1964 Topps #229 Charley Lau
About Charley Lau
The third-series card #229 shows Lau in a Kansas City Athletics uniform, the Orioles having sold his contract to the A's on July 1, 1963. He had managed only nine hits and a .188 average in 29 games in Baltimore that season, with no home runs and exactly one walk. Kansas City handed him the left-handed half of a catching platoon and he answered in kind: .294 with 55 hits, 11 doubles and 26 runs batted in across 62 games, starting 49 of them over the season's final three months and matching his 1962 average exactly.
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 · Baseball Almanac (1) · Baseball Almanac (2) · Baseball Almanac (3) · Baseball Almanac (4) · Internet Archive
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 272 | 2 | 34 | 130 | 57 | 29 | 14 | 6 | 0 |
| SGC | 13 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Graded population — a scarcity guide, not a price. Data as of 2026-09-04. Half grades fold down for both graders (8.5→8); PSA qualified slabs (OC, ST, PD, MC and the like) are not counted.
Find this card
Search T206 Cards Shop 1964 Topps cards Live auctions Buy It Now on eBay Sold prices
As an eBay Partner Network affiliate, T206Cards.com may earn from qualifying purchases.
Related cards
Team card: #151 K. C. Athletics
More Kansas City Athletics cards:
- #26 Gino Cimoli
- #42 Moe Drabowsky
- #75 Wayne Causey
- #108 John Wyatt
- #124 Orlando Pena
- #174 Doc Edwards
- #196 Jim Gentile
- #212 Pete Lovrich
- #244 Tony La Russa
- #276 Jose Tartabull
- #302 Dan Pfister
- #320 Rocky Colavito
- #334 Lew Krausse
- #348 Ed Lopat
Frequently asked questions
What is the 1964 Topps #229 card?
It is card #229 of the 587-card 1964 Topps Baseball set, picturing Charley Lau of the Kansas City Athletics.
How many cards are in the 1964 Topps Baseball set?
587 cards, tracked as 589 collectible states. Numbers run from 1 to 587 with no gaps, and no number carries two different cards; two cards - #4, the A.L. Pitching Leaders, and #517, the seventh-series checklist - carry a catalogued back variation that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, The Topps Archives, Baseball Almanac, 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 2026-10-11.