mall rats and giveaway winners

yesterday morning i took some time to check out the near-to-me mall show that sets up a few times a year. they always include the weekend before christmas in their schedule and i wanted to only show up at the very start of the show for a couple of reasons. one, there was a club show on saturday which is more predictable in terms of product, and two, i want to avoid malls this time of year during later hours and actual weekends. however, i wasn't able to get there until the early afternoon.

to my surprise, the mall wasn't that busy and there were a lot more tables set up than the last mall show i attended in october. unfortunately, there were very few diggable boxes of any interest to me. hence, the "rats" in the title post.

i made a couple of laps and did manage to find some cards to bring home, and in hindsight i am not too disappointed! while i purchased cards from four sellers, i am only going to share cards from one of them.

this 2023 topps chrome james outman card

is a "radiating rookies" insert

and i was told it was a case hit. same for this 2025 topps chrome mookie betts lightning leaders card

i pulled these from a monster box of toploaded cards with no pricing. the guy behind the table said that he would price cards from the box at one or two bucks, typically. i built a short stack that included this 2025 topps heritage alcs/nlcs yellow parallel

and a couple of parallels from 2024 topps stadium club - sepia jackie robinson and gold foil roy campanella

the campanella isn't numbered, but the gold foils look like they should be. this 2023 topps gilded collection rookies cast in gold card of james outman

is numbered - /199.

as for non-dodgers, i did grab some of those, too. here's a gold parallel from 2025 topps update of the brent rooker/lawrence butler combo card

it's a nice looking card, and the back

namechecks big mac and golden gopher great terry steinbach, along with jimmie foxx and the immortal bob johnson.

here's a 2025 topps vintage stock parallel of marco gonzales

with the back

all dressed up for christmas.

i had no reason to choose this 2025 topps josh rojas card

which is a memorial day camo parallel, numbered to 25

but it didn't rocket up the cost of the rest of the cards, so i left it in my purchase.

last card i will show is this 2025 topps lucas erceg team color border parallel

and speaking of teams and parallels...

earlier on friday, i randomized the list of names/teams from my giveaway post earlier in the week. i was a bit surprised to see so many entries and decided to bump things up to four winners as a result. here are the standard three randomizations:

with the winners being tony, tom, mark, and crh614. be sure to email me your addresses at gcrl at comcast dot net  (even you, tom, just so i can be sure i have the current one). 

keep in mind that these are "above and beyond my normal number of mailings" mailings, meaning that there will be other mailings sent, too. if anyone else in the list above wants to send me their address, i'll pull a couple of cards for them as well.  

all told, the stack of cards i pulled from the seller were priced at $30 which was just above $2/card and i thought a pretty good deal given the scarcity of some of the cards i pulled. he didn't have any change, so i added a couple of scrub autos from his box to get to $40. one of the autos i grabbed was this 2025 topps edgardo henriquez card

the other one is going out to one of the randomized winners.