i purchased a fair amount of 2025 topps chrome this year, and i purchased it from a variety of sources - directly from topps, from a couple of card shops, and from different target stores in different cities. none of it produced much for my collection, which from this product would be mostly dodgers. if i pc'd ketel marte, on the other hand...
the very first pack that i opened this year included a river ryan base card
and a couple of packs later, i found a roki sasaki prism refractor
that was a good start, but it also represented the sum total of my dodger cards across a lot of packs, until i found a teoscar hernandez refractor when i visited
one of the local card shopsand then later, a yoshinobu yamamoto sepia refractor
in my final ill advised blaster purchase.
one other card for my collection from my pack ripping experience was this xander bogaerts double play turn
then again, i did also find a brooks lee photo variation refractor in one of the packs i purchased
lee sort of lives on the fringes of my collection. he's from my neck of the woods and so i have been setting some of his cards aside, and this is a nice one for sure. not sure whether or not it will hold, though.
at some point, i decided to go the sportlots route to get my chrome dodgers that were missing
which were all of the dodgers except for river ryan. that would be those nine above plus clayton kershaw
and shohei ohtani.
note that his chrome card shows him as a two-way player
while his flagship card did not. instead, he got two flagship cards - one for each position. i actually purchased two ohtani base chrome cards from a sportlots seller for $30. now that he has won the mvp, i'll exchange one for $20 and see if i can get that extra $5 value for the $15 i invested. stay tuned.
those initial orders included some parallels, too.
hunter feduccia refractor
mookie betts, justin wrobleski, river ryan sepia refractors
freddie freeman prism refractor
mookie betts
and feduccia ray wave refractors
blake snell xfractor
and as many clayton kershaw parallels i could find from shopping cart sellers at reasonable prices.
refractor
ray wave refractor
sepia refractor
xfractor
while parallels are the name of the game in chrome (aside from autos), i did pick up a couple of mookie betts inserts - all-etch
and fortune 15
and i also waited on a buyer friendly ebay listing for this fanatical insert
which was a must have for me. i love seeing mookie and muncy (and nestor cortes, for that matter) reacting to freddie freeman's walk-off home run in the 2024 world series. here's the back
which doesn't mention the moment. i think, in that moment, betts was a fan and so it would have made sense to write about the homer. curiously, freeman has a card in this set but it does not feature this dinger. ohtani and sasaki also have fanatical cards, but they will likely remain out of my reach.
going online for my 2025 topps chrome fix was a lot easier, of course, but you know what? i still haven't learned my lesson with retail and hobby wax!
