1962 Topps #2 Jim Brosnan
About Jim Brosnan
The 1962 Reds could not repeat. They won 98 games but finished third, three and a half back of the Giants, and Brosnan gave Fred Hutchinson another steady year out of the bullpen: 4-4 with 13 saves and a 3.34 ERA across 48 games, 34 of which he finished. He was drawing $30,000, one of the biggest salaries on the club, and by his own telling that number is what pushed him onto the trade block the next spring. The card is 1962 Topps number 2, the second card in the set and part of the first print series.
Jim Brosnan (born October 24, 1929, in Cincinnati, Ohio) was a right-handed pitcher who worked mostly in relief across nine big-league seasons for the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, and Chicago White Sox, debuting in 1954 and then sticking for good from 1956 through 1963. A 6-foot-4 fastball-and-slider reliever known as an unusual intellectual - he kept books in his locker, smoked a pipe, and wore horn-rimmed glasses on the mound - he finished 55-47 with a 3.54 ERA in 385 games, his career-low 2.36 ERA coming for Cincinnati in 1960. He is remembered as much for a new kind of sports book: his diary of the 1959 season, The Long Season, was one of the first unvarnished, self-written accounts of a big-league player's year, praised by columnist Red Smith as caustic and candid, and enough of an affront to some peers that Joe Garagiola called its author a kooky beatnik. He followed it with Pennant Race, a journal of 1961. Signed by the Cubs at 17 in 1946, he lost two years to the U.S. Army at Fort Meade before returning to the minors. He attended Xavier University, kept writing for national magazines after his playing days, worked as a Chicago-area sportscaster, and died in 2014.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 248 | 0 | 3 | 65 | 110 | 34 | 15 | 21 | 0 |
| SGC | 11 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 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 #2 card?
It is card #2 of the 600-card 1962 Topps Baseball set, picturing Jim Brosnan of the Cincinnati Reds.
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.