1965 Topps #217 Walt Alston
About this card
This is one of the twenty manager cards in the 1965 Topps set - nineteen managers plus #457 Bob Kennedy, the Cubs' head coach in the College of Coaches era.
About Walt Alston
The third-series #217, the same number Topps handed Alston back in 1962, follows the year his run stopped. The 1964 Dodgers went 80-82, their first losing record since 1958, the club's first season in Los Angeles. He refused to let it pass: in spring training the following March he told his players he would not let them forget what the previous season had felt like, and they answered with a pennant.
Walter Emmons Alston got into exactly one major-league game, sent to first base for the ejected Johnny Mize by the 1936 St. Louis Cardinals and struck out by Lon Warneke in his only at-bat, then built a Hall of Fame career from the dugout instead. He spent 19 years in the minor leagues as a player, player-manager and manager, among them the 1946 Nashua Dodgers, the first US-based integrated professional team of the century, where he handled Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and six seasons at Brooklyn's Triple-A clubs in St. Paul and Montreal. When Charlie Dressen demanded a multi-year deal, owner Walter O'Malley handed the job to Alston for 1954, on the first of 23 straight one-year contracts. Nicknamed Smokey as a schoolboy pitcher for the speed of his fastball, he was so reserved that writers called him the Quiet Man. Alston led the Dodgers to seven National League pennants and four World Series titles in 1955, 1959, 1963 and 1965, including Brooklyn's only championship, and was named National League Manager of the Year six times. He retired after 1976 with 2,040 regular-season wins in 3,658 games. The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1983; a heart attack that year kept him from the ceremony, and he died in Oxford, Ohio, in 1984.
Sources: SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 398 | 5 | 63 | 188 | 74 | 39 | 15 | 14 | 0 |
| SGC | 29 | 1 | 1 | 9 | 8 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 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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- #40 Frank Howard
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- #112 Derrell Griffith
- #119 John Kennedy
- #196 Ron Fairly
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- #247 Wally Moon
- #260 Don Drysdale
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1965 Topps #217 card?
It is card #217 of the 598-card 1965 Topps Baseball set, picturing Walt Alston of the Los Angeles Dodgers. This is one of the twenty manager cards in the 1965 Topps set - nineteen managers plus #457 Bob Kennedy, the Cubs' head coach in the College of Coaches era.
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.