High Schooler Creates Rookie Debut Patch Auto Tracker

Travis Perweiler is Keeping Collectors in the Know

Date: Dec 12, 2025

Author: Greg Bates

Topics: Cards and Culture, Collector Stories, RDPA, Topps Chrome Update Series Baseball, Trending

Length: 923 Words

Reading Time: ~5 Minutes

By day, Travis Perweiler is a high school student. By night, he is a watchman for The Hobby Community.

Perweiler—also known as @Tp35Cards on Twitter—has made a name for himself. He has become one of the main people to follow in order to find out the latest 2024 Topps Chrome Update Baseball Rookie Debut Patch Auto (RDPA) cards that have been pulled. Perweiler runs a tracker for the highly coveted inserts.

When 2024 Topps Chrome Update was released Wednesday, November 13, Perweiler wasn’t feeling particularly well that day. Then a sophomore at a Northern Virginia high school, he tried making it through classes, but he ended up heading home.

“I was bored and watching my Twitter feed when the first Debut Patch was pulled,” Perweiler said. “I was like, you know what, let’s just start posting about it. I made the tracker, and everything blew up.”

Perweiler has documented that 197 of the 251 RDPA cards have been pulled from the 2024 Topps Chrome Update product, as of Feb. 6.

Perweiler uses Google Docs to keep track of which Rookie Debut Patch Autos have been pulled, when, and by whom.

Building the RDPA Tracker

The tracker became Perweiler’s thing. Collectors on X flocked to Perweiler’s main page, where he has pinned the document. Prior to making his first RDPA-related post, Perweiler had about 300 followers. By the end of January, he was closing in on 2,100.

Perweiler’s posts about RDPA pulls are always a hit. “Once some names started coming out, I was getting hundreds of likes,” he said.

Perweiler has a pretty elaborate tracking system. He plugs in a player’s name, their team, if the card has been pulled or not, who pulled it or where it was pulled, and then posts a link if there are any videos or photos of the pull.

“I had a tracker of all the breakers,” Perweiler said. “But since then I’ve color-coded everything, and I’ve removed the tracker with how many were pulled per breaker, just because that became too much.”

When the RDPA cards made their first appearances in the 2023 Topps Chrome Update release, Perweiler started loosely tracking each hit. When he started up his tracker for the RDPAs in 2024 Topps Chrome Update, he found out another collector — @bowman1of1 on X — was also tracking the pulls.

“With all full respect, I didn’t even realize I had stolen this from him,” Perweiler said. “He’s been helping me out; he’s been great. I just want to give him credit, because he feeds me most of the info. I was all over it the first two weeks, but now that I’ve gotten busy with school life and personal life, he’s been keeping a full eye out.”

A number of MLB athletes or their relatives have reached out to Perweiler in the hopes he can help them track down their RDPA cards. It’s been a pretty surreal experience for the teenager, who’s hoping it can be advantageous with him heading to college in less than two years.

“It was a little overwhelming to see there’s a lot of athletes and a lot of people following you,” Perweiler said. “This is just like one way that I feel like getting more into the sports business side, where I can get in contact with these people now and it could help me in the future with jobs. Overall in sports, I probably want to get into like roster management or scouting. I just know way too much not to get into sports, like the management business side.”

Collecting Habits

Perweiler’s dad is a fan of New York sports teams, so Perweiler has latched onto rooting for the Yankees, Giants, and Islanders. He’s also big into the Washington Wizards and Virginia Tech football.

Perweiler got into The Hobby in 2017. His interest in cards has just continued to grow over the last few years.

“Cards basically got me through a pandemic,” Perweiler said. “I’ve never really played video games like a lot of kids do nowadays. I was just going through cards.”

A few of Perweiler’s favorites in his collection are on-card, in-person autographs from NFL legends Jerry Rice and Barry Sanders. Perweiler has gone all in on collecting Giants wide receiver Jalen Hyatt as well.

Early in his collecting days, Perweiler bought a ton of 2018 Topps Baseball.

“That aged well for me when I ended up selling all my Shohei [Ohtani] rookie cards laying around,” Perweiler said. “I had like five to 10, because I opened so much 2018 Update.”

Perweiler is a fan of Bowman University Football and Topps Chrome Baseball. He’s looking forward to collecting Chrome for football and wrestling in the future.

“I’m mainly a baseball and football guy,” Perweiler said. “I dabble with hockey a little bit and wrestling. I feel like I need to get into wrestling more, because that’s been getting a lot more popular within the last year.”

He enjoys being a part of the collecting community, and maintaining the RDPA tracker is now part of his relationship to The Hobby.

“I’ve always been a guy who cares about everyone else first,” said Perweiler, who plans on tracking RDPAs every year. “I know this is a popular topic, and I want to help people be able to keep track of it.”