I've got 21,519 Cubs cards from 316 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.
The Baseball Immortals set was first issued in 1980, with 173 cards representing the 173 players in the Hall of Fame at the time. Updates were issued annually through 1987 as the Hall elected new members. The cards have a pennant on the front that shows the year the player made it to Cooperstown.
The back of the card does list a team name, so that is what is used to determine which team a player is assigned to for team sets. That is why you'll see some players below included in the Cubs set even though they are not wearing a Cubs uniform.
The cards make no mention of the manufacturer. The Trading Card Database lists them as being made by SSPC. The Standard Catalog differs, naming Renata Galasso and TCMA as the makers of the cards. The packaging shows Collectors Marketing Corporation. So take your pick!
A total of twelve Cubs players were included. Eleven were in the original set and Billy Williams was in the 1987 update, which is the year he was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
I was able to kill two birds with one stone... picking up a Clubhouse Collection card and adding another card to the rule-following relic collection. By my research, Taillon is the 106th Cubs player to have a relic card that shows him as a Cub in a season he played for the Cubs.
Take a peek at all 106 of them!
| Arismendy Alcantara | Kosuke Fukudome | Bill Mueller |
| Albert Almora | Nomar Garciaparra | Jose Nieves |
| Moises Alou | Matt Garza | Mike Olt |
| Adbert Alzolay | Mark Grace | Corey Patterson |
| Jake Arrieta | Mark Grudzielanek | Joc Pederson |
| Javier Baez | Jason Hammel | Felix Pie |
| Darwin Barney | Ian Happ | Juan Pierre |
| Cody Bellinger | Rich Harden | Mark Prior |
| Francis Beltran | Brendan Harris | Aramis Ramirez |
| David Bote | Kevin Hart | Anthony Rizzo |
| Kris Bryant | Kyle Hendricks | Addison Russell |
| Damon Buford | Jason Heyward | Jeff Samardzija |
| Marlon Byrd | Bobby Hill | Kyle Schwarber |
| Jeimer Candelario | Rich Hill | Jorge Soler |
| Victor Caratini | Nico Hoerner | Alfonso Soriano |
| Andrew Cashner | Eric Hosmer | Sammy Sosa |
| Welington Castillo | Todd Hundley | Geovany Soto |
| Starlin Castro | Brett Jackson | Justin Steele |
| Aroldis Chapman | Jacque Jones | Marcus Stroman |
| Hee Seop Choi | Eric Karros | Seiya Suzuki |
| Tyler Colvin | David Kelton | Dansby Swanson |
| Willson Contreras | Craig Kimbrel | Matt Szczur |
| Pete Crow-Armstrong | Bryan LaHair | Jameson Taillon |
| Juan Cruz | Junior Lake | Ryan Theriot |
| Yu Darvish | Derrek Lee | Josh Vitters |
| Wade Davis | Jon Lester | Darryle Ward |
| David DeJesus | Ted Lilly | Todd Wellemeyer |
| Ryan Dempster | Kenny Lofton | Randy Wells |
| Blake DeWitt | Greg Maddux | Rondell White |
| Jason Dubois | Trey Mancini | Patrick Wisdom |
| Jim Edmonds | Carlos Marmol | Jerome Williams |
| Carl Edwards | Gary Matthews, Jr. | Kerry Wood |
| Mike Fontenot | Fred McGriff | Carlos Zambrano |
| Dexter Fowler | Matt Mervis | Ben Zobrist |
| Jackson Frazier | Christopher Morel | Julio Zuleta |
| Kyuji Fujikawa |
My Cubs calendar collection now has a quarter-century's worth, running from 2000 through 2024.
The first two are in-house productions of the Cubs. They highlight Wrigley Field, not the players.
After that, they are all from Turner. The Turner calendars typically feature twelve different players. My outlier is in 2007. That year I have the Turner Wrigley Field version instead of the player version. I'll pick up the player calendar if I ever see one.
I figured out a way to get pictures of the calendars since they are too big for my scanner bed. It was a three piece project, with a camera, tripod, and then Photoshop, but I got the job done. Below are two ways for you to see the covers, a 5x5 mosaic and a GIF version. Enjoy!
I try to get all of the Cubs cards in the Clubhouse Collection and thus far I've been able to do just that.
The total number of Cubs CC cards is now at a nice round 100. Here's how the number of Cubs cards has varied over the years.
0 cards - 2001, 2007, 2011, 2014
1 card - 2005, 2006
2 cards - 2002, 2003, 2004, 2013, 2015
4 cards - 2008, 2010, 2012
5 cards - 2009, 2022
6 cards - 2016,
8 cards - 2018
10 cards - 2017, 2019, 2023
11 cards - 2020, 2021
The vertical years were 2008, 2009, 2017, 2020, and 2023. The horizontal tile has cards from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022.
I've been married for 40 years and have yet to forget our anniversary when it comes up each July. The blog has been going for 15 years but I somehow forgot to write an anniversary post last Friday. If I'm going to forget an anniversary, thankfully it was for the blog and not Mrs. WW!
Wrigley Wax made it's debut on December 30, 2008. And here we are 15 years and 5,445 posts later!
15 is a significant number for me since that is Darwin Barney's number.
Look at that... I'm the #1 Barney collector on TCDB! I'm pretty sure that each of those cards has been featured on the blog at sometime. The Barney collection has been stalled for a while since he was traded in 2014, but the Cubs collection and the blog have continued on and the plan is to keep going.
