2013 Pennant Incumbents

Free agency has become such a big part of the MLB landscape, I thought it would fun to make an insert that shows the impact it's had on all current rosters. The Incumbents features the 30 players that have been on each team the longest. While you have guys like Jeter here who have been around the same place since the previous century, most clubs have a higher turnover rate than that.

The design echoes the 2013 Pennant base design with the beveled top corners, simple team colors and the half-circle tab to house the Pennant logo. The borders here are a little more cream than white, though. Each player is cut out from an personal-type portrait and placed over a solid background. The Incumbents text stretches across the width of the card and separates the color boxes along with the player name & info. With Pennant being a retro set, the photo color levels are altered and some grain is added to the whole front along with the typography meant to evoke some past era.

The backs are kept to one-color and have a black beveled border. The top is packed with the insert title, action photo, player name, card number and team logo as well as a bit of text that reads how long the player has been a part of his big league clube. I left plenty of space for a sizable write-up highlighting the team's successes/failures in the time the player has been around.

Here's a checklist of the players featured.

ARI - Miguel Montero

ATL - Tim Hudson

BAL - Nick Markakis

BOS - David Ortiz

CHC - Alfonso Soriano

CHW - Paul Konerko

CIN - Brandon Phillips

CLE - Asdrubal Cabrera

COL - Todd Helton

DET - Justin Verlander

HOU - Wesley Wright

KCR - Alex Gordon

LAA - Jered Weaver

LAD - Andre Ethier

MIA - Ricky Nolasco

MIL - Ryan Braun

MIN - Justin Morneau

NYM - David Wright

NYY - Derek Jeter

OAK - Daric Barton

PHI - Jimmy Rollins

PIT - Andrew McCutchen

SDP - Chase Headley

SFG - Matt Cain

SEA - Felix Hernandez

STL - Yadier Molina

TBR - Ben Zobrist

TEX - Ian Kinsler

TOR - Adam Lind

WAS - Ryan Zimmerman

It's interesting but I suppose not all that surprising that most of the guys here are kind of no-brainers. They have obviously been good performers or else they wouldn't have stuck around so long. But you also have a few rebuilding teams (Houston and Miami) and others that construct their rosters differently (Oakland, Arizona) where the representative isn't necessarily the marquee guy on the squad. Personally, I think it's nice mixing up the checklists from set to set just to keep things from getting stale. That said, I can't imagine being too excited if I pulled a Wesley Wright insert card, though I have had to suffer with plenty of Ricky Nolasco cards.