1962 Topps #101 Carroll Hardy
About Carroll Hardy
The season behind this card was the best of Hardy's career. Playing all three outfield spots and getting into 85 games for Boston in 1961, he set personal bests with a .263 average and a .330 on-base percentage and a then-career-high 36 runs batted in. May 31 at Fenway added the oddity that stuck to him: he was sent up to hit for rookie left fielder Carl Yastrzemski, bunted for a single and came around to score, the only time in Yastrzemski's Hall of Fame career that anyone pinch hit for him. Card 101 belongs to the first series of the 1962 Topps set and pictures Hardy with the Red Sox.
Carroll Hardy was a two-sport athlete out of Sturgis, South Dakota, who earned 12 letters in football, baseball and track at the University of Colorado and was named MVP of the January 1955 Hula Bowl as a college all-star. A third-round pick of the San Francisco 49ers in the 1955 NFL draft, he played one pro season as a halfback, catching 12 passes for four touchdowns, then gave up football for baseball after a stint in the Army. Hardy appeared in parts of eight major league seasons between 1958 and 1967 as a reserve outfielder for the Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, Houston Colt .45's and Minnesota Twins, batting .225 with 17 home runs and 113 RBI in 433 games. His numbers never made him a regular, but a handful of pinch-hitting assignments for future Hall of Famers turned him into one of the game's enduring trivia answers. He managed in the Twins' farm system in 1968, then spent about two decades in the Denver Broncos' front office as a scout, player personnel director and assistant general manager, a run that took in the Orange Crush defense and three Super Bowl teams. He was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame in 1979 and died in 2020 at 87.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 319 | 0 | 29 | 136 | 100 | 26 | 17 | 11 | 0 |
| SGC | 25 | 0 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
Graded population — a scarcity guide, not a price. Snapshot 2026-09-24. Half-grades fold down (8.5→8), and PSA's qualified grades are counted separately from the straight-grade rows shown here. Slabs of the three cards printed #139 are joined by description, never by number alone. PSA registers the green tints as a separate set; a tint's population is listed under that state of the card it belongs to.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1962 Topps #101 card?
It is card #101 of the 600-card 1962 Topps Baseball set, picturing Carroll Hardy of the Boston Red Sox.
How many cards are in the 1962 Topps Baseball set?
600 cards, tracked as 708 collectible states. The numbers run from 1 to 598 with no gaps, but three different cards were printed #139 - two Hal Reniff poses, catalogued 139a and 139b, and the Babe Hits 60 Babe Ruth Special, 139c - so 598 numbers make 600 cards; 93 cards carry catalogued print variations, the series-2 green tints among them, that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Baseball Almanac, Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, BaseballCardPedia, 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 2026-10-03.