for now they are world champions

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.