A French poet starts as a big shot in baseball (7)
I believe the answer is:
homerun
'a big shot in baseball' is the definition.
I don't know anything about this answer so I cannot judge whether this works.
'a french poet starts' is the wordplay.
'a french' becomes 'un' ('a' in French).
'poet' becomes 'homer' (Homer is an example).
'starts' is a charade indicator (letters next to each other).
'un' after 'homer' is 'HOMERUN'.
'as' acts as a link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Another definition for homerun that I've seen is " big hit in America".)