The Pecan Park Eagle

1962 Houston Colt .45s
An Inventory of Whose Left

Like the rest of us, our favorite baseball heroes and teams of the past are governed by the same rules of mortality that apply to us all. The following is little more than a tabular accounting of the original 1962 Houston Colt .45 roster on who is till with us and who has passed on. With the ready help of Baseball.Reference and of those ongoing stats they maintain on all of baseball – including the help supplied by the researching soldiers of SABR, the data of Baseball Reference.Com is about as up-to-date and complete as we have so far learned how to gather and make it readily available by team roster.

The following table chart tracks the birth and living/dead status of all 43 men who spent any active playing time on the roster of the original 1962 National League expansion club we all remember as the Houston Colt .45s. Unless someone died overnight on the morning of this writing, 10/22/14,  this data is as up-to-date as we can bring it to you. Here’s the chart for the 1962 Houston Colt .45s, Dead or Alive Status, for their Roster of 43 Players, As Examined through the Morning of Oct. 22, 2014, with help of Baseball Reference.Com.

1962 HOUSTON COLT .45S: A TABULAR DEPICTION OF THE LIVING AND DEAD:

Check for what is mainly of interest to you, but here are few basic observations, for starters:

1) 21 of 43 (49%) are still living

2) Bob Cerv and Bobby Shantz are the oldest surviving Colts, in that order, at age 89.

3) Ernie Fazio is the youngest survivor at age 72.

4) At age 33, Jim Umbricht was the youngest original Colt .45 to die.

It would certainly be great if the Astros could go all out to arrange one last roll call for the surviving 21 men who made up our original major league team who are still with us, but that path may be fraught with travel expenses and the other big fact that some of these older guys who live far away may not travel so well these days. Still, it would be more than a nice gesture to see the club reach out to memorialize some of these far away people while they are still alive. The Walk of Fame at Minute Maid Park is certainly a nice tribute to the club’s total history, but it would also be great to do something special for guys like Bobby Shantz, the first starter in Houston’s MLB history, and Roman Mejias, the first Houston MLB player to have two homers in a single game – that just happened to also leave the park in local our club’s first major league game in history.

Let’s at least kick the idea around about what might be fitting and possible. In the end, it will always come down to this one wisdom about the fulfillment of possible options (the ones that aren’t controlled by compulsions and addictions): “Where there’s a will there’s a way. Where there’s no will, there’s no way.”

Happy Hump Day, everybody!