Introducing the Albert Almora Collection

This is part nine 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.

I know I said last time that the off-season would be a great opportunity to catch up on this series, but never discount the power of laziness.  To put these together, I have to do <spooky voice> liiiggght reeesearrrch. OoooooOOOooo. </sv>  Albert is a good role player who had significant playing time last year. He did a hell of a job in the first half, but his bat went quiet in the later months.  Still, he’s a great glove to have and overall not a bad hitter.  He’s in the shadows of a lot of other names in Chicago, so that means there are only around 500 cards I need to collect so far.

So weird to have cards of high school kids

I started off with only three cards.  I’ve been able to expand that a bit since and am now at 57.

Possible fake backdrop

Almora was drafted by the Cubs out of High School in 2012 in the first round.  The year before, he was named the USA Baseball’s player of the year.  The Cubs called him up during the 2016 season to replace an injured Jorge Soler.

Representing the Cubby Blue

He played in 47 regular season games and recorded a .277 average with 3 homers, 1 triple and 9 doubles.  That was good enough to get him on the post-season roster.

Didn’t do a lot of this in the playoffs

Almora played in 9 total playoff games, but mostly off the bench. 11 total plate appearances netted zero hits and two strikeouts.  His most important role, however was in game 7 of the World Series.   Albert came in as a pinch-runner for Kyle Schwarber who singled to start the 10th inning.  A couple batters later, he scored the go-ahead run on Ben Zobrist’s double.

Hoping he has some Cubs longevity

It seems to me like he has increased his confidence in the following two years.  In terms of collecting, I don’t think that confidence will translate to many more cards.  Unless he really breaks out and becomes an All-Star, or gets traded to a different team, several other Cubs will be featured in all those inserts and smaller sets.  That will give me plenty of opportunity to catch up on those early Bowman years.