Topps announced their 2026 Topps Finest Baseball cover athlete on Monday afternoon. Paul Skenes graced it last year, and how do you top the reigning NL Cy Young winner and early favorite to repeat in 2026? You get one of the guys most likely to stop him from doing it.
The Los Angeles Dodgers' Yoshinobu Yamamoto is your 2026 Topps Finest cover boy.
OFFICIAL: Yoshinobu Yamamoto will grace the cover of 2026 Topps Finest Baseball! pic.twitter.com/CJSiDFxuLE
— Topps (@Topps) May 18, 2026
Yamamoto is off to an awkward start this season, with a 3.60 ERA through eight starts and already facing fierce Cy Young competition from within his own team (Shohei Ohtani's ERA is sub-1.00), but we all saw what he did in last year's postseason: back-to-back complete games and an almost inhuman 2 2/3 innings pitched to close out the World Series on one day of rest.
He might be struggling right now, but Dodgers fans and haters alike know it's anomalous. He'll bounce back, and the rest of the league will have to be very, very afraid when he does.
In February, Yamamoto's 1/1 rookie auto/Logoman patch from 2024 Topps Five Star sold for $20,000 on eBay. A dual relic /5 sold for the same amount in April. His 1/1 image variation rookie superfractor from 2024 Bowman Chrome sold for a whopping $461,160 at auction in March. These are absolutely monstrous sales (one is not like the other, of course), but Yamamoto's biggest card hasn't even been found.
To this day, his 1/1 Rookie Debut patch auto has yet to be pulled from 2024 Topps Chrome Update.
Dodgers' Yoshinobu Yamamoto's debut patch is still floating around in the ether
Jackson Holliday's Rookie Debut patch, the cover athlete from 2024 Chrome Update and arguably most anticipated position player rookie in that set, was pulled in Texas in Dec. 2024 and sold for $198,000 via Fanatics Collect. Paul Skenes' sold for $1.1 million at auction. Elly De La Cruz's was pulled by Hobby Legends. Pete Crow-Armstrong's has been pulled.
Yamamoto and Jackson Merrill are the two most prominent names that have yet to be found, and Yamamoto's is going to go for much, much more.
A jumbo hobby of 2024 Chrome Update resold on eBay for $2,900 in April, and a standard hobby went for just under $1,550 on May 3. A mega box sold for $226 just this Monday. The chase for the Yamamoto patch is real, but so far, everyone has come up empty (or someone is just staying very quiet about it).
We, by absolutely no means, endorse buying resale in what could be a fruitless search for this card, but boy — whoever finally pulls it might be set for life.
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