1964 Topps #212 Pete Lovrich
About Pete Lovrich
Card #212 belongs to Topps' third series, and it is a Kansas City Athletics card, the only big-league club Lovrich pitched for. His rookie card was the previous year's Rookie Stars panel. The timing is the odd part: he had thrown his last major-league pitch on September 5, 1963, days after a line drive off the bat of Minnesota's Rich Rollins knocked him unconscious on the mound in his next-to-last outing. He was finished in the majors before his 21st birthday, so this one reached the counter with an ex-big-leaguer on it; a 9-9 season at two Class A stops in 1965 closed out his professional career.
Born in Blue Island, Illinois on October 16, 1942, Pete Lovrich averaged sixteen strikeouts a game pitching for Bremen High in Midlothian, and when he reached Kansas City he became the first Bremen graduate to play in the majors. The 6-foot-4, 200-pound right-hander went 10-1 in a season at Mesa junior college in Grand Junction, Colorado, then transferred to Arizona State, where he was 5-0 and set a school record with 32 consecutive scoreless innings. The Yankees and White Sox had followed him, but he signed with the Athletics for $18,000 in 1962, reckoning Kansas City the easier club to break into; a year later he became the first Arizona State Sun Devil to appear in a big-league game. A 9-6, 2.66 season at Minot in 1962 put him on the A's staff out of spring training at 20, and the 20 games that followed, 1-1 with a 7.84 ERA and 16 strikeouts in 20 2/3 innings, were his entire major-league career. He went 9-9 at two Class A stops in 1965, his last year in the game; arm trouble, his father said years later, was the reason. He joined the first class of the Blue Island Area Sports Hall of Fame in 1973, and died in Mokena, Illinois on December 26, 2018, at 76.
Sources: Wikipedia · Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac · Retrosheet
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 249 | 2 | 38 | 107 | 61 | 28 | 6 | 7 | 0 |
| SGC | 11 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 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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- #124 Orlando Pena
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- #196 Jim Gentile
- #229 Charley Lau
- #244 Tony La Russa
- #276 Jose Tartabull
- #302 Dan Pfister
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1964 Topps #212 card?
It is card #212 of the 587-card 1964 Topps Baseball set, picturing Pete Lovrich 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.