Paul Molitor

Sometime in the mid 2010s, I had happened to find a nice binder full of Molitor cards while visiting a card shop. It contained a bunch of his cards from the '80s and '90s, and had some pretty cool things included in it. This was fairly soon after Paul Molitor was named the next manager of the Twins, and I had been kind of looking for another side project to tackle, so I decided to pick up the binder. The binder gave me 385 cards originally, and I thought it'd be fun to see how close to 100% completion I could get of Molitor's cards from 1978-2000. I decided to cut it off at 2000 to include his full playing career, but limit the scope of this project a bit so it doesn't become too large of an undertaking and remains a reasonably-sized side project.

Across 1978-2000, Molitor has a total of 1,526 cards. The 385 cards in the original binder gave me just over 25% completion right off the bat. I'm still in the progress of typing up all of my needs for this project, so for now the subpages below are just placeholders. In the meantime, I try to keep an eye out for Molitor lots that can help me continue growing this collecton. Until I'm able to get my needs posted, please contact me if you think you have some cards I might need and we can go from there!

1978-1985

It didn't take long for Molitor to burst onto the scene in the MLB. He finished 2nd in Rookie of the Year voting in '78, and in his first 8 seasons he was a 2-time All-Star and hit .292. Unfortunately, a series of injuries held him back from accomplishing even more, but Molitor still managed over 1,000 hits over this span.

1986-1995

The middle portion of Molitor's career is when he really took off. During this range, he hit .315, made 5 All-Star teams, won 2 Silver Sluggers, and led the league in hits twice. He also won a World Series with the Blue Jays in '93 and was named the series MVP after hitting .500 with 12 hits and 8 RBI in the 6-game series

1996-2000

In 1996, Molitor went to his hometown Minnesota Twins to play the final few seasons of his career. At 39 years old in 1996, he led the league in hits and became the 21st player in MLB history to reach the 3,000 hit milestone. He was the first to hit a triple for the 3,000th hit.