1964 Topps #174 Doc Edwards
About Doc Edwards
Card #174 is a second-series issue showing Edwards with the Kansas City Athletics. It was the one season he spent start to finish with a single big-league club, and he carried the heaviest catching load on the roster: 79 games behind the plate, 71 of them starts, plus seven starts at first base. The bat did not keep up. He hit .224 with five home runs and 28 RBIs in 294 at-bats, struck out 40 times and grounded into a dozen double plays. In the field he was steady, finishing at .986 and throwing out 15 of the 52 runners who tried to run on him.
Howard Rodney Edwards (December 10, 1936 - August 20, 2018) was a right-handed catcher from Red Jacket, West Virginia, a coal-mining town near the Kentucky border where his father worked the mines. He earned the nickname Doc during two Navy years as a medical corpsman stationed at Camp Pendleton with the 5th Marines, who call for a corpsman by shouting Doc rather than medic. Discharged in 1957 at 6-foot-2 and 245 pounds, he took a football scholarship to MiraCosta College, then signed a $500 contract in 1958 with Ralph Kiner, the future Hall of Fame slugger then running Cleveland's Pacific Coast League club in San Diego, who ordered him to run five miles a day until the weight came off. Four minor-league seasons followed, including a .331 year for Triple-A Salt Lake City in 1961 that ranked second in the league. Edwards caught parts of five big-league seasons spanning nine years for the Indians, Athletics, Yankees and Phillies, batting .238 with 15 home runs and 87 RBIs in 317 games. In 1970 the Phillies activated their own bullpen coach after both catchers broke a hand in the same inning, and he caught 34 more games at .269. He managed Cleveland from 1987 to 1989 and stayed in the game 57 years.
Sources: Wikipedia · Baseball-Reference · SABR · Baseball Almanac · ESPN
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 273 | 1 | 31 | 146 | 57 | 20 | 14 | 4 | 0 |
| SGC | 16 | 0 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 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.
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Related cards
Team card: #151 K. C. Athletics
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- #75 Wayne Causey
- #108 John Wyatt
- #124 Orlando Pena
- #196 Jim Gentile
- #212 Pete Lovrich
- #229 Charley Lau
- #244 Tony La Russa
- #276 Jose Tartabull
- #302 Dan Pfister
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- #334 Lew Krausse
- #348 Ed Lopat
Frequently asked questions
What is the 1964 Topps #174 card?
It is card #174 of the 587-card 1964 Topps Baseball set, picturing Doc Edwards 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.