Such a personal bummer for me, today, to learn of the passing of Paul Womble on
April 19.
Paul Womble was a Mets farmhand whose "emergence" coincided with my becoming heavily interested in the Mets minor league system. It was just a convergence of (my) age, the '69 World Series, and a new subscription to
The Sporting News (my parents gave me a choice between SI and TSN and I chose the latter because of the minor league coverage).
Paul Womble was one of the first kids I attached myself to. He and George Theodore. The Stork had a captivating piece in TSN about how, when asked what he wanted as a signing bonus, said something like
"bus fare and an autographed picture of Yogi Berra". How could you not love a guy like that? Womble simply tore up the Instructional League one year (as I recall) and, while he hadn't been considered a top prospect in an organization with the likes of Ken Singleton, they suddenly had to re-evaluate given the power he'd shown. And I just loved the name. Paul Womble just sounded to me like a great baseball name.
And Paul could hit--or, at least,
had hit. With Kansas University, he hit .348 and set a then school record with 17 career home runs. At Visalia, he'd hit .333 with 22 home runs as the team's clean-up hitter. And, as I said, he tore up the Instructional League (between the '71 and '72 seasons).
Working against him were his age (when you're drafted out of college, you're expected to move up like Conforto has) and a very weak arm. He played left field at Visalia and discovered that hitting the ball was a lot easier than throwing it. He
even joked,
"I threw out two or three runners. I remember that because there were a lot of guys I didn't get." And, though he took it in stride, the fans were pretty rough on him.
"Some of them asked what I was going to do for a living." Opposing players, too.
"A lot of them asked me why I was throwing change-ups from the outfield." Oddly enough, Paul was ambidextrous. But he couldn't throw any harder with his left arm than his right.
Paul worked the weight room and tried to strengthen his arm. But, the more he worked on his arm, the more his bat suffered. After two sub-par seasons at Double-A Memphis (where he was tried in the infield as well as the outfield), he and the Mets parted ways.
He'd graduated KU with a degree in electrical engineering, and that's what he ended up doing after baseball. Kidney disease got him in the end. And there goes another piece of my childhood.
A while back, I'd mentioned in this forum that I was looking for a picture of Paul. Cusick came up with
this one. I tend to go looking for images when ballplayers die. It's a thing. So I found the same image without the captioning in a KU Media Guide. And I came across the second in a piece from the
Lawrence Journal-World (Sept. 22, 1971), which is also where the quotes above come from. Eventually, one way or another, I'll be colorizing and making a custom card of Paul for my All-Time Mets collection. But not tonight. (Hey Topps, if you ever happened to catch Paul with your cameras, how 'bout putting one of those out this week? I'll buy it, if no one else does. Promise. Never hurts to ask.)