it's 2025 now, and in ten months or so there will be a team crowned the 2025 world series champions. until then, it's the dodgers who will call themselves that and i am looking forward to the gold accented uniforms and commemorative patches and seeing "2024" added to the facade along the right field line at chavez ravine.
i ordered the 15-card team set that topps offered for sale after the dodgers beat the yankees, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. there was a shot at an autographed card, but i didn't get one. there are also a number of numbered parallels. once topps released the print run of the set - 37,082 - i did some quick math and found that there were 2,835 numbered parallels which meant that i had a 1 in 13 chance at landing one. spoiler alert - i did not.
here are the cards
ws-1 los angeles dodgers
ws-2 shohei ohtani
ws-3 will smith
ws-4 jack flaherty
ws-5 yoshinobu yamamoto
ws-6 teoscar hernandez
ws-7 max muncy
ws-8 walker buehler
ws-9 mookie betts
ws-10 enrique hernandez
ws-11 blake treinen
ws-12 gavin lux
ws-13 freddie freeman
ws-14 tommy edman
ws-15 michael kopech
now, when i was looking through the cards, i saw a backwards card as the second to last card in my set. when i flipped it over, it was just another tommy edman card.
it was only when i went to tcdb that i saw that there was an unnumbered white parallel in addition to the various numbered ones. a double check of my extra card showed that it was indeed a white parallel (note the different coloring at the bottom). i went back to topps' website and re-read the fine print. every set was guaranteed a parallel, so that means that there are 2,283 white parallels for each of the 15 cards to get to a total of 37,082 total parallels - one for each set issued.
so, i didn't beat the odds with this purchase but that's ok. the dodgers didn't really beat the odds either and they came out on top.
