This is part eight 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.
The last installment was back in August, but I think the off-season will be a perfect opportunity to knock out several more players. It’s also quicker to keep the line moving by showing guys with very few cards first. Because while someone like Kris Bryant has thousands of cards produced every single year and they would not be in very short supply, people like David Ross only had a few hundred over the course of his entire career.
Holding up three fingers, but that’s his first WS Ring
I started off my collection with only three David Ross cards, but that’s not terrible considering my end goal is currently set at 174 cards total.
He actually looks older without the gray beard. Must be the fake aging on the photo
David was drafted in 1998 and made his debut with the Dodgers in 2002. Over his 15 year career, he bounced around to 7 different teams. To be honest, I really don’t know if he has a card for each of them, but I think so. There are some years, where he doesn’t appear in any product at all (2012, 2013, and 2005 is just two regional issues – no major releases).
Complete with eyelash
His time with each team was short, but he was only traded twice in all those moves. Once from the Pirates to the Padres and then from the Padres to the Reds.
Dude loves to hold up multiple fingers
The Reds released him and he signed with Boston in 2008 but only lasted a couple months. Then he went to the Braves for a few years and then back to Boston in 2012 where he won his first championship and became Jon Lester’s personal catcher, but was a backup catcher otherwise.
In that 2013 Postseason, he didn’t hit particularly well, but did knock in two runs, including one in the World Series. He wasn’t crucial to that offense, anyway, and Boston won the title.
These last two cards came from Play at the Plate’s twitter dime sales
David joined the Cubs in the 2014 off-season, once again pairing up with his friend Jon Lester. Offensively minded fans were certainly weary of the pickup, but understanding that he would be the backup catcher and was seen as the great clubhouse guy, that smaller contract was an easy thing to handle. After all, in 2015, the Cubs were still putting the pieces together and weren’t expecting to contend quite yet so a cheaper stop-gap was good if it made Lester happy.
Obviously one of the best cards you can get from 2011 Update
Well, clearly it worked out better than expected. The Cubs reached the post-season ahead of schedule in 2015 and then in 2016 won it all (of course), and Ross was an easy fan favorite. In that famous game 7 of the 2016 World Series, Ross became the oldest player to hit a home run in the World Series (he hit his 100th career homer earlier that season, as well) and permanently cemented his place in Cubs history.
Ross went out on top by retiring a champion. That should mean my cardboard quest will stay at 174 for a little while, unless there are some new WS tribute history/tribute cards, or David becomes a big league manager as many expect. It would be cool to see him get cards for yet another team so many years later.
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