If you relax the requirements a little so that the sub operates on references instead of aliases, this would seem to work:

sub mapfirst {
    my( $sub )= shift( @_ );
    &$sub( map { \($_->[0]) } @_ );
#          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Here is the selection code
}
my @a= ( 1..3 );
my @b= ( 4..6 );
my @c= ( 7..9 );
sub addten { $$_ += 10  for @_ }
mapfirst( \&addten, \@a, \@b, \@c );
mapfirst( sub { print join " ", map{$$_} @_; print "\n" }, \@a, \@b, \
+@c );
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