What kind of files are they? Do you need prepress-level control and/or color management, or does it simply have to be printed?
In the first case, you may not get away from Acrobat. In that case, you should be able to create an Action where you open the file and print the first page. Then you should be able to print the documents in batches of a few hundreds (Acrobat has memory leeks, and will eventually get slower and slower and finally crash).
Alternatively, on Mac, you could also create an AppleScript which opens the file in Acrobat and prints the first page; here you have (using SystemEvents), quite a bit of control over the printer settings. And by openin and closing Acrobat, it will take a bit longer, but the memory leaks won't show their effect.
Another approach could be Ghostscript, where you have extensive possibilities of control, and which could run more efficiently than Acrobat.
If your printing engine supports PDF, it may be possible to set it to print only the first page of the document; that would be the most efficient way, as it does not involve Acrobat at all.
Hope this can help.
Max Wyss.