This is part six of a twenty-five part series chronicling my budding collections of the 2016 World Series champion Cubs. Obviously, I’ve already starting showing off some of those cards, but I wanted to offer a formal introduction to the various players. With my legacy player collections, I’m still going to attempt to show every single card on the blog, but with these new guys I’m taking a different approach as you’ll see here where I lump cards in one scan, and will probably skip many of the more basic cards I get unless I can get a good theme together.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I think the best tactic is to start posting cards for some of the smaller collections now before I run out of cards. If I’m doing other posts with various topics or themes that might include the very few cards I have of these people, then I won’t have anything left over for this series.
Now, most of the time, the manager is introduced last, but that might be an anti-climactic end to the series. Also that whole previous paragraph thing…I don’t have much to offer. This will be short and to the point.
I forgot about that terrible shade of green
After two short managerial stints with the Angels in the late 1990s, Maddon took over the Rays position in 2006. He won the AL Pennant in 2008, which was his third full year of managing. The first two did not go well, but 2008 saw the team win 97 games.
Looks worse next to the gold
He also won Manager of the Year in 2008, which was probably appropriate. I don’t know what the other guys did that year, but I know it put his name on the map for a lot of people.
Much better, but I prefer the lighter blue for the Rays
After a few more 90 win seasons, he was eventually poached by Theo, Jed and the Cubs for the 2015 season, which was an immediate success.
A few team cards – I don’t collect them, but don’t turn them away
In that first year, the Cubs made a decent run in the playoffs, getting in as the Wild Card, and won 97 games in the regular season. The next year helped create most of the cards you see above (except the Wrigley A&G Die Cut – that was from the 2015 NSCC).
Here’s some random cards from the 25 card WS box I scanned in one lump
Overall, not a bad tenure with a young team. Three straight years of playoff appearances. Three straight years of 90+ wins. One World Series title (so far?) Pretty good, I guess.
I think I’ve now posted all of my Maddon cards so far. There really aren’t enough manager cards in Topps sets these days. Collecting for Joe will be interesting. There are only 37 more cards I need so far, but ten of those are minor league or locally issued things, some from decades back. Maybe I’ll find someone from Angels territory that would be willing to send some of those old 90s Mother’s cards or 80s minor league cards my way.
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