2026 Topps Chrome

I made a somewhat snarky comment in my round up of newly announced NPB card sets the other day about how Topps had not yet announced an NPB Chrome set for 2026 and that maybe they wouldn't be releasing it until 2027.  The very next day, an announcement about the set showed up at the Trading Card Journal website.  I thought I'd do a quick post about it since it was unlikely that I'd do another round up before the set was released on December 4th.

As has been the case since 2023, NPB Chrome is not just an ugly parallel version of Topps' "flagship" NPB set but has completely different photos and checklist than the original set.  The base set will contain 217 cards - 216 cards for active players and one card for Hideo Nomo.  The 216 active player cards will contain cards for each team's manager and top three 2025 draft picks.  There are 36 "kanji variation" cards (3 per team) where the English text on the front of the card is replaced with kanji.  I don't know if technically these count as parallels since they are numbered differently than the equivalent base cards.  There are four insert sets - "1991 Topps Baseball", "Helix", "Wrecking Crew", and "Boss Battle".  The last two have 24 cards each while the first two have 28 - each set has two active players per team but the 28 card sets have four "Legend" players each.  There are a boatload of autographed cards - looks like between nine and twelve cards per team with, of course, the exception of the Giants who don't allow their players to sign for card companies.  There are also a ton of "Legend" autographed cards for players who have either retired (Sadaharu Oh, Tatsuro Hirooka, Isao Shibata, Ichiro, Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui and Rich Gossage among others) or playing in MLB (Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto, Yuki Matsui, Yu Darvish, Kodai Senga, Tatsuya Imai and Masataka Yoshida).  There's also a triple autograph card featuring Ohtani, Yamamoto and Sasaki.  There are relics for a number of active NPB players although they surprisingly are not evenly split between the teams or even have all 12 teams represented.  There are also relics for Ichiro and Sadaharu Oh.  

I criticized Topps in my earlier post for not having included a card of Masato Yoshii as Eagles manager in their NPB Finest set so I was happy to see that they rectified that omission in this set.  I guess it takes until December for Topps to acknowledge a move that was made in June (but November was too early).  They still didn't issue a card for Yuudai Yamamoto with the Hawks (he was traded to them from the Baystars in May) although at least again there's no card of him with the DeNA.