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His Only Three Home Runs of the Season

Sam Pollard, Blackpool’s superannuated second baseman, has played with the Seasiders since before League days. He has hit plenty of home runs, well over forty in his career. Aged forty three years, it is understandable that the homers are few and far between these days.

But o, every once in a while, the surge of youth ascends and takes hold of the creaking body to deliver one more performance worthy of a young man’s boast. And so it was on the 6th of June of this programme, when Pollard cracked not one, not two, but THREE! Three home runs in a single day, only the fourth instance in Second Division history that any batter has done so.

After starting the game inauspiciously with a line out to the hurler in the second innings, Pollard came up two innings later to drive his first homer a massive four hundred feet over the centre field barrier, plating Stock ahead of him.

The sixth innings is that which will define Pollard’s epitaph, however. He led off the frame with a home run, and later that very innings, the pièce de resistance: yet another home run, this with Stock, Cox and Walters on the bases at the time, for what has become known as a Grand Slam.

Sam Pollard’s remaining days in the League are few. Aged forty three, he could muster only sixty one trips to home plate, and even with a sparkling hits average of .436, the Seasiders knew there were better options to employ on the pitch. But for one night, the crown jewel of his fourteen year career, Pollard was a strong and powerful young man once more, and the best choice the Blackpool club could have made on that sixth of June.