2025 Bowman Draft gives NFL legend surprising Royals ties with unique baseball card

What if Dan Marino didn’t just end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but also became the most famous two-sport athlete of the 1980s?

That’s the alternate universe Topps is playing in with its latest “what-if” creative tied to the 2025 Bowman Draft release, which dropped this past week and includes Marino’s first-ever baseball card.

In this version of history, the quarterback drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 1979 doesn’t choose one path. He takes both.

2025 Bowman Draft raises an incredible Royals-Dan Marino hypothetical with one-of-a-kind baseball card

The spot, titled “Mari-Knows,” imagines Marino as the decade’s most recognizable athlete: not just football, not just baseball, but everything. He’s on billboards. He’s on TV. He’s the face of a massive marketing campaign built around one simple premise: whatever the task is, Marino already knows how to do it.

And then it goes off the rails, on purpose.

The 90-second spot opens in a boardroom, with an advertising executive pitching the “Mari-Knows” concept to Marino as he prepares to jump from the football field to the diamond.

From there, the creative leans heavily into AI-generated visuals, placing Marino in a parade of increasingly absurd scenarios, whether it be ice rinks, roller blades, mid-air skydives, each one more ridiculous than the last. It’s intentionally over-the-top, poking fun at the way stars were marketed in the ‘80s while fully committing to the bit.

Then it lands on a familiar image: Marino shirtless in black and white, football pads strapped on, a wooden baseball bat resting across his shoulders. Iconography straight out of a sports poster you’d see taped to a teenage bedroom wall.

And then comes the turn. Present-day Marino wakes up poolside, smiling, like he’s just finished daydreaming about the career that never was. He looks over. There it is: his first Bowman Kansas City Royals card.

That card is now real. Sort of.

This is Topps’ third time leaning into the alternate-history concept for Bowman Draft, following similar campaigns centered on Tom Brady and John Elway.

This one hits a little differently in Kansas City, though, because the Royals drafting Marino is one of those pieces of trivia that still makes you pause for a second. Kansas City selected him in the fourth round of the 1979 MLB Draft out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The two-sport star ultimately chose to attend the University of Pittsburgh, and that collegiate career led to being drafted 27th overall in the 1983 NFL Draft and the rest is, well, history.

Marino never put on a Royals uniform. He never stepped into a big-league batter’s box.

But for a moment, thanks to a trading card and a deliberately ridiculous ad, it’s fun to imagine what it would’ve looked like if he had.