Charles Elmer Ponder (June 26, 1893 – April 20, 1974) was a professional baseball player. Known as "Elmer Ponder", he was a right-handed major league pitcher (1917, 1919–21) with the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs. With the Pittsburgh Pirates, he pitched a perfect 5 2/3 innings of relief in his first outing of the year, against the Philadelphia Phillies in the first game of a doubleheader on July 23rd; it would be 94 years until another member of the Pirates, Vin Mazzaro, threw as many as 5 perfect innings of relief, in 2013. In 1920, Ponder appeared in 33 games, with a record of 11–15. His ERA of 2.62, while not the best on the squad, was better than the team ERA of 2.89. He was an aviator and airplane mechanic in World War I in 1917 until the end of the war, and he returned to the Pirates a war hero.
