1962 Topps #498 Jim Donohue
About Jim Donohue
The sixth-series #498 is an ordinary base card. It stands for the only real workload of his career, 1961 with the first-year Angels: 38 games, seven of them starts, a 4-6 record with five saves and a 4.31 ERA across 100 1/3 innings. The season that followed lasted him only into June. Donohue went 1-0 with a 3.70 ERA in 12 appearances for the Angels, 11 of them in relief, before they traded him to Minnesota on May 29 for Don Lee. Six outings in a Twins uniform brought eight earned runs in 10 1/3 innings, and after facing his former Angels club on June 22 he was sent to Vancouver, never to return.
James Thomas Donohue, born in St. Louis on October 31, 1937, was a 6-foot-4 right-handed pitcher who signed with the Cardinals for $4,000 in 1956 out of Christian Brothers College High School, where one of his teammates was the future Cardinal Mike Shannon. In the St. Louis chain they called him The Whip, for a buggy-whip delivery that drew comparisons to Ewell Blackwell; he is also listed as Bones. He went 7-0 with a 1.48 ERA in a half-season at York in 1958 before a promotion to Houston, and spent 1959 at Triple-A Omaha on a staff that included Bob Gibson and Ray Sadecki, but he never threw a regular-season pitch for the Cardinals. They traded him with Duke Carmel to the Dodgers for outfielder John Glenn in June 1960, and Detroit took him in the Rule 5 draft that offseason. His major league time came only in 1961 and 1962, for the Tigers, the expansion Los Angeles Angels and the Minnesota Twins, nearly all of it in relief: 6-8 with a 4.29 ERA, seven saves and 116 strikeouts in 70 games. He pitched in the high minors through 1964 and died in his hometown in 2017.
Sources: Wikipedia · Baseball-Reference
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 245 | 2 | 20 | 95 | 79 | 28 | 18 | 3 | 0 |
| SGC | 14 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 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 #498 card?
It is card #498 of the 600-card 1962 Topps Baseball set, picturing Jim Donohue of the Los Angeles Angels.
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.