11-year-old says his ‘brain pooped’ when he opened rare Paul Skenes baseball card

Last updated: 2025/02/01 at 10:30 PM

BigP Published February 1, 2025

Last month, Topps revealed that an 11-year-old boy in Los Angeles pulled “The Paul Skenes 1/1 Rookie Debut Patch Autograph card.”

How did the boy, who collects baseball cards, and his family come across the card for the Pittsburgh Pirates star, and what was the moment like when he realized what he had just opened?

“It wasn’t even on my mind that I would pull it [the Skenes card],” the boy said about opening up the card on Christmas Day in an interview with The Athletic. “I thought it would go to some big breaker [someone who opens boxes of cards online in large quantities and typically sells the contents by team or player]. So I’m like, ‘Dad, I pulled the Paul Skenes.’ And he was like, ‘No you didn’t.'”

The boy’s father described his favorite part of his son getting the Skenes card.

“I said, ‘So if you share this with the world, you really want to tell the world that your brain pooped?,” the father recalled telling his son, who said his “brain pooped” upon opening up the card. “And he smiled, and I think that was, to be honest, his favorite part.”

The boy turned down an offer from the Pirates for the card that included 30 years’ worth of season tickets to sit behind home plate.

Paul Skenes Postgame Press Conference

As for the player on the card, Skenes just put together a spectacular rookie season for the Pirates. The No. 1 pick in the 2023 MLB Draft out of LSU, Skenes reached the big leagues in less than one calendar year after being drafted, making his first MLB start on May 11, 2024.

In the 23 MLB starts that he made, Skenes posted a 1.96 ERA, 0.95 WHIP, 214 ERA+ and 170 strikeouts over 133 innings; he pitched through six innings in 16 of those 23 starts.

Furthermore, Skenes started for the National League in the 2024 MLB All-Star Game and pitched a scoreless inning. He went on to win National League Rookie of the Year honors at the end of the season.

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