1962 Topps #253 Harry Chiti
About Harry Chiti
Card #253 is another third-series number - it landed a dozen years after his 1950 debut. The Cleveland listing is what makes it odd. Chiti's 1961 came apart in a hurry: five games for Detroit, a .083 average, half a season at Triple-A Denver, then a trade to Baltimore that parked him at Rochester. The Orioles sent him on to Cleveland after the season, and he never played a regular-season game for the Indians - the expansion Mets bought him in late April 1962, and by mid-June he was back in the Cleveland organization. So the card lists him with a team he never played a game for.
Harry Chiti was a right-handed catcher born November 16, 1932, in Kincaid, Illinois, and raised in Detroit, where the Cubs signed him out of Northwestern High School in June 1950 for a reported $20,000 bonus. He debuted that September 27 at age 17, the youngest player in the majors that season, then lost 1953 and 1954 to Army service during the Korean War. His best year came in 1955: .231 with 11 home runs and 41 RBI in a career-high 113 games behind the plate for the Cubs. Over parts of ten seasons from 1950 to 1962 he appeared in 502 games for the Cubs, Kansas City Athletics, Detroit Tigers and New York Mets, batting .238 with 41 home runs and 179 RBI. A competent defensive catcher with a knack for handling the knuckleball, he was shuttled through sales and trades late in his career, and in June 1962 the Mets sent him back to Cleveland as the player to be named later in the deal that had brought him to New York - he is remembered as the first big leaguer traded for himself. He died January 31, 2002, in Haines City, Florida.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 217 | 0 | 9 | 109 | 72 | 17 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| SGC | 15 | 0 | 2 | 9 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 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 #253 card?
It is card #253 of the 600-card 1962 Topps Baseball set, picturing Harry Chiti of the Cleveland Indians.
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.