The Pecan Park Eagle

Bill Henry
UH Cougars
Cincinnati Reds

Baseball Almanac now runs a college baseball section in which they list the names of all the players as a group from their various alma maters who then went on to play major league baseball. My first stop in this section, as you may have guessed, was to see how they handled the list from my own undergraduate alma mater, The University of Houston. Like all things new in this crazy old world, the UH list was not perfectly complete. They left pitcher Brad Lincoln’s name off their Internet-published list. We added Lincoln’s name to the box shown here, but did not know how to make his name search-active for his career stats and first box score features as are the others.

By my count, there are 24 former UH Cougars who have gone forward to play major league baseball since the UH baseball started in 1947. Bill Henry was the earliest recognizable star as one of the early relief specialists in the post World War II era. Former Pirate, Astro, and Cy Young winner Doug Drabek is undoubtedly the most accomplished listed player. Michael Bourn stands out as a former Astro and current star center fielder for the Cleveland Indians and Jesse Crain represents represents a UH homeboy coming back to town as a possible relief staff boost to the 2014 Astros.

Eight former UH players have played in at least one game for the Houston MLB club. Their names include: Bill Henry, Glenn Vaughan, Doug Drabek, Anthony Young, Woody Williams, Chris Tremie, Chris Snyder, and Michael Bourn.

Steve Clark is noted above for having played college ball earlier for Lewis-Clark prior to his active playing time at UH.

Also, be sure to let Baseball Almanac of any errors or omissions you discover in your own searches of this material. None of us are perfect and name identification mistakes and oversights are two of the easiest mistakes we all sometimes make.

We need to help each other out on the way to building a more complete and accurate baseball history.

Get up next to the hot stove on one of those cracker barrels, baseball friends. – It’s cold outside – and a much better day for thinking about baseball than it is income tax return preparation. 🙂