The Pecan Park Eagle

Clyde Vollmer: My only surviving baseball card subject was among those who homered in his first MLB time at bat.

For me, the memory start with former outfielder Clyde Vollmer. For some reason of random chance, his baseball card was the only one that survived from my once vast childhood baseball card collection. The others were all lost to the usual reasons – and I had two parents who discarded any toy or possession that didn’t move in a week’s time. It wasn’t that we had a lot, because we didn’t, but both my parents were anti-clutter, especially my dad.

Old Clyde somehow found refuge in a box of my old school books and essays. I only found his card image, the same as the one shown here, when I was going through some old stored things of my own about 1970. Now Clyde Vollmer sits proudly, if crowdedly, in my “baseball room” in a nice plastic display holder.

That being said, Clyde also was famous for something far bigger than his survivorship of my father’s constant pursuit of order as an undeclared minimalist, Clyde Vollmer also was one of those rare players who homered in his first major league time at bat.

Clyde Vollmer’s major league debut homer came on May 31, 1942 as a member of the Cincinnati Reds. If you look over the list of all who have done the same trick through as recently as September 2, 2012, you will will find the names of four fairly anonymous former Houston Astros on the roll:  Jose Sosa, Dave Matranga, Charlton Jimerson, and Mark Saccomanno. Carlos Lee also performed the same trick in his May 7, 1999 MLB debut, but he did his first HR as a member of the Chicago White Sox.

At any rate, just going over the list is an entertaining exercise to me. I was little surprised to learn that we even had a couple of these first time up homers occur prior to 1900. They most probably were a couple of those fast-hopping grounders that got past the outfielders in one of those 500 feet deep ballpark venues of earlier times.

PLAYERS WHO HOMERED IN THEIR FIRST MLB TIME AT BAT (Wikipedia):

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The WIkipedia source for this report is viewable at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_players_

with_a_home_run_in_their_first_major_league_at_bat