This is part two 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.
Today we’re featuring former fourth starter John Lackey. This may seem like an odd choice for the second installment, but there are a couple reasons behind this. For one, since he’s been in the league longer I had quite a few of his cards, so I wanted to knock out a larger one early. For two, I recently completed a trade with a certain Angels-centric collector (one who likes order) where he flooded me with Lackeys and so it’s better to “introduce” the collection before expanding it through that big trade.
A nice array of cardboard years
John came into the league in 2002 with the Anaheim Angels, where he stayed until 2005 when he moved to The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. That first year with the team saw the Angels win a World Series title. 2007 was his best year where he notched 19 wins, had a league leading ERA of 3.01 and had his only All-Star appearance.
The blue heritage was an ebay win after starting my collection
After being with the Angels, Lackey stayed in red for a while, first moving to Boston in free agency in 2009. He found success there, but we’ll talk about that in a minute. After 5 years, he was traded to the Cardinals in 2014 for Allen Craig and Joe Kelly. 2015 was another free agency stint where he decided to come to Chicago and chase another ring (not a haircut). Then, after 2017, he decided to retire
Already almost done with this set
I know these cards are all from the UD Documentary set, but let’s quickly talk Boston. There he won his second of three rings (guess where the third came from) in 2013. After missing the season before, he came back and ended up being the pitcher of record in the clinching game 6 of the World Series.
Missing 2 of the base cards from this set and most of the golds
I mentioned the 2002 WS championship, but I didn’t tell you about how he, as a rookie, started game 7 to help them win it. Meaning he’s done it twice, both in unexpected situations (rookie and returning from injury).
Adding in the Lacky card record. He has 20 total cards to chase, but one is a season summary, so he will have a winning record on UD Documentary.
Lackey Angels card record: 10-3
The rest of these are from a COMC binge
No more Cubs cards the rest of the way down, so I’ll say that his 2016 season was good for his role. 11 wins and a 3.35 ERA. The 180 strikeouts was his third highest career total. 2017 was a bit of a down year, though.
Not sharing the card on this one
In terms of cardboard, it should be a more manageable venture than some of the other players on the team. Despite a 15 year career, I’m only looking at a little over 800 cards total.
A Gold Jered Weaver in the background
He appears in just a few of these crazy multi-parallel sets, which makes things easier. Those UD Documentary golds may be a bit of a hassle.
That 8 stamp is a little off.
The UD Heroes are pretty uncommon as well, but overall there aren’t many sets that look like they’d be incredibly obnoxious.
X gonna sparkle for ya
Lackey may not be the most exciting player, but I’m excited that it will afford me more opportunity to see some early 2000s baseball cards that I wouldn’t necessarily get to experience. His cards will largely be cheap, which is good and now that he’s retired, there probably won’t be many more cards to add. I’m looking forward to increasing the collection over the next few years and seeing a lot of red uniforms with a sprinkling of blue.
Recent Comments