1962 Topps #533 Charley Lau
About Charley Lau
His 1962 card is #533, a seventh-series high number and a short print, one of the scarcer cards in the set. It catches him at the front end of an Orioles career. Lau spent the first half of 1961 catching for Milwaukee, batting .207 with five doubles and no home runs in 28 games, then hit .170 in 17 games for Baltimore down the stretch. The only home run he managed all season came in that brief American League cameo, packed into the 47 at-bats he got after the sale.
Charles Richard Lau, listed on cards and in the record books as both Charley and Charlie, was a left-handed-hitting, right-handed-throwing catcher and pinch hitter who spent parts of eleven seasons in the majors between 1956 and 1967. He played for the Detroit Tigers, the Braves in both Milwaukee and Atlanta, the Baltimore Orioles across two separate stints, and the Kansas City Athletics, finishing with a .255 average, 298 hits, 63 doubles and 16 home runs in 527 games. His larger fame came afterward: fifteen seasons as a big league coach, most of them as a hitting instructor, with the Orioles, the Oakland Athletics, the Royals, the Yankees and the White Sox, work that made him the man widely considered the game's leading batting instructor, the coach George Brett credited with making him a hitter and the tutor Reggie Jackson leaned on in New York. His manual "The Art of Hitting .300," published in 1980, sold widely, and "The Winning Hitter" followed posthumously. Lau died of colorectal cancer on March 18, 1984, at age 50; that year Romulus Senior High School in Michigan, where he had played, renamed its field Charlie Lau Memorial Field.
Sources: Wikipedia · Baseball-Reference
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 277 | 0 | 9 | 86 | 109 | 34 | 28 | 10 | 1 |
| SGC | 22 | 0 | 1 | 9 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
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 #533 card?
It is card #533 of the 600-card 1962 Topps Baseball set, picturing Charley Lau of the Baltimore Orioles.
Why is #533 harder to find?
It is a high number card (cards 523-598) from the seventh print series, distributed last and in the smallest quantity - the toughest cards in the set and home to all 42 short prints and the Rookie Parade. It is also a short print card (42 cards, all in 523-598). Printed in smaller quantity than the rest of the seventh series.
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.