1965 Topps #454 Ed Rakow
About Ed Rakow
Card #454 shows Rakow in his second Tigers season, looking back on a 1964 that started wrong and never entirely straightened out. Shoulder stiffness wrecked his spring, so Detroit opened the year with him in the bullpen; he drew only 13 starts among 42 appearances and went 3-8 in them, and an elbow injury cost him most of three weeks around mid-August. The relief work rescued the season - a career-best 3.72 ERA and three saves over 152 1/3 innings - though he did not manage a hit in 39 at-bats, part of an 0-for-42 stretch across his two Detroit years that stood as a club record. It was his last full big-league season; Syracuse got him days before the 1965 opener.
Edward Charles Rakow, born in Pittsburgh on May 30, 1935, was a 5-foot-11 right-hander who pitched parts of seven big-league seasons between 1960 and 1967 for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kansas City Athletics, Detroit Tigers and Atlanta Braves, finishing 36-47 with a 4.33 ERA, 20 complete games and 484 strikeouts in 761 1/3 innings. His hometown Pirates turned him away from tryouts, judging neither his fastball nor his 178-pound frame big-league material, and he was driving a truck and pitching semipro ball around Pittsburgh when a chance meeting with Brooklyn Dodgers scout Doc Ruppan at a friend's wedding in October 1956 finally got him a contract. He rose fast enough that an International League official compared him to Don Drysdale in 1959, but arm trouble and a deep Los Angeles staff sent him to Kansas City in March 1961, where he became the Athletics' workhorse and chose to pitch through the shoulder and arm pain that shadowed the rest of his career. He retired in 1968, drove trucks for a living, and in 1989 was a player-coach for the West Palm Beach Tropics of the Senior Professional Baseball Association. He died in West Palm Beach on August 26, 2000.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 315 | 6 | 68 | 161 | 52 | 17 | 8 | 3 | 0 |
| SGC | 11 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 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. The two checklist variations, #79 and #508, are listed under the wording PSA uses for each state.
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Related cards
Team card: #173 Detroit Tigers
More Detroit Tigers cards:
- #9 American League 1964 Pitching Leaders
- #19 Gates Brown
- #37 Fred Gladding
- #53 Dick McAuliffe
- #83 George Thomas
- #130 Al Kaline
- #153 Norm Cash
- #191 Phil Regan
- #206 Willie Horton
- #236 Dennis McLain
- #259 Tigers 1965 Rookie Stars
- #271 Don Wert
- #288 Jack Hamilton
- #306 Bubba Phillips
Frequently asked questions
What is the 1965 Topps #454 card?
It is card #454 of the 598-card 1965 Topps Baseball set, picturing Ed Rakow of the Detroit Tigers.
How many cards are in the 1965 Topps Baseball set?
598 cards, tracked as 600 collectible states. Numbers run from 1 to 598 with no gaps and no printed-number collisions, and two checklist cards - #79 and #508 - carry catalogued print variations that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, BaseballCardPedia, 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.