1961 Topps #432 Coot Veal
About Coot Veal
Card #432 comes from Topps' fifth series, a regular mid-run number; Veal's rookie card had come in 1959. Detroit left him unprotected in the 1960 expansion draft, the Los Angeles Angels took him 27th, then traded him to Washington for Ken Aspromonte. He won the new club's shortstop job and batted leadoff in its first game, April 10, 1961 at Griffith Stadium, where President Kennedy threw out the first ball; Veal's infield single off Early Wynn was the franchise's first hit, and he scored on Gene Woodling's triple. He hit .429 through four games before a May collision with catcher Earl Battey left him with a groin injury, and finished at .202 in 69 games.
Orville Inman Veal, known to everyone as Coot, was a right-handed shortstop born July 9, 1932, in Deepstep, Georgia. He starred in baseball and basketball at Auburn, still called Alabama Polytechnic Institute when he was there, and signed with Detroit in 1952. Thirteen seasons of professional ball followed, six of them touching the majors with the Tigers, Senators, Pirates and Tigers again across 247 games. He was the classic good-field, no-hit infielder: a .231 hitter with one home run in 611 at-bats, but a .976 fielding percentage, four points better than Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio's. So little of his offense went for extra bases that his career on-base percentage, .298, finished ahead of his slugging percentage, .288. Casey Stengel, watching him for the first time, asked aloud where that Veal fellow had been hidden. The name came from a high school coach who tagged him Kook after a third baseman on a Black team that barnstormed the area; in college it was heard as Coot and stuck for life. He went into the Macon, Georgia, Sports Hall of Fame in 2001 and died March 14, 2021.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 244 | 0 | 18 | 116 | 74 | 20 | 10 | 5 | 1 |
| SGC | 6 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Graded population — a scarcity guide, not a price. Data as of 2026-09-04. PSA counts are straight grades only; PSA half grades (PSA 1.5 among them) and qualified slabs are not included. SGC half grades fold down (8.5→8). Slabs of the two cards printed #463 are joined by description, never by number alone.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1961 Topps #432 card?
It is card #432 of the 587-card 1961 Topps Baseball set, picturing Coot Veal of the Washington Senators.
How many cards are in the 1961 Topps Baseball set?
587 cards, tracked as 596 collectible states. Numbers run from 1 to 589, but #426, #587 and #588 were never issued and two different cards were printed #463 - Jack Fisher and the Milwaukee Braves Team card, catalogued 463b - and eight cards carry catalogued print variations that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, The Topps Archives, Baseball-Reference, the SABR BioProject and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, PSA & SGC population reports. Card data compiled and maintained by T206Cards.com. Page last updated 2026-10-05.