Last year, an 11-year-old boy from Los Angeles, California, got the ultimate Christmas gift: a baseball card worth more than $1 million! It was a super-rare card of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes. The boy’s family sold it at an auction in March.
For weeks, the young baseball fan had begged his parents for a box of 24 packs of cards from the 2024 Topps Chrome Update Series. On Christmas morning, he couldn’t wait to rip open each pack. In one of them, he found a card that read “Congratulations!” It had instructions for trading it in for the Skenes card that countless collectors had hoped to find.
“Me, my brother, and my dad were like OMG!!!!” the boy wrote in his journal.* “I started bouncing all over the place.”