This is part seven 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. Well, this is the definitive time to do that with Willson Contreras. What you see below is all I have left. He’s one of the few players where I started off with nothing of his.
That makes sense, because I’m not a Bowman buyer and Willson didn’t debut with the Cubs until June 2016 where he homered in his first AB. In the early days, he also played a very short time at first and in the outfield, but he was primarily the second or third tier catcher behind Miguel Montero and David Ross.
That year, he appeared in 76 games, batting .282 with 12 homers and cemented himself as the team’s best offensive catcher, slowly pushing out Montero from the primary catching role. The postseason saw him get 10 hits across the three series, including 2 doubles in the World Series and a home run in the NLCS.
Now, Contreras is our main catcher, and at times seems like our only catcher. He’s caught more innings than anyone else so far this year, and has continued to be a solid offensive presence at catcher. He’s dynamic defensively as well, although he does commit quite a lot of errors. Either way, he was one of the Cubs All-Stars in 2018, has a World Series ring from his first Major League Season and is a bit of a rising star.
All that means is that there should be plenty more cards of his for me to get in the future, but for now, I’m fresh out!
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