1963 Topps #116 Jim Brosnan
About Jim Brosnan
Brosnan's last season began badly and ended somewhere better. He got into six games for Cincinnati and posted a 7.71 ERA across 4 2/3 innings, and on May 5, 1963 the Reds traded him to the Chicago White Sox for Dom Zanni. Chicago leaned on him right away - saves in his first four outings - and he finished 3-8 with a 2.84 ERA and 14 saves in 45 games for a team that ran a strong second to the Yankees. He pitched his final big-league game on September 21. This card is 1963 Topps number 116, a second-series card that still pictures him with the Reds. He never pitched again, refusing a 1964 contract that cut his pay and kept a ban on his writing.
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 | 361 | 0 | 21 | 165 | 125 | 36 | 12 | 2 | 0 |
| SGC | 15 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 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.
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Related cards
Team card: #63 Cincinnati Reds
More Cincinnati Reds cards:
- #1 1962 National League Batting Leaders
- #3 1962 National League Home Run Leaders
- #5 1962 National League E.R.A. Leaders
- #7 1962 National League Pitching Leaders
- #21 Marty Keough
- #29 1963 Rookie Stars
- #37 Jerry Lynch
- #70 Jim O'Toole
- #90 Gordy Coleman
- #133 Gene Freese
- #158 1963 Rookie Stars
- #178 Johnny Edwards
- #194 Joe Nuxhall
- #203 Chico Cardenas
Frequently asked questions
What is the 1963 Topps #116 card?
It is card #116 of the 576-card 1963 Topps Baseball set, picturing Jim Brosnan of the Cincinnati Reds.
How many cards are in the 1963 Topps Baseball set?
576 cards, tracked as 583 collectible states. The numbers run from 1 to 576 with no gaps and no number used twice, and seven cards carry a catalogued print variation - three checklists, the two Rookie Stars cards also printed with a "1962" heading, and the #341 Jack Baldschun and #454 Art Fowler print states - that the master set counts separately.
Sources: 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.