Jim Bullinger

I know almost nothing about Jim Bullinger.

I don't know where he went to college, where he grew up, how long he lasted in the majors.

Until I searched for and posted his baseball card above, I couldn't've told you whether he was right- or left-handed.

What I do know about Jim Bullinger can fit into a pretty short, poorly arranged paragraph:

He debuted in the majors for the Chicago Cubs in the summer of 1992 - sometime around the first week of June. He hit a home run on the first pitch of his first major league at-bat. He saved four games that week. And he really wasn't that good a pitcher.

Oh, and he's my favorite baseball player ever.

There's no complicated reason, no special connection between Mr Bullinger and me (the closest that I come to that is with this guy that I knew in high school) that leads to him being my favorite.

Instead, he's my favorite because I have a great memory of that first pitch home run.

I had graduated from high school a week before and headed out the next day to St Louis as one of four in a car.  The driver was my then girlfriend, now wife - The Girl.  The other passengers were ColdNorthGamer and Marilyn, a foreign exchange student who was staying with The Girl and her mother.

We didn't have any sort of crazy plans.  This wasn't going to be Spring Break Gone Wild.  This was just the four of us getting out of town for a quick trip to celebrate our completion of what we felt at the time was some kind of big hurdle - high school.

We'd visited with my cousin and aunt in St Louis.  We'd stayed at The Girl's grandmother's house.  We'd been up in the arch and seen the Mississippi River - a sight that warms my heart and moves me to awe every time that I lay eyes upon our Mother River.

And we'd gotten tickets for a baseball game, two games even, as the Cardinals were hosting the Cubs in a daytime doubleheader at Busch Stadium.

The tickets were good - first row of the upper deck, the kind of seats that you can either lean back and put your feet up or lean forward and watch the game through the railing.  I don't really remember how we got the tickets - somehow via The Girl's sister and brother in law.  We didn't pay for them.  That I do remember.  They ended up being gifts for the family and friends in town for a visit.

Gamer and I were in a fantasy baseball league that summer.  He was the commissioner, tallying up statistics by hand thanks to a subscription to either USA Today or some print baseball weekly.  The league was made up entirely of friends with whom we'd had classes during high school.  Our draft had been conducted in drips and drabs on a piece of paper passed hand to hand in the center of a fantasy baseball magazine that one of us had bought but that we all treated as communal property.

The Girl brought a novel to the game.  She didn't - and doesn't - case a whit about baseball, though she has gotten better at enjoying a baseball game as a social time, chatting with friends and watching the world when we do happen to a baseball game.  I think Marilyn brought a book, too.  They spent a fair part of the game wandering the stadium and the rest of the time talking to each other and reading their books, each enjoying being alone as a pair.

Gamer and I watched the game...mostly.  He bought a scorecard and kept score, he had at every Cubs-Reds game he and I had seen together.

I say mostly because I remember the game rolling along at a tidy pace, scoreless into the sixth inning.  The play by play says there were only a half dozen hits in those first five innings and only a couple of runners even made it to second base.  I remember turning to Gamer at the start of the top of the sixth, a rookie pitcher was up to bat.  He'd made his major league debut the half inning before, having given up one walk in an inning of work.  I wasn't really paying attention.

I don't remember the swing or the pitch.  I remember the ball...rising.

One of us turned to the other as we saw the ball soar toward the stands away from us - we must have been somewhere near homeplate, maybe a bit toward first, maybe my memory is faulty.  "Wasn't that the pitcher?" one of us asked.  It might've been me, might've been him.

It was the pitcher.

It was his first major league pitch faced.

Jim Bullinger became the fourteenth batter (ten more have done it since) to hit a home run on the first pitch of his first major league at-bat.

And I love him for that.

He went on to have a great week, saving four games by the end of the week.  He saved two more the next week.  One more in the rest of the season.

But he saved all of them for my team.

Because I had picked up Jim Bullinger by the time we'd made it to the car.

The Cubs won in thirteen innings, Bullinger having long ago headed to the bench after three innings one one-run ball.

Jim Bullinger picked up the save in the second game, but I didn't see it.

When the second game got to the fifth inning, The Girl announced that we'd made it through two games - eighteen innings can be pretty long when you're not watching the game - and that the driver was going to be heading out.

That's why Jim Bullinger today.

To quote Pat Lamorte:

Jim, you were an unspectacular pitcher, crappy even, but in 1992 you hit a home run on the first pitch you faced in your first at-bat in the majors, one of only five pitchers to accomplish this feat...thanks for that. Go Cubs!

 Thanks, Jim.