games in 1945, however, since he was drafted in late April and spent most of the year in the Army Quartermaster Corps.

Mustered out, with the war over, he started 1946 with Columbus again, but his contract was purchased by the Houston Buffaloes.

In 1947 he was back in the Red Sox system, playing for his hometown ballclub, the New Orleans Pelicans. His final year, 1948, was also spent in Louisiana, but as player-manager for the New Iberia team in the Class-D Evangeline League.

After leaving baseball, George worked in shipyards and was a bartender at the Southern Yacht Club in New Orleans. He also worked at Schwegmann’s Grand Super Market in the city.

George Stumpf passed away, fighting cancer, at East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie, Louisiana at the age of 82, on March 6, 1993.