1966 Topps #368 Charlie Lau
About Charlie Lau
Card #368 is a fourth-series issue reporting the best batting average Lau ever posted over a full season: .295 in 68 games for Baltimore in 1965, on 39 hits with five doubles, two triples and 18 runs batted in. The shape of his job had changed by then. He caught 35 games and spent the rest of the year as the club's emergency bat, drawing eight hits and seven walks in 36 trips off the bench, the season he began the turn toward full-time pinch hitting. Baltimore paid him $15,000 for it.
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: Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac (1) · Baseball Almanac (2) · Baseball Almanac (3) · Internet Archive
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 196 | 1 | 17 | 101 | 47 | 18 | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| SGC | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 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. Where SGC registers no separate row for a variation state, its slabs of that card are listed under the base state.
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Related cards
Team card: #348 Baltimore Orioles
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- #136 Woody Held
- #148 Bob Johnson
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1966 Topps #368 card?
It is card #368 of the 598-card 1966 Topps Baseball set, picturing Charlie Lau of the Baltimore Orioles.
How many cards are in the 1966 Topps Baseball set?
598 cards, tracked as 613 collectible states. Numbers run from 1 to 598 with no gaps and no number used twice, and 14 cards carry catalogued print variations - five checklists, the trade and sold statement backs, the three-state #43 Don Landrum, three team-card dot pairs and the #161 Jerry Lumpe white streak - that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, 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.